Jubilee Pool - Background Designs

After doing a few character designs, I looked at doing some background designs. As Art Director, I felt I needed to be ahead with doing some initial designs so the group had an idea or what we were going for, and so I could have feedback to make it better and apply more to the project. First, I did this quick piece of concept art for the presentation to the client. We hadn't got final character designs yet, and we hadn't started background designs, so I threw this together quite quickly so the client had an idea of what we were going for. We wanted it to be be bright and fun for children, since they are our target audience, so I included a lot of colour. I also played around with textures in the background, as we wanted the characters to be simple block colours with the backgrounds having a focus on the Art Deco patterns. I didn't like how this concept piece turned out, but that was good because then I knew what I needed to avoid and where to go next. I found all the colours and textures combined was too chaotic, and it was difficult to focus on the characters.

Initial Character and Background Design

So for my second attempt, I created a water background in Photoshop, using Art Deco patterns as a big inspiration. Instead of making sure the patterns stood out, like I did in the first background attempt, I focused more on the colours and the overall atmosphere. I think it worked really well, and I think this background could also look great animated.

After making this background, I used it as the base for my next attempt. I chose our opening shot, which is an aerial view of the pool. I really like the gradient technique used in a lot of the Art Deco posters, so I tried to recreate this in the background.

I really liked the result, and so did my team, so I tried this technique with a second background. Again, we loved the result, however when we put the characters in the scene they stood out as they were completely different styles. We then had to decide whether to keep the character designs or the backgrounds, so I chose to do some tests to see how I could combine the two.

Additionally, I did an animation test of the clouds parting from the first shot of the film. It was very simple to do, but I like the result since I used the same brush I used for the texturing to create the clouds, therefore they blended well.

Cloud Test