One of the biggest challenges of changing from being just an illustrator to more of an all round visual communicator has been breaking from the the conventions I have learnt when building images. In an editorial image particularly most of the time everything in the image is important and requires being in focus, that does obviously depend on the context, but that has been my experience after 7 years in the business. One of the main aesthetic things I noticed from HKC is how the camera focuses on what's important, whilst everything else just helps to build towards the feel, they are signs or signifieds that help the viewer to gain a better understanding of whats going on, almost taking them in subconsciously. So they don’t need to be in focus, they don’t have one image to get everything across, they have many unlike an editorial illustration. This allows them to leave some things pushed to the background as I said before.
This being the case I decided to test out how that might look when I make artwork, and how might this translate into the animation for the trailer. Below is my rough attempt, I didn’t take it any further than this as I am getting closer and closer to the final deadline so need to focus more of my attention on creating artwork for the actual final piece. This has been incredibly usual though, and even in this rough image I can see how it could be used to great effect. It has given this pretty quick attempt a large amount of depth and certainly given it that cinematic feel. In an effort to d
Save time, rather than cutting corners, I will probably create static backgrounds like this as a operate layer, apply the ‘Lens Blur’ and then the characters animated over the top. Ideally I would have some parts of it move, and maybe some people in the background but the amount of time used to create just the characters leaves me desperately short handed so this is maybe something I can consider for my final project where I will have double the amount fo time.
I did find it difficult to get any reference material of any artists who also do this, but then that is probably for the same reason that I discussed before re editorial focus. Below are 3 examples of Bup_Koos work, who is a concept artist which would make sense as to why they imply this technique. You can also notice the wide angle frame which feels very cinematic. But mostly I have used their work to see how they used the out of focus background. I would also say that their use of lighting in the images gives it a very HKC feel, the bright punch of studio lighting used outside so common in most films rather than just HKC. This is something that probably gives these little images quite a lot of depth, added to the blurry background and you get quite a combination.