Research - Eduardo Pena

Eduardo Pena is a visual development artist based in the entertainment industry. I wanted to talk about his work because it has an incredibly cinematic feel to it. As well as this, a while ago I watched a video tutorial he did on painting cinematic scenes, and from this I learnt a huge amount about camera positioning and how to make scenes feel overall more cinematic. Due to the area of his work, he has to create artwork that would be suitable for film or video games, which I feel is an entirely new design process entirely from the usual process. He also mentioned how he works, and that he tries to include as much information as possible for the production pipeline later on in the overall production. The reason I think this type of design is so hard is because you have to work as a cinematographer, a designers an artist and you have to fit all of these things into one piece.

The characteristics of his artwork is that there is a continual theme of epicness and he has a great sense of scale coming across within his images. Take the image below for example, with the sand worm type creatures. Everything about this piece is integral to creating the sense or scale and the epic feel that we get from looking at it. I noticed first the direction of the camera angle is directed upwards from a low point. This gives the creatures a greater sense of threat and dominance within the scene. I noticed the lighting he used is also incredibly cinematic in that it has that kind of piercing through the clouds look to it and creates a nice highlight off of the creature in the image. These are some of the reasons I wanted to include Eduardo Pena in my research because although there are many concept artists to look at I feel like he continually creates these very large scale vistas and as the audience we receive so much information about them because of the extreme wide shot viewpoint we are looking into the image from. I definitely feel like I should look at his work for inspiration when trying to create design work for animations because of how much he can relay through a single image.