Yoh… a lot of work and not a lot to show…
Ive been experimenting with the fractal backgrounds and playing with the new after effects plug in, just trying to get the hang of it but mainly to try see what works. It’s fun to make cool things but it is so easy to make something extremely shitty. So I’ve spent a bit of time trying to work out what shapes work well and how busy the composition should be when i import it. I really liked the way that straight lines looked because it gave it a very geometric look (and if you duplicated the adjustment layer that was creating these fractals then it would make something even trippier). Once I thought I had an idea of what worked and what didn’t I moved onto my colour scheme, this has been so hard because when you think of LSD, you think of bright flowing colours and colours that just don’t work together. So trying to find colours that’ll look good (and not like a 3 year old chose them) was pretty difficult, but I think Ive managed to find a couple (purple, yellow and green – it looks better than it sounds).
I started the fractal experiments using the scamp of my evil character (the pen drawing) and i really liked how it looked which is what led me onto using lots of straight lines. I also tried gradients, circles, squares, and other shapes but decided to stick with predominately lines.
I then had a background that I’m starting to like and think is almost usable and took a screenshot and imported it into illustrator so I can work around it. I still like the black platforms with an outer glow because I think it looks like theres a black hole or a glitch in the game.
I changed the evil characters colours, I kept the same grim reaper style with a hood and everything, but made his colours more suited to the background, he blends in a lot which I think is really cool! He’s come a long way. I added the screenshot (of the background) onto the character (and cropped it accordingly) and he really blends in now and looks really cool. The only noticeable thing is his hood and arms (but when her goes into the purple section it blends in).
I took a screen recording of the whole process so you can see what I’ve done (and you can also see AFX crash a time or too because the fractal got too big – this stuff is pushing my laptop to the limits).
JWL 2020 