In Dreams
These
I did for a short animated film (which can be viewed here). I was in
charge of backgrounds and animating objects within those backgrounds.
A
surrealist desert background. Inspired by painters like Miró, Xul
Solar, Dalí and by Diaguita art (an indigenous culture which
developed in now northwestern Argentina and northern Chile). The
hills were based on The Hill of Seven Colors (El Cerro de los Siete
Colores) which is in Jujuy, a province in northwestern Argentina.*
An
ancient swamp background. The idea was to convey something old,
forgotten and overgrown. The stone head was inspired by Olmec,
Diaguita and Inca designs. The rest I mostly based on nature itself,
I looked at different real life swamp images for reference, and the
references for the flower were those huge foul smelling rainforest
flowers, known as “corpse flowers”.*
These
were part of a background that was like a womb-cave, inspired by, well, the
inside of a womb; I exaggerated the veinyness, to make it
more claustrophobic, also added black that seemed to give it a sort
of polluted look. Anyway, these are two versions of the same image,
one has some lighting effects which gives it a bit more depth I think...
*If you are wondering why the eye stalk and the flower don't have texture like the rest of the backgrounds that's because I finished them to be animated. I didn't really want, or had the time, to paint each individual drawing within each animation with a textured feel, so I tried creating a single texture which I then added to each drawing, but it created a peculiar effect, like Tommy’s plaid coat in The Offbeats. However, I then realized texture wasn't all that necessary and you may have noticed this in a lot of 2D animations: sometimes characters and objects, or parts of the background, that are meant to be animated are not as detailed as the rest of the background (or might change when animated), they may have light or shadow areas drawn, but the colors will almost always be plain, not textured. Backgrounds can indeed be very intricate while keeping the animations with a "simpler", more malleable design. I find it amazing how this doesn't seem to affect our perception of the whole that much, our eyes and brain tend to not be bothered a lot by certain details and prefer viewing things as part of a bigger picture, which just fits like a glove when it comes to animating!
