Work I forgot

 I like to put up my work for each year when it's over, but for some reason, I forgot a big chunk of work that I did last summer. I'm not sure why I didn't think to include them, but here they are. They were all done by a company in California that provides digital backdrops for theatrical productions. They were interested in using my work, but wanted me to do some test images first. I don't necessarily recommend this, but they did pay a bit for them and I was interested in this project.

The first test image was basically, a haunted house on a steep hill. They sent me a rough concept image to work from and this is what I ended up with, after a bit of art direction from them. As you can tell, it's mostly photo-based, so it's sort of a matte painting. I liked the end result quite a bit, so I decided to animate it. You can find a link to that animation here. 

Here is the second test image they wanted. Again, I was given a concept image to work from. I do like this. It's okay, but not the greatest thing I've done. It's not totally photorealistic and not quite an illustration, but the overall impression is cool.

They ended up liking them, so I was given the full project: create digital backdrops for the musical The Prom. It was a challenging job, since they wanted images at a really large pixel size. This one was interesting. It's an image of the Shubert Theater with a fictional production called Eleanor! I guess that's sort of an in joke for the musical. This is a day-for-night shot and I had to create all the signage, since this musical doesn't actually exist. The idea here is that this is what it would look like if it was actually a show on Broadway. I used this image for a tutorial I did on refining mask edges in Photoshop. You can watch it here.

After the 'show' wraps, the cast meets at Sardi's for their party. This is an actual restaurant in New York City that is popular among the theater crowd. This image is based on images of the restaurant, but customized to be a backdrop. The main feature of the restaurant is the caricatures of famous personalities framed and hangin on the walls and columns all around. Can you tell who is on the front right column?

Much of the musical takes place in a fictional high school. This is my image for the exterior. If the color here looks a bit off, they had a color scheme for the production that they wanted me to match. I had a hard time figuring out what they wanted. My initial images were more plain and realistic.

Here is an interior shot. James Madison Hight School has the Wildcats as its mascot and the colors are blue and gold, so that imagery pops up over and over. I thought this image turn out nice. I like working with different surface quality and reflections, so I had fun on this one. It has a dramatic impact as well.

The theater troupe from New York comes to this midwest town, so they need to stay at a motel. Here is an exterior shot where they stayed. I also had to to a daytime shot, but this one looks cooler. It's supposed to be a cheap, plain motel that wouldn't really be that fun to stay in, so that's what I tried. 

The interior lobby shot was also supposed to hammer that point home. It's small, drab, and maybe a bit depressing. That's what I was supposed to do. It's sometimes hard to make conflicting ideas work together in one image; I still want to make a cool piece of artwork. I still kinda like this one.

For this final image, I went all out. It's for the final scene, where the theater troupe helps put on a fancy prom for the kids. It's still in the gym, so I worked on top of that image, but it was also supposed to look fancy and spectacular. This was in addition to a 'sad prom' image that was earlier in the show. I actually created quite a few backgrounds for this production. These images here are some of my favorites. It was a really big job and ended up being more work and time than I had thought at first, but it was an interesting job. It was a nice summer job and I had to learn a lot. Creating theatrical backdrops is different than other kinds of images, as the viewpoint and scale have to serve a particular need. It was tough at first, but I eventually figured it out.