The story of 23 Degrees 5 Minutes begins in Dublin around the turn of the last century (nothing specific), so we wanted to work on a look for the film that complimented that.
Art Director Stephen Robinson, did some research and came up with some amazing visual references.
Here’s what Stephen was thinking on the look of the film:
‘’This story is set around the time that the first colour plates were becoming commercially available to photographers. The Lumiere brothers had developed a filter using dyed dots of potato starch (using the colours orange, green and violet) and this gives the colour prints of the first two decades of the twentieth century a unique colour palette. The painterly feel and the slightly unreal atmosphere of these early colour photographs inform the art direction of this film.’’
Stephen also put together some paintings which I hope you will agree are pretty top notch.
Now all we have to do is to figure out how we’re going to match this style through 3D lighting. Thanks for raising the bar for all of us Stephen!
2 comments so far
My God, I’d hate to have the job of translating these amazingly atmospheric paintings into 3D. The source references are really perfect – The weird coloring seems to imbue everything (regardless of the subject matter) with a feeling of “earlier-era” innocence. A really good fit for the story. Inspiring stuff.
12 October 2009
9:03 am
Thanks for the comment David. Sometimes it can be scarey when the paniting reference is TOO good!!! Unfortunately we have such limited time on a short like in order to crack the look so I hope we haven’t bitten off more than we can chew? Such is the challeneg of doing shorts I guess
12 October 2009
9:22 am