Photoshop

CREATING MOOD BOARDS

In this workshop we focused on what would be required from a mood board at a professional standard. Looking at previous work I had a firm gasp on how to portray my ideas. Reflecting on my visit to Kyoto gardens I had many inspirational pictures I could use.

To begin we set the base paper size, and dragged in the photos from our documents before resizing them into a presentable format. With help from the tutor I was able to insert text in a stylized manner and highlight the color scheme I wanted to portray. I have previous experience in Photoshop and have worked on similar pieces so did not struggle to align the images, despite this I was able to learn of many ways I could complete things quicker, just hovering over the image icon opens a list of every picture allowing me to click and drag easily.

Once all the photos were formatted across the page we use the rectangle tool to create shapes that would portray the color scheme. I wanted to focus on more natural colors for mine, taking inspiration from The Last Samurai and actress Kyouki Kato and her green kimono I stylized my character around her. I found her performance in the film to be beautifully elegant and perfectly captures the calming atmosphere of a Japanese garden.

For the set design I used photos from my visit to the Kyoto gardens as well as old fashioned Japanese buildings and windows. As my set is focused on exterior I focused on that aspect of architecture. I really like how this turned out and was able to quickly move onto another board.

For my second mood board I focused on set decoration and detail. Most of my inspiration came from Naruto (long running anime and manga series I read as a child) and the award winning Spirited Away. Both are some of my favorite designs and artwork in anime. The detail in each location is astonishing, ranging from vibrant and elegant structures to cluttered and busy streets. I feel like adding age and distress to the scene will enhance story telling. Making the scene look lived in will help me indicate the presents of character.

One thing that I found extremely interesting was the importance of Photoshop in our line of work. After watching the work of a graduated student I was astonished at the levels of Photoshop used, he suggested experimenting with the software during free time and to download Google Sketchup which I did after the lesson. This turned out to be fascinating and I look forward to using it in the future.