LOCATIONS: Red Cliffs Desert Reserve

Biome Exposition

To prepare for creature design and animation my cinematographer Jon Tinsley and I explore various areas with the intent of filming a documentary about creatures native to each location. We do this by finding areas in each location that look like they may house life. For example: the first creature I designed after we arrived was one that used the can pictured above as a sort of hermit crab shell. Then we built on from that considering its predators and sources of food. Sometimes we take inspiration from animals that already live in each location, like the birds that nested in the cactus at one location. This location provided us with great color contrast to some of the red cliffs that populate the other creature habitats that we have visited.

Troggs

This is a Trogg (A poorly rendered and uncolored gif of one at that). Troggs eat the pocket change scattered by the omnivorous Human's. The favorite coin among Troggs is the penny. One of the only reasons why pennies are still in circulations.

Sand Eel

The Sand Eel spends most of its time swimming through porous rocks searching for insects. Some believe that this species is responsible for creating these holes, but this has been dis-proven by Geologists.

Field Notes

Seen below is a page from the Field notes book I have been keeping to detail creatures. The creatures detailed in the documentary will either have been born from this book or perhaps just thought up on location. For creatures thought up on location I usually will record them in the field notes just as a reminder.

The Garbage Slug

This is a Garbage Slug is a specialized type of Gastropod evolved to feed off human waste. This particular slug was found behind Alvaro's Mexican food. Most Garbage Slug's are translucent due to the hazardous contaminants found in their food supply.

Concept

A deconstruction of the Nature documentary. This project will take the essential components of the typical nature documentary and superimpose them over a multitude of fictional animated creatures. As seen in the photo above (taken by Jon Tinsley) The animation will be done over actual footage. Each creature will be explained by an accented pragmatic disembodied voice. The capstone video will be the first in a series of habitat themed episodes. Our crew will be scavenging the surrounding area for environments that lend themselves to the vision of the video, the locations will be photographed and promptly turned to concept art. With each new creature, an accompanying lore will be crafted to be incorporated into the Narration of the piece. This blog will chronicle each piece of lore as well as location. This first piece of concept art (above) depicts the "vent" nicknamed for its resemblance to one. It leaks a pale green smog that serves as an integral part of a local bird's food source. Any bird that flies too close to the vent's mouth is sucked in and ingested, so their feeding is often a very dangerous event.