PIXELPLASIA
Pixel
/ˈpɪks(ə)l,ˈpɪksɛl/ Contraction, from 'picture-element.' A small component in a digital image. - Plasia /plā-zh(ē-)ə/ Suffix, from “growth, development or multiplication,” of a component part. Pixelplasia: The development of digital imagery: Concept Art, Sequential Art, and Storyboards. I'm a Ph.D. Researcher in Cinematic Arts, at Ulster University specialising in Horror Film. Briefly, my particular area of interest is the spatial in horror: locations, settings, props and monsters. I have a background in the visual arts and a Masters with Distinction in Film. I'm perhaps unusual in that I work across theory and practice in horror, both writing on theory while also having a a portfolio of visual practice. My theoretical work addresses the complex communication and narrative concerns that are embedded in horror, which are often never culturally expressed elsewhere. My practice draws on my skills and experience of illustration and design, where horror-themed work held a prominent place. Gerard Gibson |
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PORTFOLIORecent work
Horror has a strong element of place. Boundaries, and edges are high-risk areas. Past actions cast shadows on current events simply because they share a location.
I've been looking at how horror relies heavily on our sense of place, and how, by changing our perceptions of place we can be deeply unsettled and experience fear and dread. These images use motifs and themes which have been prominent in our recent media: urban decay; the spectral and abandoned in the city; the legacy of our landscapes, and how we still struggle with our corporeality. |
Above: Current Work: Cthulhu's Return concept
CURRENT WORK
LOVECRAFT'S NIGHTMARE
Currently I'm exploring horror imagery of destruction, abandonment and human impermanence
using the work of H. P. Lovecraft as a lens. Lovecraft deals with a wide range of horror from the existential cosmic horror of the Cthulhu Mythos through to the body horror of The Thing on the Doorstep (1937). At present, I'm working on ideas of place and starting work just gathering research to begin visualising Lovecraft's horrific nexus, Innsmouth. But, to get the ball rolling, I thought I'd deal with the threat hanging over most of Lovecraft's work - the dread return of Cthulhu and what that might mean for humanity. The image above, hopefully, offers a cinematic glimpse of that. |
TRAILER SHOWREEL
This highlights some of my concept design work, edited together in the form of a trailer for The Watcher in the Water.
Soundtrack done in Adobe Audition, and edited in Premiere Pro
Soundtrack done in Adobe Audition, and edited in Premiere Pro
Concept Art
Cthulhu Concept Design
Cthulhu Concept Design
Innsmouth Character Concepts
Innsmouth Character Concept Art
This work is the development and application of some theoretical work I've been doing on the corporeal embodiment of horror. Using three werewolf movies, Walker's The Werewolf of London, (1935), Waggoner's The Wolf Man, (1941) , and Landis' An American Werewolf in London, (1981), I looked at ideas which found their origins in the unstable body of the werewolf. The bearer of the werewolf curse is an alienated outsider, even to themselves; being both victim and aggressor. The werewolf invites challenging questions about the mind-body paradox,between our human and animal drives, and our most profound relationships with ourselves.
I applied ideas of instability and interstitiality to the bodies of the townspeople of Innsmouth. They too are born into such a spectral trap, embodiments of the dire consequences of their ancestors contracts and bargains for power and wealth, they represent some of the unresolved problems at the heart of the American myth. Yet they also contribute to the problem, having been raised in a culture where such difference is both hidden and valued as a mark of privilege. They might both resent and treasure their alterity. I adapted their appearance using marine creatures such as fish, reptiles and ocean-going mammals for reference. I wanted these characters to look credible and real, almost ordinary perhaps with a bit of an entitled attitude gained from lost glories, but still obviously alien.
This work is the development and application of some theoretical work I've been doing on the corporeal embodiment of horror. Using three werewolf movies, Walker's The Werewolf of London, (1935), Waggoner's The Wolf Man, (1941) , and Landis' An American Werewolf in London, (1981), I looked at ideas which found their origins in the unstable body of the werewolf. The bearer of the werewolf curse is an alienated outsider, even to themselves; being both victim and aggressor. The werewolf invites challenging questions about the mind-body paradox,between our human and animal drives, and our most profound relationships with ourselves.
I applied ideas of instability and interstitiality to the bodies of the townspeople of Innsmouth. They too are born into such a spectral trap, embodiments of the dire consequences of their ancestors contracts and bargains for power and wealth, they represent some of the unresolved problems at the heart of the American myth. Yet they also contribute to the problem, having been raised in a culture where such difference is both hidden and valued as a mark of privilege. They might both resent and treasure their alterity. I adapted their appearance using marine creatures such as fish, reptiles and ocean-going mammals for reference. I wanted these characters to look credible and real, almost ordinary perhaps with a bit of an entitled attitude gained from lost glories, but still obviously alien.
The Villain of the Piece - Jonah Gilborne
This is Jonah Gilborne. The protagonist's great Grandfather and the individual who intends them no end of evil. I've looked at the different creatures which follow a marine life, and these designs are based on fish. Others are based on mammals or reptiles, each of whom have aquatic forms. The designs below are specifically developed from the proportions of the Blob fish or Psychrolutes marcidus. I've added shark's teeth to a few. the pipe running into Jonah's nose keeps his lungs filled with water, which trickles out his mouth. The second design draws on the Beluga Whale as inspiration, and I feel works more successfully, beacause whilst he is strange and alien- looking, the evil is less obvious. No one would go near this first design.
The character Jonah Gilborne, lateral and dorsal views.
A variety of researched wheelchairs to carry the nearly aquatic Jonah Gilborne around. I wanted something that echoed Lovecraft's use of Victorian imagery in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and so drew on older designs. These sketches reduce the chairs to outlines with midtones and a few highlights,and reveal that the three on the left are too complex to be easily read as a chair. The chair on the extreme right has a stronger, cleaner outline that will allow me to patinate and break-up the textures but still make the object intelligible as a wheel-chair.
That design, with a few unpleasant-looking pieces of medical apparatus added. The spherical drip design I found in a late-Victorian medical book, and then simply filled it with a noxious looking ichor. I had some images of old rusty air tanks and adapted these to act as the machine attached to the back of Jonah's chair that, through a line going into his nose, keeps his lungs filled with gurgling water.
Jonah in all his repellent glory, intent on bring Cthulhu back into the world. Like all monsters, Jonah exists on the fulcrum between the familiar and the strange, conceptually blending ideas to create something never seen before but still recognisable as a threat. It would be easy to make Jonah so large that he is monstrous, but the larger he gets, the less and less threatening he would become. The monstrosity exists on the pivot-point.
Just to prove you can also have too much of a bad thing... There are aesthetic limits to making monsters. Jonah's size is a part of what makes him monstrous - his life in the sea among Lovecraft's Deep One's mean that his body has transcended the limits of land animal locomotion. Carroll (1990) in his Horrific Biologies identified this recurrent horror motif as Magnification. Jonah simply dwarfs his associates and any ordinary human. However, if he becomes too large, too removed from the human somatatype, he also becomes less threatening... he begins to look a little helpless and perhaps even comic, like Elephant Seals- which are dangerous animals but look sort of humorous. The mechanics of the monster exist on the uncertain threshold of the familiar and the mysterious.
Mrs Meres - The Gilborne's Housekeeper
Jonah's Housekeeper is a sinister character. Much more human than Jonah, she typifies the Innsmouth Look. A threat to the protagonist from when they first meet, she can pass for human - just.
While I created this character when I wrote the treatment about two years ago, she really came to life when I asked myself who I'd like to have play her. Watching Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021) I thought that someone like Tig Notaro would appreciate a chance to play something a little different, so - with all respect - I based Meres' face on the actress. When applying a marine aesthetic to the human form, one of the most noticeable differences between fish and human faces are the nasal structures, so I dramatically flattened the nose here while keeping the nostrils small, like the indentations you might see in an eel. This first take pushed things a bit too far from the human, she just couldn't function if sent outside Innsmouth, and from reactions I realised that I'd have to dial it back more and make her look just on the very edge of human. It's also a good idea when you are designing horror prosthetics that the performer can feel confident expressing themselves through the make-up. This first concept might make an acceptable background character, but is too limiting for a significant character with these constraints.
While I created this character when I wrote the treatment about two years ago, she really came to life when I asked myself who I'd like to have play her. Watching Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021) I thought that someone like Tig Notaro would appreciate a chance to play something a little different, so - with all respect - I based Meres' face on the actress. When applying a marine aesthetic to the human form, one of the most noticeable differences between fish and human faces are the nasal structures, so I dramatically flattened the nose here while keeping the nostrils small, like the indentations you might see in an eel. This first take pushed things a bit too far from the human, she just couldn't function if sent outside Innsmouth, and from reactions I realised that I'd have to dial it back more and make her look just on the very edge of human. It's also a good idea when you are designing horror prosthetics that the performer can feel confident expressing themselves through the make-up. This first concept might make an acceptable background character, but is too limiting for a significant character with these constraints.
Below is a much more human looking Meres, with much more of the actor coming through. The features - eyes, mouth, nose - were mapped to Notaro, but the hairline was pushed much further back and the kindness utterly removed from the face. The lines on the face follow the flow of the surface but have been curved into aggressive shapes, and the teeth have been made to look like those of a predatory or fighting fish. I knew from the beginning that Meres had her hair scarped very far back, a dramatically exaggerated 'Croydon face-lift.' The whole shape of the head has been made to echo an outline shape like that of a Piranha, with the bunch at the back of the head like a fish's tail. I've tried to bring out the aquatic resonances like that which run though all of Innsmouth.
Mrs Meres is about average human height, just taller than the protagonist, and she's placed here on this stage just to give a clear look at her outline and to give a better idea of just how large Jonah is.
I've picked up on the costume of a 1920s housekeeper, to hint how Innsmouth is a bit alien and backward looking. They've gone a different route through the Twentieth century, and are a discrete culture. Her outline shows her wiry thinness, and reveals that she has additional tissue built up around her cervical vertebrae, perhaps from spending time in the sea. Her hands too have the distinctive Innsmouth look, and I rationalised that if Innsmouth is cut off from the world, and they are physically different to the average human, they would probably have a shoe maker who designed footwear that suited webbed feet. This is isuggested in the split toes and rather old fashioned and heavy look of the footwear.
I've picked up on the costume of a 1920s housekeeper, to hint how Innsmouth is a bit alien and backward looking. They've gone a different route through the Twentieth century, and are a discrete culture. Her outline shows her wiry thinness, and reveals that she has additional tissue built up around her cervical vertebrae, perhaps from spending time in the sea. Her hands too have the distinctive Innsmouth look, and I rationalised that if Innsmouth is cut off from the world, and they are physically different to the average human, they would probably have a shoe maker who designed footwear that suited webbed feet. This is isuggested in the split toes and rather old fashioned and heavy look of the footwear.
Every object we see on screen in a horror film plays its role as an actant in the narrative, helping the audience build a clearer picture of the story-world they are involved with. These objects materially represent the ideas and energies at work in the tale. Medical equipment plays a significant role in the final act of The Watcher in The Water. So here are a few choice pieces of kit. I wanted a mix of old and new, but not too new. Modern medical equipment has been subjected to the iMac aesthetic of Jonathan Ives and feature pastel and grey ovals, compass keys and LCD displays. These particular machines were chosen because their bold shapes allow them to remain recognisable even when they are patinated and 'dirtied down.' I have no idea what the one on the far right does, I just liked the idea that it looks like it should be in a generating hall of a power station rather than a therapeutic space. The final colour versions are below. The various muted hues and texture imply a neglect and decay, suggesting themes of suffering, raising questions of safety, not to mention hygiene, visually lending what should be neutral objects a deeply sinister aspect.
Innsmouth Inhabitants
Innsmouth Sea-Wife.
Neutral, Alert and Aggressive states.
Neutral, Alert and Aggressive states.
The Landscape of Horror
Horror has a fascinating relationship to place. Our oldest surviving sound horror film, Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), opens with a dramatic landscape scene representing a coach traveling the mountains of Transylvania. This scene sums up everything fascinating and important in horror's connection to space, place and the material. Like horror itself, it's a paradox, both filled with information and mystery, and is simultaneously real and artificial.
The scene is a skillful glass-painting, that is a scene filmed through a pane of glass which has been painted on to alter what the camera captures. We do this now with computers, but glass-painting was practiced until the mid 1990s. Glass-paintings depict that which cannot be captured from life, and so they are a means to visually convey ideas and understandings of things outside our reach. In the case of this scene, the bottom third of the image is clear glass and shows a coach being driven along a road at Vasquez Rocks, near Los Angeles. By 1930 Vasquez Rocks had been a recognizable filming location for about a decade, mainly for Westerns. The top third of the image, however,doesn't show Vasquez Rocks. It is a painting showing huge, monolithic mountains of bare stone. This painted portion looks remarkably like some of the rather fanciful landscape etchings which appeared in Victorian travel guides to Transylvania from Stoker's day through to the 1920s. Ironically, for a land whose densely forested nature suggested its very name, it is devoid of trees. We are presented with a vision of the exotic and alien and it conveys a strange wildness and scale which hint at the strangeness, breadth and importance of the tale which is to follow.
My research has a dual focus; examining the links between horror and landscape and the material means of production by which this is achieved in horror cinema. These are areas neglected by academia. For example, the opening scene of Dracula has huge importance, yet no one can say who created this vitally important image with any certainty. This is because both the landscape itself, and the glass-painting's existence as a material artifact of film making have both been taken for granted and side-lined. Instead theoretical texts have concentrated on analyzing the plethora of meanings we might read in the story itself; discourses on eugenics, gender norms, miscegenation or colonial anxiety. In truth these are all important and interesting, but their dominance has meant that we have failed to consider the film image in its wider totality. I hope my work here will redress this imbalance, and this wonderful glass-painting has become an emblematic thread wending its way through my studies.
The research I'm carrying out looks at the role space, place and the material play in cinematic horror, both theoretically and through practice as research. I'm scaffolding this work by using Lovecraft's writing as a starting point. No writer is better suited, since Lovecraft himself admitted that he was more interested in place than in character. The first landscape I've crafted to explore these ideas is the apocalyptic scene is also set out above. Others will appear here as this work develops.
The scene is a skillful glass-painting, that is a scene filmed through a pane of glass which has been painted on to alter what the camera captures. We do this now with computers, but glass-painting was practiced until the mid 1990s. Glass-paintings depict that which cannot be captured from life, and so they are a means to visually convey ideas and understandings of things outside our reach. In the case of this scene, the bottom third of the image is clear glass and shows a coach being driven along a road at Vasquez Rocks, near Los Angeles. By 1930 Vasquez Rocks had been a recognizable filming location for about a decade, mainly for Westerns. The top third of the image, however,doesn't show Vasquez Rocks. It is a painting showing huge, monolithic mountains of bare stone. This painted portion looks remarkably like some of the rather fanciful landscape etchings which appeared in Victorian travel guides to Transylvania from Stoker's day through to the 1920s. Ironically, for a land whose densely forested nature suggested its very name, it is devoid of trees. We are presented with a vision of the exotic and alien and it conveys a strange wildness and scale which hint at the strangeness, breadth and importance of the tale which is to follow.
My research has a dual focus; examining the links between horror and landscape and the material means of production by which this is achieved in horror cinema. These are areas neglected by academia. For example, the opening scene of Dracula has huge importance, yet no one can say who created this vitally important image with any certainty. This is because both the landscape itself, and the glass-painting's existence as a material artifact of film making have both been taken for granted and side-lined. Instead theoretical texts have concentrated on analyzing the plethora of meanings we might read in the story itself; discourses on eugenics, gender norms, miscegenation or colonial anxiety. In truth these are all important and interesting, but their dominance has meant that we have failed to consider the film image in its wider totality. I hope my work here will redress this imbalance, and this wonderful glass-painting has become an emblematic thread wending its way through my studies.
The research I'm carrying out looks at the role space, place and the material play in cinematic horror, both theoretically and through practice as research. I'm scaffolding this work by using Lovecraft's writing as a starting point. No writer is better suited, since Lovecraft himself admitted that he was more interested in place than in character. The first landscape I've crafted to explore these ideas is the apocalyptic scene is also set out above. Others will appear here as this work develops.
The images below all relate to theory I've been working on concerning the connections between the monstrous, vision and understanding. This has been presented at The Lovecraft and Monsters Conference, Vienna, 1-2 May, 2021, and in some upcoming material that is with a couple of editors for collections I'm working on.
Lovecraft directly linked sight and knowledge and this is often clearest in how his stories use imagery - statues, jewellery, sigils, paintings - as unmediated experiences which change the worldview of the characters who see them. These art objects access knowledge outside human understanding. The Monster might be considered the most obvious visual manifestation of horror.
Monsters traverse a very delicate line I've called the Threshold of Uncertainty, from which they take their power. Too abstract and they just aren't threatening, too familiar and they seem comical and again fail to threaten. Woods (1979) and Carroll (1990) both rightly agree on the necessity of threat, but disagree on its causes.
Lovecraft directly linked sight and knowledge and this is often clearest in how his stories use imagery - statues, jewellery, sigils, paintings - as unmediated experiences which change the worldview of the characters who see them. These art objects access knowledge outside human understanding. The Monster might be considered the most obvious visual manifestation of horror.
Monsters traverse a very delicate line I've called the Threshold of Uncertainty, from which they take their power. Too abstract and they just aren't threatening, too familiar and they seem comical and again fail to threaten. Woods (1979) and Carroll (1990) both rightly agree on the necessity of threat, but disagree on its causes.
The Summoning of Yog-Sothoth.
The crew of the Emma, exploring the vast tomb-city of R'lyeh, from The Call of Cthulhu.
In the non-Euclidean confusion, Cthulhu attacks the Emma's crew, from The Call of Cthulhu.
A detail of Cthulhu. Whilst many associate Cthulhu with water and aquatic attributes, this was something developed after Lovecraft's death by August Derleth. Lovecraft is clear that water imprisons and suppresses Cthulhu's power. All of Lovecraft's analogies refer to death, decay and human extinction in outlining this monstrous threat. These are the visual qualities I've sought to bring out in this interpretation.
Like the non-Euclidean experience of the island, these images were designed to be read in different orientations, both in landscape and portrait formats
Like the non-Euclidean experience of the island, these images were designed to be read in different orientations, both in landscape and portrait formats
SHOWREEL
This is a longer look at a wider range of my concept design work, though it shares many images with The Watcher in the Water Trailer above. There's no audio with it.
SEQUENTIAL ART AND STORYBOARDS
Narrative is how we make sense of the world. We use stories to understand ourselves and everything around us.
What we leave out in telling a story, is as important as what we include, and we often don't even realise how much narrative relies on the life experience and cultural awareness we bring to it, for its emotional heft and value.
Books can tell us how characters think and feel. Film, and other visual narratives, have to show us.
We have to see, or be shown, all the clues we need to make sense of the action, and understand what the characters are thinking, and how they feel. Visual storytelling is all about sequence, seriation, order and composition.
In visual art terms that means Sequential Art and Storyboards.
More to follow.
All characters belong to their respective rights holder, and are used here under Fair Use principles for scholarly comparison
What we leave out in telling a story, is as important as what we include, and we often don't even realise how much narrative relies on the life experience and cultural awareness we bring to it, for its emotional heft and value.
Books can tell us how characters think and feel. Film, and other visual narratives, have to show us.
We have to see, or be shown, all the clues we need to make sense of the action, and understand what the characters are thinking, and how they feel. Visual storytelling is all about sequence, seriation, order and composition.
In visual art terms that means Sequential Art and Storyboards.
More to follow.
All characters belong to their respective rights holder, and are used here under Fair Use principles for scholarly comparison