During this project I did quite a few more complete style pieces. This is just to vary up the project a bit and to see if any new paths might emerge from doing these. These generally emerged from character sketches that I liked that I wanted to develop in Photoshop. Another reason for doing work like this is it's an opportunity for me to practice Photoshop which is a skill I'm very much trying to develop. I've learnt a bit about colouring, adjusting levels and merging layers from fiddling about this project.

I tried developing the relationship between the background and figures in my scenes with another scene I was working on. I figured from my last group of experiments that the best way to separate the foreground and background (essentially what I'm doing) was to keep the figure tonally flat and not too complex while use a range of tones on the background and make it relatively complex.
To the left you can see the piece I believe works best. I think the use of various grays in the background and the pure black and white characters differentiate the two layers enough while the use of ink for both layers prevents the two aspects from being two entirely different entities. This I think is a little the case for the piece below. Though I think this to works well the figures seam a little too stuck on compared to the first piece. A similar problem comes from the colour experiment I did as well. I doesn't have the synergistic relationship the first one has in which the foreground and background support each other to strengthen the whole.

I decided to draw certain scenes from my storyboard plan thing. I thought it would be interesting to draw the figures in ink with a brush, the way I drew most of my work last project. I tried doing the figure and background separately and then combining the two on Photoshop. This allowed me to try out a multitude of different types of background to see how they work out. The piece to the right and below to the left I don't think work because the characters merge in with the background too much due to a similar quality of line. The middle bellow one works better due to a variance of tone but the line quality is still very similar. The piece to the right does not have this problem. I attempted to create the background of this piece in Illustrator so the lines are very clean cut. Unfortunately I am not skilled enough at Illustrator to draw something as complex as a building in any adept way and the little bit I was able to do took me a very long time as it is. I was left not really sure how to get a good balance between the figures and background,

This is a sketch I did that I really like. I had been drawing street scenes for a while at the time but all from references. One day I wanted to draw the opening scene to my story and didn't have access to any of my reference material. Besides none of my references looked how I wanted the opening scene to look like. This lead to me drawing the scene from my head. My natural scratchy rough style combined with not basing the scene on a photo gave th drawing a really cool feel that I thought lent itself to the dark edgy tone I wanted for this scene. I guess the main problem with this scene is the area doesn't look that rough. 

I think the buildings need to be taller and possibly more boring.

A cool side affect of this not being the case though is the street looks kind of European and the play is originally set in Athens, so in some ways the scene is still a success.

Mapping the plot

I had the majority of the idea of what would happen in my head. I knew I had to physically plan out what would happen however to stop me getting confused later and to make sure I hadn't missed anything out and knew how everything would develop. I tried more or less writing out a script but didn't get far before I found the process tiresome and tedious. I decided that I would be better suited to visually mapping the plot in a kind of storyboard/ rough comic way. I found this much simpler and enjoyable and even though I didn't map out the entire story I did get as far as the finishing the first scene of the second act in the play.
Visually mapping the plot helped me immensely as it cleared my head in regards to a lot of issues I was having with this project. The first of these was tone. When I came up with the concept for a modern interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream I envisioned a dark tone. One that started a little dark and just got darker throughout. When I tried to make the story fit around this tone however, I couldn't figure out how to make it work without it becoming, well kind of lame. When mapping out the plot I forgot about the tone a bit and got the plot points and jist of the dialogue down. Doing this I realised the dark tone would work well if just used it for the fairies parts of the play/ the parts that take part in a certain part of the city, the bad part. The rest of the story would have a more normal tone.
This changes the city I was planning to set the story in. It no longer needs to be rough and decaying and full of dark corners all over the place, now it only needs to be certain parts of the setting. I think the rest of the city should be relatively normal in comparison, although a bit crap overall still.
During this process and the change of tone idea I also figured out exactly what the fairies role was in this new narrative. I figured that the story and tone would work best if the fairies were essentially the mafia, a more bohemian laid back mafia but just as dangerous and illegal. Oberon's fairies and Titania's are like two Families at war.
The main benefit to visually figuring out the story was that I could find areas that held the greatest visual interest to me. This gave me something to artistically focus on while I figure out what I'm going to do with this project.

Setting

 The photo to the left and below it are of Park Hill, Sheffield. Although the buildings and the place itself aren't really what I'm looking for, there are little details I can reference to. For instance the boarded up windows or the way no surface is completely clean and everything is deteriorating.


The other two photos are of Detroit and Baltimore. These have more of the elements I'm looking for in the world I'm creating. The photos I've posted (and the others I've collected) show kind of deteriorated, neglected parts of a city, like  Park Hill. Unlike Park Hill these places are obviously a part of a much larger city and not cut off. You can see the whole city blending in around these parts of the city. The photo of Detroit I've posted is a bit extreme in it's deterioration but I can always clean it up a bit.

The reason Baltimore came to mind is because it's the setting of the TV show The Wire. In the show Baltimore is portrayed as a city with a lot of crime and corruption. The poorest parts of the city and the main hub of  crime is referred to as 'The Projects' This will be my main reference place for the setting of my story, especially the parts with the fairies in the play who now constitute the criminal underworld in my adaption.

When I started this project my idea for an adaption of A Midsummer Night's Dream was just an idea and I didn't have any idea of how it was going to evolve or of any kinds of finished piece/s I may do. This meant that to begin with I started with some of what I have called world building. I started by renaming the characters and and figuring out any slight changes to the characters themselves and the roles they play. For instance the group of actors is now a band and the Prince is just a really popular influential person. I then figured out the outline of the new story which once I got the setting and characters sorted was relatively simple, except for one part which is very tricky. While doing this  I did a lot of preliminary character design work as well.
The other part of the 'world building' process I was developing was the setting. I wanted to set this contemporary version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a large relatively sprawling city but one that's in a bit of the dumps. My first thoughts on this was Baltimore and Detroit (a bit less extreme though). Dale suggested Park Hill in Sheffield as a good place to base my setting off. I had a look at it online and there is quite a lot about them that can influence my work and they do have the same kind of tone I'm looking for for part of the story. However it was too much of a cut off tower complex of apartments cut off from everything else. I want something more sprawling and varied that naturally flows together.