NecroLair Art DevBlog: Hickner, Cars, and Sculpting!

So I learned a really good piece of advice from a very knowledgeable, talented, and kind man, Mr. Steve Hickner:

"When someone gives you a note on what to do, do the spirit of the note, not the note itself."

Mr. Steve Hickner had visited my Thesis class AND gave a presentation to the Computer Animation and Game Art Department about staging and other cool ways to make our films read better.

This was a person's notes on what Mr. Hickner talked about last year (click for link) to Ringling Students, but it was pretty much the same this year with current students' work. Still very valuable today!

I was fortunate enough to get a one on one meeting with Mr. Hickner! We discussed really cool ideas to help sell my work in my thesis film. Alot of it had to do with staging, dynamic camera angles, and pretty much good filming techniques. One of the things I was struggling with was having flat camera shots because I was trying to show gameplay in 1st person view. But Mr. Hickner made me realize that when making something like a trailer, the most important thing is to show off what looks cool!!

Soon after my meeting I got really inspired and went to the library. A notable DVD I picked up was Citizen Kane, which I hear is great for learning film language.

Then I got hit by a car on the way home as I walked the crosswalk. Lol. It was slow progress after that for a couple of days.

~~~

After my talk with Mr. Hickner and my teacher Ed Gavin, I'd decided to include more of my Hero character and LESS of the ghostie summoning scene. You only see the pet ghost once in my trailer, so why waste frame time.

I've changed some of my trailer scenes to look more like this:

Solve Puzzles Scene

Fight Monsters Scene

Upgrade your Magic

Here are some really cool 3D sculpts and photos I want to use as inspiration for me as I work:

Progress:

Big Ghost Skull

3 hours working on it so far. My estimate was: 7 for worst case scenario. 5 for most likely. 4 for Optimistic. I'm a little rusty in Zbrush, so hopefully I'll be alot faster in the future. Done with this sculpt for now, and moving on to the body.