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Designing La Muerte's Castle
Paul Sullivan • October 17, 2015
Here is a step by step of my process for designing La Muerte's Castle for the animated film The Book of Life.
First we had to get something quick for the Reels. I was very busy Art Directing and trying to find the time to design this. I really wanted to do this design from the beginning of production because I knew there would be a lot of opportunity for beautiful colorful design in the Land of the Remembered. I really wanted to make a strong beautiful silhouette that at first read, looks like the traditional mexican tree of life.
This was the first rough sketch for the composition that was going to be in the film. I had to design and compose to a 2.35x1 aspect ratio so it was important that the castle was much wider than it was tall so it read as a grand final place to end up at the end of the parade
I did this drawing based on the overall shape of the initial rough sketch. I wanted to flesh out more of the design ideas in the castle. I was playing with the idea of including Klimt's tree of life elements and elements of Antonio Gaudi and more specifically Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia in spain. The concept of organized chaos was all over in the Land of the Remembered and this idea is very apparent in Gaudi's work as well.
This version was to see how it was playing off the dark backdrop as that was the plan in the film. Jorge our director was very protective of this design and I really wanted to make sure he was included in every part of the process to give his feedback and make sure I was hitting the look he was expecting.
Next was the color rough, I tried to get the colors looking nice first before going into all the detail, much like how you would approach a plein air landscape painting traditionally. I really had fun with this one, and spent about 45 min to an hour getting it to this stage. Once I get this where I like it, I feel a sense of relief because the rest is just cleaning it up and drawing with the colors that work.
This was where I left off before using it in the film. The rest of our team took this painting and detailed much more and put it in the film. This design was one of my favorites that I was able to work on.
Love this film and Love Ryan Gosling in it. Such a moody dark piece and I wanted to study it and play in that world.
Some say an artists work is never done, perfect example. I never liked how I painted these designs back when I did Tomb Raider. So I wanted to redo it now. I always imagined the skin on the Viking corpses stretched and sinewy, covered in glowing goo, but this time I wanted to try it more localized on the inside of them as it was supposed to be their life force. I only spent a couple of hours on this but I like the potential of where it could go.
We wanted Son of Jaguar to show up as yellows and warm tones and Lord Calavera to be represented by greens. So the color script reflected this. In the story we have a battle in the ring. When lord Calavera is winning, green takes over. When SOJ starts to regain his angle on the match, the yellows and warm tones get stronger.
A sketch of Mala strana in Prague.
Almost 2 years before we actually made the Son of Jaguar VR short with Google spotlight stories, we did these shots for the beats of the story that Jorge was brewing up to help illustrate the ideas. As usual with these things, we had to work fast and get ideas across quickly hence the rough nature of these. I like what the spontaneity created. This thing was Jorge's idea through and through and we were just trying to help him tell his story as best we could with the new and limited medium of VR. It ha to render in real time on a phone, the google pixel 2. And one of the challenges with VR is that you can't frame compositions like we do in film, it's like a mix between a game and a film that way. But he wanted to tell a story in this medium, because why not!? There are no rules to VR and in a lot of ways it's still being pioneered which is a fun challenge. One super creative solution he had to that was to isolate the story to the inside of a ring, as if you were the viewer looking on. You could look around if you wanted to, but like a real wrestling match, you want to look at the action inside the ring. So I thought it could eb a good solution to help the viewer feel like we were inside the lights of the ring, by darkening and blurring the background, so maybe you could just see lights of cameras and the first couple rows of people in the crowd. These shots are really the first take on that idea.
