Ed Week 7: Hel

Hel is the name of a human woman but is used here to refer to the inventors robot. Originally made to represent his lost love (Hel) who chose to marry the master of metropolis instead and ultimately die giving birth to Freder, she will later be forced to take on the face of maria to discredit her in the eyes of the workers.

 

 When designing Hel's face I started with the human before the robot. I looked at many different features to show a motherly face with the resemblance to Freder particularly in the colouring.

In the end I wanted a person who looked very much like a person. Hel doesn't look nearly so polished as Freder and has visible wrinkles, bags under her eyes and various subtle imperfections. These were important in establishing the character of the inventor through her.

A lot of these imperfections would be smoothed over or obliterated when I came to design the face of the robot. As the inventor recreates his lost love he does not create a true replica; gradually he twists it to be an idealized version of Hel and she loses a lot of the personality from her face to become more of a doll. By creating this Automaton the inventor has essentially chosen the face of this woman over the personality of the original and as such he works to an idealized vision he's creating for himself.

This subtle difference, the desire to change and 'perfect' the one he loved also shows us subtly why she picked a different man to marry in the end and allows us to see a layer of Hel and the inventor also when she was alive that we might not see in their own character designs.

 

When it came to designing the robot frame and body it was her name that provided the ultimate inspiration. Hel is also a figure from Norse mythology, the Daughter of Loki and in charge of once of the realms of the dead she's described as 'half blackened and half flesh'  this coupled with the idea that she's been built in secret largely out of scrap influenced her final look.

Part of the final image is her dressed in an approximation of maria's clothing, changed to look like Maria. She retains a portion of her original features as the underlying structure of her metal skull remain the same but she's been changed enough that most workers who are only familiar with their spokeswoman from a distance or description would mistake her for Maria. Her clothes are ever so slightly too new, too unbroken, as a reference to the inexperience with these things that the upper-class citizens who dressed her in them have.

Ed Week 3: Freder

In terms of weeks, this has been a week of set-backs. Though we have sent off for our book from one company we sent off from a second for the sake of a comparison and the process of getting that book printed and sorted out has taken a very long time. Now it is finally complete however and it's such a big relief to know that I don't have to worry about it any more. It's taken up a fair portion of my week just getting that complete, but this week I've also finished off Freder and his upper-class clothing as well as beginning to put together the final book layout and actually start to include our work as opposed to placeholder images.



In the end, in the process of producing Freder's facial features I produced nearly 140 headshots.

I went back to sketching Freder after trying to use photo bashing to define his facial features. though I won't say no to using this method in the future and it did help me define his features better for these second lot of sketches, I found the process of finding relevant references for it time consuming and difficult, it was also very easy to become side tracked whilst looking. In the end it became a relevant step but a short one in the design process.

 

Over the course of designing him I did find myself becoming very fond of him, to me Freder is a character who's lack of responsibility and genuine power has left him insecure about himself despite the bluster that his sense of entitlement and the power of his father have left him with. 

Hopefully now that the setbacks of this week are done, I can get more produced next week when I should be producing my first setting for the book, either the pleasure garden or the city's cathedral.

Ed Week 1: Metropolis Citizens

As the project begins, we’ve started on our first pieces of artwork as well as our initial plans and layouts of the book.

I personally worked on the upper class citizens of metropolis, creating a range of androgynous clothing with variations on a theme and style rather than one final image that can be used to create a varied range of background characters who all look like they’ve come from the same environment.

I used my usual method of working for this; starting with basic silhouettes before taking the ones we liked and developing them into variations and sketches using blocks of grayscale colour. After this I move on to photo bashing the outfits to get more of an idea of colour and texture and do even more variations.

 

One of the two sheets of silhouettes




Developing silhouettes into block sketches (This is silhouette 19 from the picture above)




Moving on to photo bashing

Because there's no 'final' hero image to this part of the project, these final coloured images created through a combination of painting and photo bashing are the examples of the range of clothing worn by our upper class citizens 
 

I’ve also created a range of page layouts that will be used to format the finished book, they’re created with placeholder images and text but they’re examples of how the pages will look once the book is complete. I created layouts for square pages as well as landscape because we’re not certain which type of book we want and we expect them to change.

 



Layout for a Landscape A4 page

 



A layout for a squarer page

 

 I'm happy with the amount of work I produced this week. As the project starts I'm really excited about the opportunity to create the feel of a wider world in the clothing of the people.

-Ed