With graduation quickly approaching, I've put off putting together a blog long enough. So... here's my first entry and what I'm currently working on right now...
Hermit of the Abbey
This particular project spun off of the Beethoven project of the BFA seminar. I took several elements of my research - Vienna's rich religious culture, Beethoven's private hikes through the woods, and ruins left over from the Napoleonic wars - to develop a story of a hermit who lived in the ruins of an abandoned abbey/cathedral.
This is one of the first layouts I did and I had alumni Gia Luc take a look at it. He was brutally honest, which is what I hoped for and he pointed out some things that I needed to fix. First he pointed out that it was compositionally boring, indicating that everything was pretty much in the center. Second he also said that my perspective was getting lost and that the hermit seemed to be out of perspective with the rest of the environment. Third he pointed out that the atmospheric perspective was lacking.Unable to fix the first issue without starting over completely, I opted to make adjustments based on his other points of critique.
I pushed the atmospheric perspective more and I fixed the perspective angle of the hermit. Hopefully it's reading a little better.
At the same time, however, I wanted to try a new composition based on Gia's crit, and this is one I came up with. I initially tried about 9 other compositional setups, each based off of a different camera angle on a Maya model I had built. After receiving some feedback from Derek Brand, I settled on this one. It's still in progress, so we'll see how it pans out in the next few days.