Research - Creating Worlds / Environment Design

Since wanting to pursue a career in the creative industries, environment design has always been something that has appealed to me. The idea that you can create a whole world or environment simply using ideas and influence from our already existing surroundings seems like an exciting and enriching endeavour. I think one of the most helpful tools in the process of creating environment designs of this nature, is knowledge. When we are young often we read encyclopedias and wonder at the images they contain of things we have never seen before, stars, galaxies, rain forests etc and in the process absorb all of this new imagery. These are the kind of influences that can be used as inspiration for creating imaginary worlds from scratch.

One of the most important processes or methods I have learnt whilst reading articles and watching videos on design of this nature was by Feng Zhu, a concept artist and teacher. He was talking specifically about the way when designing whether it be for a film or video game, usually the most successful route to take is to take influence from our surroundings to design. Play with the scale of real world objects and building, or even natural forms. The example below shows that small objects on the macro scale, or upsizing objects that are usually quite small can be a great way to gather ideas for various aspects of an environment. Mixing surroundings that go against what we know is also a great way to create unfamiliar yet recognisable worlds. Putting cities in swamps or desserts, historical buildings such as the pyramids in the snow or iconic architecture in perhaps what we think of as uninhabited terrain. One of the key things when creating designs from scratch is to make sure that familiar design language is used so that the audience is receptive and engaged with the ideas that fuel the design and not put off my how new and far out they are.



There are so many incredibly crafted worlds that have been created for the purpose of entertainment. An example I want to show is some of the backgrounds and environments from the 1995 film, Ghost in the Shell. I find these backgrounds not only stunning as stand alone pieces but the way the world is shown broken down through the use of detail in the buildings and the dilapidated environments is an example of a really successful portrayal of a derelict city in combination with the abandoned imagery. The process to create these hyper detailed and realistic backgrounds was quite unusual. 'The digital cel work included both original illustrations, compositions and manipulation with traditional cel animation to create a sense of depth and evoke emotion and feelings. Utilized as background, filters like a lens effect were used to create a sense of depth and motion, by distorting the front background and making the far background out of focus throughout the shot. Ghost in the Shell used a unique lighting system in which light and darkness were integrated into the cels with attention to light and shadow sources instead of using contrast to control the light. Hiromasa Ogura, the art director, described this as a very unusual lighting technique.'