CARNIVAL OVERTURE
A Collaboration with the CBSO
2024
For my first year Unit X project, EDIT Brand Studios paired our class with the City of Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra to produce animated shorts or posters for them to use to promote their performance of Antonin Dvorak's Carnival Overture. I chose to do an animation as I orchestra I thought it would be perfect to use my synesthesia as a reference. One of the forms of synaesthesia I have is chromesthesia, which will be my main point of reference as it makes me visualise certain colours, patterns, and motions when listening to different instruments in a song.
CHARACTER DESIGN FOR CONDUCTOR
The design for the conductor went through a few different versions before I decided on the final style. I initially started off with the same design I had used in my initial illustration. It was meant to be a silhouette of a conductor in a suit. This style worked well for a full illustration, however, the details on the hair, hands, and coat would make it difficult to keep the shapes consistent if I animated it, since the silhouette does not show any major details. To solve the issue of the overcomplicated design, I decided to lean more into simple shapes that could easily be recognised as a silhouette. I decided that it would be a good idea to have the conductor be made of paint/ink as it would make thematic sense for him to move across a canvas. This blob of paint style also made it so that I was able to morph the shape of the character more freely to match the music.
This first version used only a paper overlay, with colour burn as the blending mode. This was not very noticeable though, so I decided to only use this texture for the background
For this second version, I tried to use chalk texture brushes to simulate the different highlights and shadows you would see in fresh paints. But the texture looked too rough and did not match the paint feeling I was looking for
Finally, I settled on using an actual photograph of wet oil paints to get a realistic texture. At first, I overlayed it using Multiply as the blending mode, but the highlights did not show very well, so instead I used colour burn.
