KDS - Backgrounds - Spring 2021

Members: Anna Fischer

Yaremy Copca

Sunny Abulon

Natalie Kresova

Nathaniel Pettey

Charlene Zamora

Joseph Mendoza

Lydia Gibson

These backgrounds follow the first episode's opening teaser as Sodachi manages to speed through and maneuver around a kaiju attack to make her delivery. Each shot here is a glimpse into this world while complimenting the action sequences with dramatic flare and kaiju appearances with the encroaching presence of danger.

Every update from the Visual Development team adds another layer of detail towards these interesting and stylized sets

-Allen Jay

Here are some of the backgrounds that were finished this semester under the supervision of our Background Lead, Ryan Zulueta.

Here we've highlighted some of the process to show how these backgrounds were developed. The background artists needed to work with the type of shot the storyboards had layed out, and so theres a bit less of a freedom to change the camera or perspective. However, thankfully the shots were already well considered in terms of camera, and so a lot of the job for the background artist is to make that composition pop, and bring more of the stylization through. Here, you can see the screenshot of the storyboard moment (Top Right) and the new line sketch following the style (Top Left). Slight tweaks were made for storytelling purposes, and more dynamic flow, creating a more impactful composition on top of an already functional one. These extra choices breathe more life into the background. And then, of course, there's the final!

You can see the same thing happen again here, though in this case, a tweak in size of the background was made for a longer shot.

Here, one of our background artists even takes it a step further by even doing some extra designing for the bridge structure this takes place on. This extra effort makes for a much more interesting look to the structure, and also gives a bit of reference to any other artists who might also have the bridge in frame.

Finally, here we can see on example of an additional style reference from our Background Lead, Ryan Zulueta. Ryan had a lot of responsibility for establishing the stylization of the project, from the clouds to the water, and these things, in terms of how to approach brushstrokes and texture, really helps to bring a cohesion to the style of the project, especially when multiple people need to be able to carry that same energy in their own paintings.