Coraline features a plethora of gorgeous sets and puppets. One particularly impressive scene consists of a vibrant booming garden. The Laika team worked tirelessly to bring the surreal forest of flowers to life. They used everyday items such as popcorn to imitate cherry blossoms and a dog that mimicked a flower in bloom. Lights were also installed throughout the set to give it an otherworldly feel. The cobbled ground was hand painted and sculpted, lending itself to the set as it allows the sculpted flowers to shine without feeling too busy. 

 

The characters themselves are fantastic and versatile sculptors. Over 150 unique faces were made for the movie's protagonist, allowing them to access a range of emotions by switching out sections of her face between shots. The secondary characters receive the same amount of care, with all of them having unique character design and motion. The sculpture department at Laika first create an armature that they then build on using clay. After this, features such as hair, eyes and freckles are painted by hand and replicated hundreds of times for each character. The final product exudes Laika's love for the craft, this being the main reason that I would love to work for them one day. 

 

While playing The Last Of Us I often feel like I am navigating through a painting from the romantic era. The environments are based on real cities that have been weathered by a 20 year apocalypse. The marriage of nature and the urban cityscape creates a unique setting that complements the story of the game. The creatures themselves complement the art of the world. The zombies can be identified through their red spores growing from their faces allowing them to stand out against the natural greens and browns of the games environment. I often found myself pausing to take in the gorgeous details of the terrain as I navigated through the apocalypse. 

 

The world of The Last Of Us mirrors the narrative's central theme: that the most grave situations have moments of levity.

 

Director Dario Argento was determined to show audiences that horror can be both terrifying and a triumph of cinema. He utilised vivid colours to create an uncanny atmosphere, highlighting the mystery of the film's primary location of the dance studio. Throughout all my work I often reference the film's palette as I love to use vivid unnatural colour in otherwise mundane settings.

Argento put red everywhere, in reference to the evil within the dance school and the bright red creative passion that fuelled said evil. The film’s emphasis on colour made its gruesome deaths theatrical, transforming its witches’ gleeful bloodlust into a sensory-overloading, overwhelming breed of terror.

 

Gebbia's unique style is on full display in his installation "Omni". The monumental work was inspired by meteorology and geology, spanning two parallel walls as to fully immerse the viewer. The artist harmoniously allows the themes of familiarity and foreign to emerge from the work through his skilled application of wax and a beautiful spectrum of pigments. The material creates a bounty of landscapes, ranging from mountain ranges to lava and uncanny dream worlds.