Magnificent Seven
Plains
Looking through the screenplay for the Magnificent Seven I wanted to find key scenes that I felt would transcribe well into visual interpretations and my illustration. As this film is a westernised interpretation of Seven Samurai, I felt it would work well if I could compare the two, both from their screenplays, themes and from the works I produce. One scene I chose describes a house on a western plain, from this I started researching images of iconic western landscapes such as Monument Valley and the Great Plains.
Rough sketch
From this research I completed multiple renders of buttes and mesas as well as looking at semi-arid deserts and the Great Plains to try and find something that I felt stylistically best represented the approach I wanted to take.
Rough plan
This is a rougher drawing representing this scene of the house on the plain, I wanted to produce a quick mock up to get an idea of how I would lay things out and how I would compose the elements of the image.
Rough sketch
Forest
This part of the screenplay depicts a group of men walking through a woodland area and emerging into the fields outside of a town. I felt that this would be an interesting subject matter as I could work around with the lighting between the trees and get an interesting perspective of these characters walking through a dense forest. Also it states in the screenplay that “the men walk slowly and arrogantly”. Portraying this will be a challenge, but something I feel I can learn a great deal from.
For this I created one render of a mountain range to use as a backdrop and then a separate render of a small dirt path that I would use as a basis for the ground of the forest. Meshing the two different layers together would take some careful consideration, but would create a great deal of depth to the image.
Rough sketch
Rough plan
First attempt at this final piece, I reconsidered my approach as I developed it and started from a different angle
Final Outcome
This is one of my final pieces for the Magnificent Seven. For this illustration I have focused on the scene depicting the mounted men travelling through the forest wilderness. For this image I generated the landscape within World Creator and used this terrain as a backdrop, from this I then placed characters over the top of this backdrop into the landscape to create the casual travelling column formation. I have tried to appropriately dress the characters in clothing suited to this genre as well as designing the characters within Metahuman to make them look dishevelled as if they are part of the unkempt gang that is described within the screenplay. I think this illustration could be developed further and would likely improve as my knowledge and skillset of the new software I am learning now becomes more developed in time.
Settings
These renders are specifically of Mesas and Buttes as I wanted to find a way to create these within World Creator. I found it difficult working with this application as it was a new software to me at the time. This meant I struggled with layering the different filters on top of one another to create the effect of a Mesa or Butte and found that it took me a few hours to fully grasp how to achieve this.
Further work on plains
For this piece I created the environment in World Creator looking at the flat plains of North America and the mountains that can also be found there for inspiration. I then imported this environment into Blender where I created a grass texture that I could then cover the landscape with to make it look more realistic. This grass simulation was similar to the particle affect that I had used previously to create the leaves for the Maple tree.
Once I created my landscape I then imported two farm houses that I had also constructed within Blender into the environment and then I set up some dynamic lighting and a better camera angle to best capture the farm houses on the plains.
