Extended Practice: Designing Houses

I wanted to set my animation in Los Angeles. Therefore the look of the environments in my animation needed to resemble a suburban neighbourhood in Los Angeles. I didn't want the protagonists to be wealthy or poor, but somewhere in the middle, they needed to live a place that a ten year old child can walk back and forth to school everyday, yet still have crime and gun crime.

The three major set pieces in the animation are the Cop's house, Nan's house, and Lucy's school classroom. But since I don't live in Los Angeles I begun by conducting secondary research into houses in LA through the use of Google Images and Google Maps. I did like the look of some of the houses but they didn't quite have the right fit. Eleanor pointed me to a suburban area of Palo Alto in California where she had previously visited. I instantly preferred the houses in this area.

Designing the Cop's House

The way I went about designing a house was quite literally by house hunting on Google Street view. Below is the house I found that I felt would be ideal to model the Cop's house after...

Had I had more time I would have liked to design a house from scratch. I feel like this approach is quite lazy but I would argue that it's not like I'm copying the house exactly as it appears in real life. I wouldn't be able to do this even if I wanted to due to much of the house being covered by fencing and trees. That way it leaves much of the design work up to my imagination as I fill in the gaps of what i cannot see. Furthermore, background design has never been one of my strengths and since playing to my strengths is an integral part of this project, I must make sure I manage my time on anything else as effectively as possible.

These are my concept drawings of the above house..

INSERT PEN DRAWING

Designing the Nan's House

The house I found to reference the Nan's house after was literally right around the corner from the Cop's house on Google maps.

I felt like this house would be perfect to reference. My own nan lives in a bungalow which gave me the inspiration that the fictionalised Nan character should too. Below is a concept sketch I drew of the above house...