Week 3- PAFS
- Alisha Gupta
- Jan 5, 2023
- 3 min read
The third week into this project I worked on developing my ideas for the concept artwork and prop design. For my approach to the concept artwork I looked into the existing locations of the film and what appealed to me in each of them in order to decide between at least two choices within which my set would reside since I wanted it to be appropriate to the storyline. I created visual boards to lay out the locations which were six in total.
Lamia’s Inn was the cottage fabricated by the main antagonist of the film who uses her dark magic to build it from the ground up to lure the fallen star, Yvaine inside before attempting murder. It is naturally an important point to the story but designed to deceive the audiences. I was tempted to create a room in this location that Lamia would use to perform the act with her weapon but I found that it was already concise enough and didn’t need any addition.
The English Village of Wall was another possibility since it held a famers market, small cobbled rows of houses that held this old medieval village charm to it but I found it a bit too ordinary to work on. The two large locations in the film were the Witch’s Castle and Stormhold that were large spaces and felt a bit too dark cinematically to create a scene within and didn’t personally draw me in.
The two locations that I narrowed down on were Captain Shakespeare’s Pirate Ship and The Wall Market. The Pirate Ship was quite interesting in terms of layout the way the outdoors came inside and lit the space with daylight underneath the main deck inside the Captain’s chambers were visually appealing in a positive light. I had briefly thought of creating an open space such as a lighthouse on built on an island close to where the ship lands after sailing between the clouds.
The sixth location that I finally decided to choose was The Wall Market. Tristan’s father enters the market at the beginning of the film as a young boy and is charmed by what he sees- a mystical array of unearthly creatures, ornaments and strange displays of witchcraft that fill this very middle eastern inspired ‘bazaar’ and I was drawn to the cultural influence it held and chose to create a tent like set that belonged to a fortune teller tied to an old banyan tree filled with antiques littered over the bookcase seated on a top floor.
After this process I made a rough sketch on the environment to try and visualize my ideas on paper as a starting point to take further based on research into the specifics of the interior and art style the next week.
For the Prop Design I approached with as I did with the concept art by creating a visual board of what is seen in the film first. The few key props all play a part in helping the narrative move forward in some way. Septimus’s Ruby is what leads to Yvaine crash landing as the gemstone hit the star and created the meteorite landing. The first prop in the film is the Flower, whose purpose we learn later is to grant protection from magic on a mortal is possibly the only positive one in the story that helps the main characters and serves a clear purpose.
The other three belong to the Witches to cause harm and portray the level of power they hold but I found by paying close attention to what is lacking is a way for the characters to know where they are headed in this vast landscape of a world and that was a prop for navigation.
This is where my idea of a compass came to be that was naturally not an ordinary piece of metalwork but tied to the main themes of enchantment in the film and the crystal like properties of Stardust.
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