City of Gup initial research

In this module, we've got a live brief, which is creating animated backgrounds for drama student's theatre play. The play is based on a book called Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

It was the first time we all did something as a group and also the first time we did work which was similar to real work in our industry. We were all kind of just thrown into the water without the ability to swim, to see if we can learn it. Definitely a  challenging task but we all bravely faced it. 

I found it awesome how we were able to sit down, discuss it and easily agree with the plan. We split into three groups, each of them took one of the worlds. There are three worlds in the play, Sad City, Gup and Chup. Mine group got the Gup city, which was the happy, colourful world.

For the Gup city, I needed to research cityscapes, Indian architecture, bright colour palettes and the underwater world. We are supposed to make background animations and I think the cityscape with animated clouds and birds would work very nicely. Indian architecture is typical with onion-shaped roofs, decorative ledges and sharply pointed arches. In my sketches, I tried to combine simplified traditional Indian architecture with modern skyscrapers and buildings. I also tried different colour palettes for various times of the day - daytime, sunset and night.

The ocean and underwater world are made in pastel colour scheme which shows softness of the water in contrast with bright, bold city buildings.