The Anniversary - House Designs.

The look of our short film was decidedly European, particularly Dutch influenced, although we didn't want to call out one particular nationality. We designed the house to belong to someone who lived in a small village. I kept the technology sparse and to help with the dour mood, I kept the lighting diffuse and the windows small. The lighting would be an eternal early morning overcast day.

Master Bedroom

 Eventually, I started to really steep the rooms in shadow with lights that barely illuminated anything. I painted wood materials as dark and rich so they'ed disappear into the shadows.

 You'll notice in several of the concepts that I angled the ceilings often. I found that it made each room feel a bit smaller and more claustrophobic and just slightly chaotic.

Stairwell

 Kitchen

View from the doorway.

We played around with the view outside a fair amount since we'd really spend most of our time indoors, this was our only chance to describe the outside world other than the cemetery scenes.

 Closer to the countryside.

 We settled on a location that would be somewhere within the main village.

The Anniversary - The Old Woman - final art.

The Old Woman

Once the face design for the Old Woman was approved, I set about designing her costume. I definitely found her harder to design for as women's clothing often seems to offer infinitely more variety than men's. I tried all sorts of accessories as well -- fancy vs simple, formal vs informal, big vs small -- trying to find just that right look for an old woman who was dressing up to visit her husband's grave, but was no longer in morning and lived very economically.

The Anniversary - the Old Woman.

The Old Woman needed to embody empathy and often when I create characters who save others that are overwhelmed with some internal struggle, I find they can't just look kind and giving, they need to have a little hint of wisdom and experience. The wisdom and experience is what makes it seem like they can help solve "the problem, " and that is always in the eyes. There's got to be that inner strength.

My cartoony faces.

The photo liquify technique.

The Anniversary - beginning a short film.

The Anniversary

The Anniversary is one of the first big projects I worked on at Brain Zoo. It was a serious drama about a man trapped in a cycle of mourning for his diseased wife, but in the end, finds a kindred spirit in the form of a grieving widow. While I started with very cartoony faces, it became apparent quickly that this drama wasn't going to have gags or anything super exaggerated and another style would need to be developed. My director told me not to think of this project as an animated short, but only a film that used cgi. There were going to be a lot of subtle emotions and he didn't want to romanticize the sadness or overplay it.

To develop the Old Man, I knew we needed someone who looked like they'd seen every hardship, so a lot of wrinkles. There also need to be some kind of heaviness or weight to the face, the emotional weight pulling his expression down. A lot of dipping curves and bags of skin.

My first round of sketches as the story was being fleshed out.

Mo (my director) suggested that one way we could create a new look that had both exaggerated elements, but also highly realistic elements was to take real photos of older people and liquify their faces to create new characters. At the time, I was loathe to do this (eye roll at former self), since I felt it would really hamper my creativity, but I never would have gotten such unique results without it. Check it out.

I think of this style as photo caricaturing. The great thing was that the uniqueness of the source face allowed me to create much more unique faces than I could have created just from my imagination. Subtle things, like one eye open more than the other, or slightly lower than the other, all made it in there that would have been generalized out in a much cartoonier sketch. Even the way wrinkles formed became very unique from person to person.