Behind The Scenes: Halloween Mashup

Yep, still spooky October mode :) I sat down and thought about what to create next for this season and I kind of done whole nine yards in terms of spooky houses, pumpkins, graveyards.

So I shifted my attention to some pop culture and I was looking for a suitable horror classic, that would make a nice diorama. And immediately, several ideas clashed in my mind and it became a bit frustrating. But time was running and I had to come up with something, so I scrolled through some of my recent works and stopped at the TV show mashup I've done.

I know it might look like an obvious choice, but when your starting at empty drawing board, sometimes, these ideas just get stuck. I immediately got excited for a new mashup illustration, this time with a horror movie classics.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Before I do any visual research for the movies, or TV shows, I put together a movie list. Various "best of" articles on the web are a great tool for filtering out 8-10 nice ideas. At the same time, by going through a list, you get a well-rounded selection and you get to be sure, you didn't miss any all time classics.

I've pinned the movie covers directly from the articles to the board to save some time. And actually, it made for quite nice reference board, so I only had to search for some particular scenes, or visual references.

When picking out the scen from a movie, you always need to take a different approach. For example, IT was pretty obvious. Of course, I could go for a Pennywise character, but I didn't have time for too much custom character work and the scene with a paper boat and baloon is so iconic and creepy, it should be recognizable at once.

The same applies for the well (Ring) and face hugger eggs (Alien). Immediately recognizable and easy to make.

I couldn't avoid at least some character work, because if would be a bit hard to show Frankenstein's monster without the actual monster. Maybe the room setup would help, but it's just not the same.

So I dished out a pretty simple low poly faceless character and used only poses and color to differentiate between them. I used the other duplicates as zombies for the Night of the Living Dead.

The rest of the assets mostly come from movie covers, or are self explanatory (Cabin in the Woods = cabin + woods). 

I can't stress enough, how important is the sketching phase for a compilation and mashup scenes like this. You need to keep everything abstract, try to accommodate the scale of all the objects, while keeping it somewhat coherent and organized. Pencil and eraser are your best friends in cases like this.

You can watch the process video on Youtube