Eli - Snail Shell Seekers

I can't remember if I mentioned this before... I think it was just after the last hand in I did this so maybe I haven't but my friend Eli in film and TV was looking for someone to make some concept sketches about some elements of the film he was making this semester a film called "snail shell seekers".

It's about a little boy and his sister who live in an underwater submarine with a ship captain and a womanising harpoonist. His sister is pretty sick and he's looking for a way to make her better. He earns his keep on their ship by collecting the snails that are pretty much all over the ship... I don't really know any more about the film than that. I've been keeping up with his progress though.

So when Eli appeared online looking for help creating some concept art because he had some presentations to do and he couldn't draw well enough to say what he meant I knew I wanted to help him out because it sounded interesting. He was looking at a style I really liked and I love making concept art! So naturally I wanted to give him a hand with it.

He gave me some booklets to look at to get an idea of the story and the style and things and then he told me what he was looking for me to do. He left it pretty open but specified a few things he was interested in having.

These are the visual references Eli sent me.

One of the things Eli requested was something similar to a painting of a destroyed city he saw that he really liked but with a much more red sky to it because that's what he imagined the dystopian future that this was set in to look like. I loved this piece once I made it for him. I always meant to go back and add a submarine to the gap up the top and see what he said but I didn't ever manage.

He was also interested in seeing the inside of the submarine drawn out in some way. He wanted the style of the art I made him to be quite scratchy and rough and charcoally and although I felt like I failed him in that regards, he seemed pretty happy with the results. 

 Finally I constructed this scene as a quick look into some of the characters. The harpoonist on the left, the little boy in the middle and the captain on the right. I didn't know much about them when I made this but Eli says I got pretty close to what he saw and he loved my version of the little boy. He had asked for this scene specifically because it's a climactic point in the film where the little boy has to force the two older gentlemen into helping him help his sister.

I mean if I was doing it for him again now I would be able to see the elements a bit more clearly but that's what progress is like I suppose. I still really love these.