Measured Assessment, part 1: Concept design

Gnomon Workshop just released an excellent tutorial DVD about Hard Surface Shading and Texturing by a friend of mine, the outstanding CG artist Neil Blevins. If you’re interested in hard surface shading, I highly recommend buying this disc. Neil is a superb artist and you’ll learn a lot about shading theory and technique from his DVD.

Plus, the example used in the DVD isn’t some toy example created for pedagogical reasons. The model is a character Neil designed, modeled, and shaded as part of doing Production Design work on an animated short film project called Measured Assessment, which I wrote and am starting to put into preproduction (and am starting to build a mostly volunteer crew, in case any animators or 3D artists are interested). Here is the image from the DVD cover (and Gnomon Website):

Neil started working on the model by creating this original concept, based on the script, and conversations we had about the design:

Who’s that bot?

We call this robot the “Mortuary Bot.” That is shorthand for the most compelling (to us, as humans) job that this robot performs, which is retrieving dead bodies. But in the script for Measured Assessment, he is operated by the “Department of Sanitation and Human Services” and is actually designed to pick up both garbage and corpses. That is reflected in the bin-like chassis and hinged top (the cylinders on the top front and back contain hinges that allow the top to swing open so garbage can be dumped into the bot).

Neil’s designs reflect the macabre and inappropriate pairing of garbage collection and human remains collection being subsumed into a single entity, which is important to the story in Measured Assessment. This bot’s utilitarian design, combined with the nature of its duties, are visual shorthand that helps quickly convey a litany of things gone wrong with the society depicted in Measured Assessment. Without much verbal explanation or long, expensive expository scenes, when the audience sees a character they’ve hopefully come to care about getting scooped-up by this thing, they’ll understand just how morally corrupt the world of the story really is.

This other robot is also crucial to the story:

She is known as the A.N.G.E.L., and in the Measured Assessment world she’s operated by “The Department of Homeland and Social Security” as a combination personal defense and emergency medical response robot assistant. As you can see, she’s not much of an Angel — at least, not on the surface (but don’t judge a bot by her chassis). Another aggressively utilitarian design, A.N.G.E.L.‘s exposed instrumentation inspires tomophobia (fear of surgery) more than confidence in her lifesaving abilities. Her lack of sophisticated styling (she’s no EVE from WALL-E) is also a story point in the piece. The design reference I suggested to Neil for this robot is the fantastic work of Chris Foss (also Stewart Cowley, and the great John Berkey).

For science fiction and fantasy films, compelling and concise concept design is especially important because the world is unfamiliar to the audience. You don’t have much time to draw them in and make the scenario understandable. But even when creating more familiar worlds, concept design can help you nail-down a lot of ideas visually in sketches. For no-budget shooters, the trick is not to over-design (you can’t afford it) and also avoid becoming too wed to the drawings: you might not find that perfect actor, set or prop on your budget. But with concept drawings as guidelines, you at least know what you’re looking for.

What’s this concept concept?

The concept design process is an important part of the production design process, and not only for animated and VFX heavy films. Any part of your film where the design is important can benefit from concept design. Concept design is the preproduction part of the production design process, a time for reference photography and sketches which will feed into the production design process (and 3D previz modeling, if your project has budget for such a thing — or you have skills to do it yourself).

Concept sketches of characters can help with casting and wardrobe, or character design for animation. Similarly, for sets and props these early designs can help you find the right locations, decide when to build instead of use locations (if you can afford to build — which you may be able to, don’t rule it out until you do the research about spaces in your locale and find out the skills of your collaborators). Since concept design is often done roughly at the same time as storyboarding (often starting a little earlier), the concept artist(s) and board artist(s) can exchange ideas in ways that hopefully lead to a better result.

As concept designs can serve as a visual guide for storyboarding and production design, it ultimately filters down to every aspect of production. If you’re going to do it, getting it right is crucial. Your role as Director in this process is to have firm opinions about what you want, but also be willing to hear ideas from your designers. Indecision is the enemy of production, and you will harm your project through waffling — you can praise all the options and the people who are giving them to you, but you still need to make a decision. Always. And be ready to stand by those decisions, or else hundreds of well-meant opinions can turn your project into chaos. That said, films are made better by your ability to listen to your artists’ ideas first and have the confidence to then possibly make a different decision than you went in thinking you might, based on assessing relevant input from skilled collaborators. If you work with sufficiently talented people they will question what they don’t agree with. You need to be ready to both listen to them when justified, and sensibly defend your decisions when necessary. Concept design is the first phase of this collaboration, and the results of it can serve to visually explain your cinematic goals later on — a useful shorthand, especially in the heat of production.

I am very lucky to have a talented artist like Neil helping me with the concept design for Measured Assessment. Even if your concept designs aren’t quite as refined as Neil’s, so long as you feel they’re in the ballpark of what you’re looking for, they’re still a great tool for your production.