Group Project - Jubilee Pool - Research

My other module for this term is to animate a film for a client. For this module we are in teams: my team is me, Molly Fuller, Sam Keye, Robin Atkins, and Drew Fletcher. We assigned roles for the project:

Me: Art Director, Concept Artist, Background Artist, Layout Artist, Key Artist, Editor.

Molly: Concept Artist, Storyboard Artist, Inbertween Artist, Background Artist, Foley Artist, Sound Mixer

Sam: Director, Script Writer, Storyboard Artist, Inbertween Artist, Editor

Robin: Project Manager, Producer, Key Artist, Inbertween Artist, Music Composer

Drew: Co-Art Director, Concept Artist, Music Composer, Foley Artist, Sound Mixer, Layout Artist, Key Artist, Inbertween Artist

We have chosen these roles, but we also understand that they may change as the project evolves.

 We had a few films to choose out of, but we chose and got 'Jubilee Pool'. This film is collaborating with a college to animate a sound clip of someone saying their experience at the pool. The college recorded the sound clips, and we are animating the film, which will be about a minute to a minute and a half long. We had a few sound clips to choose out of, but in the end we chose clip 1 of Mark Gilmore, which told the story of him as a kid learning how to swim at the pool. We chose this clip because there is a 'military instructor', who sounded like a good antagonist.

We started off by collected lots of research so we would have some ideas for the project. I created this PowerPoint of research I found. As you can see, I went quite overboard, but I like having lots of research before generating any ideas.

I first found some facts and information about the Pool from the Pool's website in the history section. It was very interesting to learn how the Pool was designed in the early 1930s, and how this is apparent in it's design.

I then found images of the Pool from the Present and from the 1930s to see what has changed. It's clear the Pool hasn't changed that much in appearance, and that the original design is very important to the heritage. 

The Pool was designed in the Art Deco era, so a lot of the design is focused on angular shapes mixed with curved shapes. Additionally, Cubism was also quite popular at the time it was made, so some of the features at the Pool are based on the shapes used in Cubism. I found some images of Cubism pieces, as maybe a pathway for the art style with the colours or geometric shapes.

I then looked at 1935 swimsuits (1935 is when the Pool opened) for character outfits and designs. I found they were very vintage, and included a lot of suits with shorts and striped patterns. I liked the patterns, and thought maybe they could be good for backgrounds, especially since there are a lot of patterns in the Art Deco era.

I also looked at 1935 fashion, to see how it compared to the swimsuits. It was hard to find images of the swimsuits in colour, but looking into the fashion led to the fashion magazines, which were in colour. This helps a lot for the art direction in terms of colour palettes and patterns. In all the magazines, there was an apparent use of complimentary colours, and dull colours for part of the outfit being mixed with a very bright element.

I had found all this research on the internet, so next I turned to books from the Library. I went to the Falmouth Uni Library and found some Art Deco books, since my team were very interested in Art Deco being used for the art style.

I separated all the information I found into sections, and started off with the Art Deco patterns. They are obviously a big part of the era, and we had the idea to use the patterns for the sea and in the backgrounds. I collected the patterns I found in the books for reference. Most of the books were in monochrome, which was a shame since I couldn't see the complimentary colours and how they were applied to the patterns.

Next I collected all the images of Art Deco posters. I really liked the gradient style in the posters, and I wanted to use them for the art style - whether that be in the shading, backgrounds, or character design. Again, I couldn't find many colour posters, but the ones I did find used very dull colours with a black gradient for a bold image.

Here are the posters I found online, which used a lot more colour. They may have the contrast editing, but I did prefer the bright colours. These posters still used only a few colours in one poster, with black or dark blue for the gradient.

I moved on to character design, and how figures and characters were drawn in the Art Deco era. There was a lot of variety in the images I found, which gives me options for when I design the characters for our film. I liked the design on the far left, since it is quite simple yet effective with the contrast of the monochrome tones. However, I also liked the textures in the middle images, especially the wood appearance. The designs on the right are more colourful, so good for eye-catching designs, however they seem quite complicated for a design.

I went on to look at Art Deco animal designs and British animals, as we were thinking of having animal characters instead of humans to reach out to a younger audience. The exhibition that was recently displayed at Jubilee Pool was about it's history, and it seemed to target an older audience. The sound clips we got of the stories from the pool were mostly about peoples' time at the pool as children, so we felt it was important to make our film reach younger audiences and learn about the pool and it's history.

I also looked at colours from the Art Deco era. There are a lot of reds and primary colours, but then there are large areas of neutral colours such as greys or browns. This may be good to reiterate in our background vs character designs, and how we can blend the two whilst also making sure the characters stand out.

Here are some initial sketches Drew did for human characters, as we weren't sure if we wanted to do human or animal characters. He looked closely at how figures were drawn for Art Deco posters, and translated them to so character poses and sketches.

I also did a concept piece of the water, and Molly did a wave test to work out how we could animate the water. We wanted to use the Art Deco patterns in the backgrounds, but I was worried how patterns would make the overall appearance of the film too complicated. Therefore, I used the patterns as a base, and focused on the colours to create an overall look for an aesthetic look.