Blog Post #14 Mood Board

 For this assignment, I created a set of mood boards that help demonstrate the vibe and important details that I will be including in my two minute film opening. Since I plan to animate the vast majority of my opening, many of my pictures are not real locations or people that I will use in my opening, they are more conceptual or things that I will use as inspiration or as a reference when animating. There are 8 mood boards that have different purposes 

    1. Character portraits (design):

For my character designs, since the majority of my opening will be animated, I don't have portraits of actors that I will be using in my film. Instead, I put together a handful of characters and images from video games and comics that have a similar style and vibe to what I am hoping to achieve. Mainly, a semi-realistic style that is unnerving and uncanny. While I'm not trying to directly recreate the characters and art style, I am planning to design my characters and backgrounds based on common elements of these styles so finding similarities between these images will hopefully help me create my own style that achieves what these do. 

    2. Location Photos: 

Again since the majority of my opening will be animation, these references are for drawing rather than real locations that I will be filming at. There will be two main locations for my opening, the inside of a house (mainly a living room/sitting area) and a news station. During my preproduction audience survey, a large amount of my participants indicated that they had no large preference for either retro or futuristic themes in sci-fi movies so I decided to do a mix of both. I want the different locations to contrast heavily so I'm planning to have the house be designed in a more retro way while the new station is very futuristic and technology forward. 

     3. Wardrobe and Props: 

I don't plan to show my main characters directly in the opening, but their shadows will be visible on the wall.  I will likely make the clothes baggier and not have their silhouettes be super sharp, I'm hoping that contrasting this with tighter clothes for the news people and weatherman will enhance the contrast between them. The only real prop I will need is an old TV which I'm planning to borrow from a friend. 

    4. Visual effects 

Since I'm doing mainly animation, I don't plan to have any crazy visual effects like greenscreens or CGI. But, there is one transition that I'm not completely sure how to do yet and may need to employ some visual effects. I want the camera to dolly in and out from the TV smoothly transitioning between real life and inside the TV. I may just do this by zooming all the way in and then cutting to black for a split second but I'm not sure if this will work so I may need to use visual effects.

    5. Framing and composition

I want again for there to be a large contrast between the two locations so I plan to have very different framing and composition between them. I want the framing and composition to be much more unbalanced and claustrophobic in the house compared to the news station. 

        6. Lighting 

This goes along with the contrast again, but the different locations will be lit very differently, The home will have dark, cold, lighting while the news station has bright and cold lighting. 

7. Color Palette

My color palette will be a mix of shades between reds, oranges, browns, and blues. They will change in warmth/coolness depending on the mood or location but will generally stick to this handful of colors. 

    8. Film Stills 

These film stills capture a similar aesthetic to what I'm going for in my opening. Slightly unnerving sci-fi films that have a sense of dread or fear mainly portrayed visually.