Hi all! Adrián here with the weekly recap, one more week giving steps forward with the project. This week we've done some more research to find inspiration and references for the project by taking a trip. We've also working on the pitch and sizzle reel, and thinking about our best options to sell the project. So without further ado, let's go with the recap!
So this trip we took was to Asturias, the region in the north of Spain where I was born, because the locations from the project are very inspired in these places and a lot of the initial impulse for the project came also from some elements from my childhood in there. That's why I wanted to share that with Pablo. We spent 5 days walking around my village and exploring for new ideas, but also taking pictures and sketching things to have materials to look at these next weeks. These are some of the photos I took. These ones are from the place that gave me the first idea about the project, which is very close to my parents' home.
Then, the second day, we went to a pathway that goes to the town next door through a forest, with the idea of taking some inspiration for the forest and the surroundings of Hugo and Nico's house.
The third day we took a different path and we went to a small town in a hill near the sea. This path went also through a forest, but a bit different one.
And the last day of research, we took the car and went a bit further, to a village of fishermen called Llanes, very known because of the buildings and houses there (which I think are a great reference for the big old house of the hill).
But walking and taking pictures wasn't our only task. In fact, this week was a very busy one! Pablo has been exploring backgrounds, props, characters and even scenes. These are his sketches.
Nice stuff, huh?
This week we were busy also because we had a lot of meetings. On Monday we had the session with all teams and Scot about music and sound design for projects and how it's involved in the narrative. On tuesday, our team had a meeting with Kris, and we talked about pitching, how to focus our pitch more in the tone and vibes, and he even pitched us two projects to help us understand how it works. We've also talked about the sizzle reel, and Pablo made these sketches for a possible reel.
On wensday, we finally met Andrew. As it was our first session with him, we updated him about how the project is right now, and he helped us a lot with some artistic ideas and references. He is a very nice guy!
Thursday meeting with Maureen was the last one. We had a lot of questions about what strategies would be interesting to sell our project and what strategies would be good for us to make ourselves known. Very useful information about topics that we as artist usually don't take in consideration as much as they deserve. We are thinking about which steps should we take after the program.
While Pablo has been focusing more on the graphic side, I've been (one more week) developing the writing of characters and world, but this week I've began to write a pitch in order to taking a clear direction with the writing. That's why I've put the focus on the very essential of the project: the tone, the main relationship between characters (specially Hugo and Nico) and the world of the monsters. I've been thinking in the idea of making most of the film happen in the Garden by making it big, but also by creating the idea that the Garden turns more neglected as we follow the characters' journey, until the part where the Withered live, which is just wild (and maybe has some elements of an old factory/mine). My objective right now is to finish this first draft of the pitch as soon as possible, so we can work from there.
Sooo that's been all for this week! We have a lot of inspiration and many ideas to explore in the next ones. Until then, see ya!