Jobs!

Okay so here are our jobs for the next week:


Katy:

• Modelling and texture experiments on test claw. 
• By Tuesday 6th December
• Stylised logo design .
• By Tuesday 6th December.

Sean:

• Environment Designs: Facility, Lab, Town Concept
• By Tuesday 6th December.

Molly:

• New edit with wipes and text movement.
• By Monday 5th December

If these aren't done there will be serious problems so lets just do it and then we can actually move onwards and upwards! :D

Error Exporting to Photoshop!

Ok so this was my idea for the Military base, It feels a little plain but since its in a deserted area I think its ok.? Anyway Illustrator won't let me export it as a .psd file, it keeps giving me this message "Not enough memory to save the file" when I have hundreds of gigs of space on the HD. I think its saved as an illustrator file but I just cant export to psd.

I've tried just opening the Illustrator file in Photoshop but it crops the image down to that box, I dont know how to delete this box you get in Illustrator. Can someone tell me where Im going wrong if thats the case, or how to fix this please

Lack of Posts!

There has been a distinct lack of posts on this blog over the weekend and there's been no explanation as to why.  We're going to have a meeting with Alan tomorrow and this will be discussed then.

Tweaked Logo...

Most of them are just me playing with lines but again, let me know what works and what doesn't so I can go in and change it again :D

Monster Movie Reviews.

Useful video reviews from Cinemassacre

I've watched these and know they're good:

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Frankenstein.

• Dracula.

• Wolf Man.

• Monster Squad.

• Top 10 Giant Monsters.

• The Fly.

• House of Frankenstein.

• House of Dracula.

I haven't watched these yet but they may still be useful:

• Hammer Films.

• Ed Wood.

• First Frankenstein.

• Monstervision.

• Giant Claw.

• The Screaming Skull.

• Frankenstein meets Wolf Man.

Monster Bio Research.

I'll probably expand on this at some point soon, but as this post has been sitting here for a while I thought it was worth having up in the meantime:

The Creature from the Black Lagoon:

"the Creature or Gill Man is a thorback to the Devonian period, the so-called "Age of Fishes", a geological expanse of time stretching from approximately 345 back to 395 million years ago"

"Alland explained, the so-called Gill Man was some weird combination of alligator, fish, and turtle. The fact that the monster also possessed the general shape of a human being made him even more interesting.  This "Creature" supposedly still haunted the jungles of South America and existed unchanged in appearance or habits since Devonian times."

 "the only movie monster to emerge during the 1950sto take upon himself a kind of classic status. The Gill Man was the real successor to such earlier Universal classic horror characters as the Frankenstein Monster, Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man."

"The image of the Gill Man, with his ichthyoid face and fins and his unique style of swimming, has become...as familiar an icon as the square-headed Frankenstein Monster with the scars and the neck electrodes, and the sinister black-caped Transylvanian with his craving for human blood." (231)

"Arnold once stated, he intended that the Creature be sympathetic, attacking only when provoked, and then capably of any form of violent revenge." (233)

Glut, Donald F. (2001) Jurassic classics: a collection of Saurian essays and Mesozoic musings. USA: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Frankenstein:

"Karloff's slender six-foot body was propped up to give the illusion of unnnatural height."
"The robotic appearance featuring grafted-on metallic highlights suggest a melding of science and nature."
"The abnormal shape represented how the top of the head would look removed, with more gray matter piled in and a new cranium supplied to accomodate the over-sized brain."
"Artificial veins were actually strips of cotton soaked in colodion and actor's hands were meticulously made up...even the slightest bit of makeup caused unbearable pain when caught in the actor's eyes." (45-46)

Brunas, John, Brunas, Michael, Weaver, Tom (2007) Universal horrors: the studio's classic films, 1931-1946. USA: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Redone Scientist

Sorted out the scientist's hair

Group Meeting Tuesday.

Hey guys!

I just saw that we have technical tutorials with Alan Tuesday morning so I think we should be there before lunch to have a meeting with him.

I'll be there from 10am anyway so be there, at the latest, for 12! :)

Wipe Experiments!

It's taken a while but I finally think I can make custom wipes! :D

New Look?

These are the latest attempts at a logo and our titles so let me know what you think! :)

Wipe Research.

Here's a compliation of the wipes I've found from various trailers that I'll bung at the bottom so you can see what I mean. These are used for video transitions and test transitions:

Video transitions:

• Straight side wipes (Right)
• Spikey side wipes (Right)
• Blur out into next shot.
• Barn doors (upwards)
• Spikey barn doors (side wipe)
• Cross fades

Text Transitions:

• Zoom into or out from the text.
• 3D spin into shot (right, drop down, lift up, enters and leaves shot going right)
• Wipes (Right, left, right then down)
• 3D spin right is followed by a right wipe sometimes.
• Diagonal wipe (Top left)
• Circular wipe (inwards)
• Fades (in, out, cross fade)
• Barn doors (outwards)

Trailers Researched:

The Killer Shrews (1959)

The Alligator People (1959)

Robot Monster (1953)

Bride of the Monster (1955)

By the way! There's a line in The Killer Shrews trailer that we are directly taking which is "Your flesh will crawl with fear at their nearness." It's just so rubbish that it's perfect for our film! Hopefully Alan won't have a problem with direct lifting but it's a public domain film so hopefully we can use it. It's too good not to really :D

Gas Station

My second attempt at the gas station..

Progression

Text Research.

I did this a few days ago and hadn't got round to posting it up. As we're going to have text shots I thought I should do some research into some classic horror film trailers:

Dracula (1931)

Wolf Man (1941)

The Killer Shrews (1959)










The Alligator People (1959)

Above is just a nice example of the kinds of wipes they used, I'm going to do more research into this too because it will definitely make ours look more authentic! :D

Here's the trailer below, it's the exact kind of rubbishness we're going for! :D

Poor Lon Chaney! From Wolf Man to that, what a 'howler'! (Sorry, I felt a pun was necessary :P)

New Animatic!

Finally finished! Sorry it took so long but fingers crossed you'll be fairly happy with it:



Let me know what needs changing and where! The music in the background was just instead of my poor attempt at music before and as I'm not sure whether it's 50s enough just let me know if you think it needs swapping out.

Scientist Designs

Using Molly's original scientist design as a base I created a form using the abstract style. 

Environments Attempt Using The Adopted Style

I used this sketch for the basis of my design and looked at Katy's Gas Station Design

I've left it here at the moment to see what you guys think of it at the moment... I havent used the exact shading/textures but I'm trying to take on the styling of shapes etc.

Environment Designs

These were the designs before "the style talk".

Lab Design 1

Lab Design 2

Lab Design 3

Gas Station Design

Gas Station Design

Here is the gas station with the applied style.

Rough sketches

Locations Research for Sean...

Fifties gas stations:









Military bases and fencing:

I know that the military facilities aren't all from the 50's but it's more about adapting the design to fit the time. The best picture to start from would probably be the 3rd one down, beneathe the 2 of Fort Knox, as I believe it's a base from the fifties.

Hercules Beetle Monster Design

Panther Monster Design