First images from the teaser.
Based on Curtis Jobling "Wereworld", Wolf King is an epic adventure fantasy series as well as a coming-of-age story produced by Lime Pictures and Jellyfish Pictures.
I art directed the first 7 months of pre-production, built the art team and set up the vis dev workflow. This is such an epic show, couldn't be happier!
I art directed the first 7 months of pre-production, built the art team and set up the vis dev workflow. This is such an epic show, couldn't be happier!
I never talk about my process (well, this is just one of the many methods I use) when I work on shows. One of the first things I do is starting to work using a mix of 2D and 3D software (on top of the usual sketching, brainstorming, etc...).
Photoshop is great but with Blender I add way more depth and advantages.
First of all I can show the director how the set will actually look once the show is out. I find this invaluable!
It takes me usually a few hours to convince even the most skeptical directors that this method will help massively! The director is not the only one to benefit from this workflow, in some instances my mockups/proxies get used by the storyboard team as there is no second guessing when it comes for example to space, scale and distance between characters. The layout team can use them as foundation to further build things up as well.
Of course I would never replace actual Vis Dev with just 3D mock-ups. Visual Development done in 2D is just too important as in 3D at this stage (unless the budget is big) you can only get to a certain level of visual development.
In this particular case the lack of time, a usual constraint nowadays (sadly), would tell me how much I could work in 3D before passing it to one of the amazing artists I had in my team (I believe this went to you Po Sing Chu), if times/production allows, I would work on it myself.
I've been using this method for years, I've refined it over and over again and I keep refining/adapting it according to the project I'm working on. My mockups most of the time represent the set as they are, sometimes literally all I need to do is a little paintover and things are done! I love this process so much!
Having said this... There are moments where I just ditch any 3D tools and just paint and draw!! I don't think I'll ever get tired of doing that!!!
Hope you enjoy some of the behind the scene images I'm posting, rather than polished illustrations of the sets. The gif image shows the first iteration of the set done straight in Blender.
Super quick sketch done while chatting to the director Tom Brass about the look and the functionality of the lifts.
Below are some images from the trailer.
These are very initial sketches of the Wolfshead sword Drew uses in the series. I went a bit crazy with the Damascus steel engravings... It turned out the sword had to look a bit more regular as you can see in the show.
A vis dev piece showing Motley. It was quite a lot of fun figuring out this little town at the beginning of the show.
Hector's book. Some part of these pages where reused here and there as filler.
Screenshot from the show
Brackenholme Gates
Screenshot from the show
