This first week back at university for second year, we were greeted with a fun assignment to create a Cinematic Short due in December. There were 8 separate environment topics on the board we had to choose 2 from, then narrow it down to one, and with these we would split off into groups of people who wanted to work on the same thing. I chose the Fairy Realm group as id been really into mushrooms and nature lately and thought it’d be a fun thing to work on.
After a short while i found like-minded people who wanted to work on the Fairy Realm, but there were 10 of us and since groups were only allowed to be 5 people, we split into two groups. Once our group was recorded as group 5, we were able to sit down and start brainstorming ideas for the environment such as the basic plan for what we actually wanted to create, which in the end we settled for Aoibheann’s idea of a fairy tree. With this in mind, we split off to two computers with me and Amber on one and Thomas, Aoibheann and Cain at the other, where we started a Miro board to gather references we thought would be helpful to visualise our environment and the assets. We took inspiration from games like “Pokémon: Sword and Shield”, films such as “Epic”, and illustrations drawn by artists on the internet such as Alector Fencer who can be found here at their DeviantArt page https://www.deviantart.com/alectorfencer.
I had started with the idea of going with a soft and sweet fairy realm with soft and pastel colours where natural mushrooms and moss covered the grounds, a big tree in the middle of a lake where fairy houses would sit on the bank of the water, with a few higher up in the tree. I also liked the idea of mushroom houses where the fairy’s had hollowed out mushrooms and used a ladder to get up into them, with small gardens round the side and a nice forest behind the tree that was accessed by stepping stones through the lake.
(og concept of the mushroom house)
Fireflies also seemed cute to me so I wanted them to be flying freely around the environment but to make it simpler, they could just be stationary and increase and decrease their glow throughout the camera panning, which led me to the idea of using lanterns for their light source either hanging from the tree or just placed neatly on the ground, but to still show a sense of design, they’d be sitting on a small rock or wooden stool. I took a lot of this inspiration from things i usually build in Minecraft where you’re limited to grid snapping with blocks, so you have to try incorporate different heights and designs to your builds to make them more interesting.
Above is a reference of a build i made using lanterns propped on rocks or hanging from them instead for variation.
After this idea, i heard Aoibheann referring to fairy’s as evil, so i did some research on them and found that in Celtic mythology, they’re considered daemons and tricksters so i decided to make some ideas for this path too, including some bones, tattered bird feathers and wilted flowers down at the bank, with a rotted tree in the middle and vines and overgrowth covering it all. Since they were tricksters i also thought that them stealing toothpicks from humans and making weapons with them sounded appropriate, and their houses should be resembling wooden bird houses that they built themselves that could have caved in roofs or the wood could be warped due to the negative energy these creatures gave off, making everything around them distorted and drained of life, which also then led me to the idea of having jagged rocks in the background surrounded by a low hanging dark fog to set the atmosphere.
(og dark tree concept)
At the end of the class, we knew we wanted a tree with a pond, possibly some fairy houses and definitely mushrooms to capture the fairy aesthetic, though we were torn on whether to make the environment light or dark, which we then decided to leave up to the individual for when they were lighting their render.
To communicate, we set up a discord group for our project and added each group member, made three separate channels to help keep ourselves organised and let everyone know they could message at any time with any ideas, questions or progress they wanted to show.