Urashima Taro so far

Here are all the sketches so far from our university project, to create a title sequence for a story not yet made into a movie. This is ours, called Urashima Taro, the Japanese myth of a fisherman's journal to and underwater city to fight a dragon.

As an artist who is predominantly western in style and preference, Japanese stories and art were not very familiar with me, so my first task was to immerse myself in their culture, art and tradtions.
Being a story that is mostly set in the fictional underwater city of Ryuju-go, it was important I got to grips with Japaense architecture and styles, I did this by meticulously scanning images of frugal japanese buildings and sketching them down in my sketch book to get a feel for the styles and understand how the buildings are made. Here are my initial sketches from that research:

The first thing that I noticed was the grand tiled pagoda rooves, with brilliant head pieces and ornaments. The buildings in this city will be towering structures, but need to stay true to the style and architecture of it's time, some versions of the story of Urashima Taro describe the city as being made of crystal and coral, these are important things to keep in mind when building the city.

The next important thing was artwork, Japaense was isolated away from the rest of the world and thus was able to establish and build it's own styles and methods of producing art work, resulting in a magnificent and unique take on the world. I decided it was important to take advantage of this to really emphasise and help immerse people into the culture of frugal Japan, where this movie is set.
So I spent a day or two drawing and copying the styles from the various paintings and woodcuts produced by this historical art peices.

The bottom drawing was done with brushpen, and is copied from a painting depicting the story of Urashima Taro, when a turtle rises out of the ocean to take the fisherman to the city under the waves.

 

After establishing both style and architecture, it was time to design the character and the city itself.

I researched traditional costume of the time, and came up with some sketches for the over all look of Urashima Taro, I did not focus on the face as the character would most be seen from afar and shrouded by the murky water.

The brushpen drawings to the side help to test the silhouettes, from these I decided the bottom one had the more interesting silhouette with the flowing outfit and noticable head gear.

 

 

I felt designing a city would take way too long, and wasn't really necessary, so I went ahead and started rough boarding some ideas for the title sequence, doing the layout for the city as I went along ( as you can see above)

My idea was that it started off as a typical japanese painting, the camera would dice under water and follow Urashima's journey into a through the city, while cutting away a few times to show life in this under water utopia to really establish the scene and immerse the audience in this strange but beautiful world. You'd first see the lights of the buildings before the shapes of them would imerge out of the murky waters towards and around the camera, mixing up the shots by having the camera looking out through the windows and up from the streets below to show how the civilians of the city see him, I feel this would make the sequence a lot more interesting.

 

 

That's all I have for the moment, stay tuned for more updates!