Ed Week 4: Beginning the Cathedral

When he realises that Maria isn't going to meet him in the cathedral, Freder finds himself in the part of the cathedral that contains statues of Death and the cardinal sins and believing that she could have found herself in danger he beseeches the concepts that the statues represent to stay away from her, keeping her safe. 

 

This week I started the environment of the cathedral, though a lot of the cathedral won’t actually be shown in the book as the scene from the film takes place in what we’re interpreting to be a large side chapel of the main structure, a showcase of the seven deadly sins and death, I started with the full floor plan of the building. Ninety per cent of the structure will not be taken beyond this stage of the concepts however it gives me an instant idea of scale and of where this sits in the fabric of the world.

Some designs got a little silly but it was an interesting exercise to imagine how people would move around the cathedral, or where they would sit to listen to the sermons. I've always been interested in the architecture of gothic cathedrals and though I found it colouring my ideas of the environment a little, it was interesting to try and construct a modern building that still held the grandeur of the gothic buildings. In the original film the cathedral is a very traditional building but we wanted to try to have a more modern construction in our concepts.

 

This is clearly the city’s main cathedral, a major place of worship and yet it has an entire area dedicated to the cardinal sins? This struck us a little odd and it was for this reason that we chose to make this area a side chapel rather than a main part of the structure. In most of the plans there is an accompanying side chapel for the cardinal virtues.

The Sins are in the chapel on the north side of the church, always bathed in shadow the north side is the perfect place for such a sinister set of statues. However it means it won’t get much light and the chapel is lit by lights from the floor, creating a close atmosphere.

Unlike the original film this is also the route that Maria takes up to the roof in our version. She runs past the statues that Freder beseeched to keep her safe as she flees her attacker by escaping onto the roof. For this reason I included the sweeping staircases in the concepts. 

 
 

 

 During whiteboxing I started to get a real feel for the scale of the room, but came to a problem with the statues and how they were placed; the original film has death to the left of centre in the ‘middle’ of the sins, with three to his right and four to his left, in order to create a more even and central focus I placed Pride at Death’s feet in the middle.