More location research: Wembley Park and Kilburn

Yesterday, Nat, Will, Perri and I went around London to find some more locations.  Ed and Matt were both unavailable that day.

We started at our furthest chosen location in the North West of London; Wembley Park.  We were trying to find a specific estate in Wembley that was marked on the Parkour hotspots map; but we could not locate it for some reason.  We did, however, wander through Wembley and we took photos of various railings, balconies and steps that had some potential.

After Wembley, we took the tube to our next destination; Kilburn Park.  As soon as we left the station, we could find some areas of great potential for a parkour.  Kilburn already reflected the urban environment with plenty of terrain for a chase.

After a look around the central area of Kilburn and a cup of coffee, we took a walk down Springfield Lane, where we found a cluster of council estates.

We were all very satisfied with the council estate of Kilburn.  It had buildings of varying heights, and plenty of railings; there was also a pen for playing sports.  There were also steps so we could go to different levels within the estate.  We also liked the road that runs under the estate as this could provide a dead end for our protagonist to be chased into before the final showdown.

After visiting Kilburn Park, we were so taken by it that we decided that this is where will will shoot our piece.  It captures the inner-city look that is integral to parkour, and it also provides many obstacles for our runner to overcome and to make this chase as exciting as we can.  The next stage of this project is storyboarding and we will use these photos as reference for storyboarding the piece and deciding how the runner will get through this environment.

Moodboards for location and monster

In order to get this project underway and come up with some ideas for the sort of location we were looking for, as well as the appearance of our monster, we all put together some moodboards so that we could develop the texturing and colouring of the piece further.

This is the location moodboard that I put together for the project.  Click on the image to enlarge, its a fairly large image as well!

I have decided to look at images of urban areas, such as council estate blocks, staircases, railway stations, etc.  This may be considered by some to be rather generic for a parkour piece, but in truth, parkour was made for dense suburban areas and I think that we should embrace that!  Furthermore, this could result in a good hybrid between the gritty urban realism and the B-movie style monster that pursues our protagonist through it.

In this moodboard, I have experimented with filters to alter the colouring and create a cold atmosphere, like that of the Chris Cunningham's video to Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin.  I have also established a possible colour scheme to go by to create this atmosphere.

I also collected some images of some interesting graffiti characters, which is largely because one of the ideas that I suggested earlier in the project was that the monster originates as a piece of graffiti art, but comes to life (and is perhaps defeated by being returned to the graffiti wall).  I separated some of the graffiti from the rest of the scenery in some some images to experiment with the contrast of a colourful monster against a gritty backdrop.

Next, is the monster moodboard.  In this one, I didn't really brainstorm the appearance of the character as my team mate, Matt already has that covered.  In this moodboard, I considered the possible textures for our monster.  Again, click to enlarge.

We have decided on a swamp monster, so consequently, I have been studying the texture of a swamp, as well as the texturing of fictional swamp monsters from elsewhere.  I experimented with the colouring of the swamp monster images to see if I could alter them to look more like they had just emerged from a swamp, much like the guy in the picture with the ball.