Spring Submission Milestone 1: Greenlight

This term we were given a choice of which brief we would like to undertake either a 2D brief, 3D brief or a Jack of all Trades brief. I decided to undertake the 2D brief as I would like to focus on my 2D skills more in the coming months. Especially since last term I was solely focused on 3D work as I was the environment artist for my group project and for my solo project, like everybody else, I was working towards making an industry standard 3D model.

For the 2D project we were allowed to choose what we would like to make; either an environment piece which could also included vehicles or a character piece. I decided I wanted to make an environment piece.

For this milestone we had been tasked to complete an early draft of a One Sheet for our project detailing what we would like to accomplish and to provide a Mood-board of references pertaining to our chosen field in the project which would be presented for review. Figure 1 is my draft One Sheet, In it I talk about how I would like to tell a story through my environment. My main focus began on medieval cottages and slowly transformed to water mills. At first I thought I would make a piece that showed some form of segregation between the mill and the community. However after a guest lecture with lead Concept Artist at Lionhead Studios, Mike McCarthy, I decided to switch my focus to be a bit more fantastical in it's design and story.

My setting however remained unchanged and I begun some research into water mill history and functions, turns out they have been around for a long time. But I needed to give my mill a function and came across what is known as a Trip Hammer, these are massive hammers that were used for various needs but I focused on one of their functions which was to refine ore, recovered during mining, into small pieces.

I decided to base my water mill as a mill that focused on these Trip Hammers and from my reference I tried to think about different ways I could flow water though the wheel. With the idea of there being a mine nearby I figured I could design the mill to be located underneath a small waterfall that fell into a cave system, and nearby the mill would be the localised mining force at another cave entrance that connected to the cave the waterfall fell into.

I next thought to myself how I could make this more interesting and so, on a whim, I decided to set the mill within the 14th Century of Northern Europe. With some more research I discovered that it was within this century that the Black Death occurred and so I started playing with the idea that this mining operation was the focal point of the Black Death.