Pre-production is well underway on Harvest. Director Charles Willcocks has already begun his own harvest of finding some of the finest artists and CG artists around to begin design and work on creature design for Harvest. Our first new member to join Pallas Pictures is Rupert Lees. I took the opportunity at the start of his relationship with Pallas to ask him a few questions.

What is your background and what was route in to CG?

My background is originally in fine art – I graduated from Central St Martins in 2003, focusing on pen and ink drawing, and spending my time illustrating imaginary botanical mutations and monstrous creatures, drawn at a very small scale with pigment ink fineliners. From there, I thought I’d better try and do something more useful and I went on to become a woodworker, and co-founded a design and build company in 2010, carrying out residential refurbishments and designing and manufacturing bespoke timber products and site joinery.

In that context I began using Sketchup, (the ‘gateway’ 3d software for so many!) for product design and architectural 3d visualisation, and that first step into the world of 3D  modelling and CAD, soon led me to become curious about using similar software to create the sort of fantastical organic ‘fine art’ I had been making back in my college days. After a short dabble with Blender and Sculptris, I began learning Zbrush, and it is the main tool I have been using to create my artwork for the last few years now.

What are your inspirations for your work? 

The strongest inspiration for my CG work and the creatures I depict, no doubt comes from the natural world and the plants and creatures which co-exist around us – the myriad genius inventions, structures, systems, forms and fancies of mother nature, particularly those which seem so horrifying and alien to so many humans, such as insects and other arthropods.

In terms of inspiration from other artists, medieval painters such as Bosch and Breugel inspire me as much as modern day artists such as Hans Bellmer, Chris Cunningham, Sarah Sitkin, Ted Mineo, the Chapman brothers, Erik Ferguson. In fact anyone peddling ghastly body-horror or hyper-real creature-based work in any medium gets the creative juices flowing really. I’m naturally drawn to strongly imaginative, and visceral artwork, the monstrous, macabre, the grotesque, I suppose.

How do you work? What are your methods?

I tend to work in a haphazard fashion, often on several projects concurrently as I’m also working as a designer and woodworker, moving back and forth between the workshop and the computer. For the creature design, I sometimes start off with pencil drawings to rough out ideas, but more often just dive in to Zbrush and sketching creatures and ideas straight out in dynamesh in an exploratory fashion generally muddling about. Once an idea works, I’ll generally retopologise and refine my model in Zbrush, and use Keyshot for my renders. Some of my models are also 3D printed, again using a mainly Zbrush based workflow.

What would you like to bring to Harvest and Pallas Pictures?

I’m hoping to bring a proper ‘orrible creature design to Harvest, and I’m looking forward to seeing just what we can do with it.

What interests you about the project?

I’m a bit of an outsider to the CG and film industry, joining the team at Pallas Pictures for this project is a great opportunity for me to work in a new way, get involved in a creature production pipeline, and learn a huge amount no doubt from the talented team. The creature for harvest is probably going to have a fairly humanoid form, which my work hasn’t really incorporated before, so I’m looking forward to that challenge too!

What is the best CG you have seen recently?

Best CG I’ve seen recently? I finally got around to watching The Revenant the other day, and the bear in that was pretty rad!

RL 13/10/16

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