Final changes on One Sheet

I made some final changes on the one sheet which is also on the front cover for the DVD case:

• Hikoboshi and Orihime as characters came into existence rather late during the production phase. However they now play quite an important role in the film, as they retell the story of the legend of Tanabata. The legend says on Tanabata a crowd of magpies comes to form a bridge for the lovers over the river/milky way. Therefore I arranged Orihime and Hikoboshi opposite to each other on the two major decoration gates, and linked them with a half circle of magpies.
• Furthermore I exchanged the background gates through new, more carefully selected gates which I build at later stages.
• I also changed the font of the title. Originally the writing of Tanabata on the one sheet was in bold captial letters, which were very easy to read. However my intro the Hiragana version of Tanabata transforms into Roman lowercase letters, so the previous one sheet font was basically obsolete in the film. Although the writing as it is now may not be that easy to read as the one before, however the exchange was necessary to keep consistency in the design.

 

Made some changes on the One Sheet. I tried to make it much lighter, as it shall look joyful and not be too dark. So I changed the background colour and took out many dark shadow parts from the character. Becausae I don't want her to look mad or like an insomniac. One thing yet, which still needs to changed is the title writing.

One Sheet

This will be the One Sheet for my film. The log line "A festival, a foreigner, a fabulous experience" basically describes what my film is about. Making a film about Tanabata I, as a non-Japanese person, don't take the right to be able to show what the festival is about. That's why I want to present it of a foreign point of view, by having a visually clearly foreign main character.

This image will serve as poster and DVD cover for my film. I will change the font of TanaBata though, and make it more matching to my film, as I only rushed this one for the pitch.

The following are seperate elements of the one sheet:

The character to the left has features of a cow, a woman and a demon. The characters to the right, the octopus on flying stars, are just there because when I was on Tanabata festival I saw more octopus and fish than cows (but that was probably because all of the takoyaki stalls). Anyway they will appear in the animation.

Here I took the shadows away from Hiko. I haven't decided yet wether to leave them on or not. Looking on the poster design under this aspect afterwards, makes her looking sort of creepy and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, as I actually planned the strong shadows right from the beginning.

The gate designs have very purposely unrealistic lightings, almost shining which makes them look abstact. I also wanted to bring in stupid looking "baka" cows with red eyes. Not sure if they will actually appear as characters or rather as decoration ( as their style resembles to some extent the one of the festival folk).

The one on the left is my first coloured sketch of a one sheet which I started during the summer holiday. I didn't have a lot of drawing equipment with me, so I started colouring it with some odinary pencils. It looks quite crappy but includes already all of the important features for the final design. In my final One Sheet I actually traced the outlines from this design and then scanned and coloured them in Photoshop, of which you can see an early coloured stage on the right.