Symbolism.
This is an image of Edwards house from ‘Edward Scissorhands’. The exterior appears very dramatic and spooky, and from the outside all people can see of it, as it looms from its place on a small mountain, is its odd, isolated and creepy appearance. However, once you get past the surface, into the front garden, the viewer’s perceptions are altered. The garden is full of life, and is colourful and beautiful, just like the personality of its owner. I wanted to incorporate something of the sort in our work. An environment that maybe wasn’t at first what it was perceived to be, and that emphasised elements of a character or characters personality. This is very much linked in with the use of colour.
In ‘Edward’ and ‘Nightmare’, the ‘good’ and ‘normal’ towns are shown to be made up of identical houses, told only apart by the different shade of pastel they are painted in. Their interiors are very minimal. Instead of getting a positive feel as you would expect with pastel colouring, the audience gets an understanding that the characters who live there are very cold, conventional clones of each other. I found it interesting how the use of colour could be applied in many different ways to achieve many different outcomes, especially away from those you would expect.
Individual objects are also used to portray elements of the characters personality. In ‘Nightmare’ the home of Oogie Boogie has objects inside such as an Iron Maiden, decorated to appear like the Queen of Spades to portray the gambling and torturous side of the character. I really liked subtle references like this, and hoped to include such things into my own designs.
I knew that I wanted to keep away from objects that were very obvious. For example, above we can see just a few examples of how many times coffins have been integrated into the various environments. Although it works for the films, I wanted to design something different and a bit more original. It is also important to me that my work is only inspired by Tim Burton. I don’t want to be known for just copying someone else’s work and ideas.
This image is of some of the machinery found in Edwards home. Like Edward, and the exterior of his house, this machinery looks very intimidating and scary. However, the audience is soon shown that it is used to make cookies and gingerbread- again subverting people’s expectations. I liked the design of the machine as it used very original ways to make cookies, although that is not very clear from this image, which makes it look like just giant cogs. Everything is connected to trigger something else, which eventually leads to having the cookies made. I wondered about the possibility of having something in our environment if not a machine, that could trigger off a chain of events.
Style
Burton often messes with the proportion of objects. This bed for example, is huge compared to the little girl inside it. The bed is in the opening scene from ‘Edward Scissorhands’, where an old woman begins to narrate Edwards’s story. The bed is used to convey to the audience that the film they are about to see is a fable, and that although the world they can see is still recognisable as human it is part of the characters world and not ours. In our environment, I hoped to design something that was recognisable but out of the ordinary, something that belonged in a different, stylised world.
From 'Tim Burton's Corpse Bride- An Invitation to a Wedding' book.
As well as watching the films, I looked through the books that accompanied them. I found myself particularly interested in the concept art of the Everglots interior home. The illustrations were very unlike the traditional Burton style, to illustrate the home owner’s rigidness and blandness. I liked the idea of a large manor house, as we could be extravagant with our designs and there would be many objects for a character to interact with. If my group go with this theme, I would like the style made more elaborate however, to stand out and appear more out of the ordinary.
Another film that I looked at for inspiration was Labyrinth. Like Burton films, it is packed with fantasy elements, but this time, in a much less gothic fashion, which I felt was good for me to look at, if the rest of my group weren’t going to like the Gothic way of thinking, I had started to head down.
I liked the False Alarms as they were part of the environment but were also alive and could be interacted with. As our brief stated that we had to have a character interact with the environment, I wondered whether the environment could interact back with the character, or maybe part of the environment actually be the character?
The helping hands. Showing more environment that was alive.
Like with the Tim Burton images, I wanted to keep away from the too-obvious spooky furniture. With the Adams Family I was more interested with the design of their home than of the objects inside it. Like with Edward’s mansion, the building is very intimidating on the exterior, and on the interior, well, ok, it is still creepy, but they have a real nice family vibe going on. I can’t really explain it very well, but they have always reminded me of my own family, weird but close. So in my designs, I wanted objects that had reason for being there, that the characters would like/ use, to hopefully convey a more personal feel. I particularly like the tower block in the middle, as it really captures the audience’s attention. Its height is also impressive, making the building appear large and daunting.
All the Gothic-style environments that I looked at reminded me of an old ‘Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror Halloween Special’, in which Homer and Bart act out Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’. Incidentally, it was from watching this episode as a kid that started my interest in Edgar Allen Poe, sad, I know but I always found it interesting that by having such a strong sense of atmosphere, by incorporating the correct mix of colour, lighting and furniture, the cartoon, could fascinate its audience. I wanted to create something equally as dramatic in our own environment. I was particularly impressed with the bright colours used. Usually bright colours would detract a scary feel, like in the Land of the Dead in, ‘Corpse Bride’.
In ‘The Simpson’s’ we can see that bright colours such as greens and purples have been used to create a crazy, muddled effect. If our group were to go down the spooky route, I hoped to maybe incorporate something alike in our designs, instead of the expected, black, white and greys.
The camera angles in this piece were also very effective. Many high angle shots were used, making the room appear tall and intimidating, whilst the character appeared very small and vulnerable. The shots also had the camera tilted a lot, making the scene appear muddled and claustrophobic.
After each group member had acquired their images and inspiration, we met up again and compared our results. Although the Dans had different inspirations to me, we were pretty much on the same wave length. I had worked with the Dans before and we are close friends, so we knew what to expect from each other. Most friends would probably be too polite to tell each other what they really thought of the others designs, but we are not like that, and it’s all good :) I had never worked with Elisha before, but I spoke to her a lot around Uni and knew she had very different tastes to me and the Dans. The challenge would be to design an environment that included all of our interests, or at least find something that we could agree on. Elisha’s inspiration was very Disneyish- lots of princesses and princes, and although I like that sort of thing, its not really what I usually incorporate into my work.
To try and find a balance of things we all liked, we sat as a group and visited the website http://www.3dtotal.com/ and looked in the environment section. There we all selected images we liked elements from and placed them in a folder. In the end we ended up with 40 images.
Out of all the images, two caught my eye the most:
I loved the clutter in this image and the way the room really looks lived in. Everything looks as though it was placed for a specific reason by the character.
Although this room had more space, I liked the study area, where again the objects appeared rather cluttered. Dan C in particular, liked the way the man made objects were integrated with the natural environment.
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