The Botanic Gardens

On the 2nd of March I decided to take a trip down to Edinburgh Botanic Gardens to get some inspiration and ideas for the film. Not necessarily for the forest scenes, but more for the recipe book that she uses to make her soup. I wanted a variety of different plants and flowers on show, to make it look more like a potions book and therefore make the ending more of a surprise.

The weather was absolutely awful so I didn't stay long, and I'm a cheap skate so I didn't pay to go into the main greenhouse, but I still got some great pictures of interesting plants and flowers to help me in creating designs for the ones I want to use in my film. The symmetry of plants has always fascinated me, and symmetry plays a large part in my film so I think that these will end up being a great help.

I think that the colouration of the plants I've taken pictures of are very interesting, there are so many different variants of green to choose from and to make colour palettes with. I also love the architecture of the main greenhouse. I may try and incorporate that someone within my film if it's not too complicated to depict - perhaps in a simple way such as the shape of the windows.

I really like the birch trees as well. I think that I'd like to try and emulate birch trees within my film, their colour and patterns are quite striking and there's something very stark and haunting about them.

Botanic Garden Illustrations

I decided to take a few of the plants and flowers that I'd photographed and try to illustrate them and experiment with colouration and texture using Adobe Photoshop. I like the way that some of them have turned out, such as the circular green one, but I think that they are a little too realistic which isn't what I'm going for. They need to be more stylised and the designs of them more symmetrical. As well as this, as they're in one of her books, they need to look like they've been hand drawn. These illustrations look like they belong in a plant encyclopedia.

I'm happy that I went to the Botanic Gardens as it's given me some primary observations to work with and has also shown me what sort of decisions I need to be making regarding design.