After The Sandman we were tasked with designing the ship from the beginning of Shakespeare’s the Tempest, completing this university unit. I started the project a bit later and was not feeling creative. So, I went to design a ship combining elements from various replicas of the Santa Maria, Christoph Columbus’s ship. This model has seen service during the late 15th century and might possibly been still around in 1611 when The Tempest was written. The motivation is to lean into the colonialist themes of The Tempest with the ship of the one who “discovered” the Americas.
Preliminary research included reading up on Italian history (the characters are from Naples and Milan) to get the ships, flags, and coat of arms right, gathering references and looking at practical solutions for building a 1:1 ship for film. The seascapes of Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky became my main inspiration for the concept art. Behind the scenes footage from The Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and Master and Commander (2003) revealed how they mounted ships on massive swivels for bluescreen or in a tank.
For my concept art, I played around with different compositions in a series of thumbnails. The final piece was done by hand in photoshop. Using the Adobe colour wheel helps a lot with determining colour balance.
I then went on to the technical drawing in AutoCAD, my new favourite software for technical drawing. It’s almost completely 2D and has a quicker workflow than Sketchup. I used a technical drawing for a Santa Maria scale model as a base and modified the fore- and aftercastle.
The finished technical drawing helped me to create a digital model in Blender. Because I ran out of time before the submission it remains basic. I wish I could have at least added the rigging. Though, my struggle with Blender is turning into a losing battle. For future projects, I will focus on concept art, exploration through storyboards and high quality technical drawings with an optimized workflow.
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