Week 1 - research and planning

For this university assessment, I have been tasked to Model, sculpt, Texture, light, and render a Victorian 3-story building that will fit into a Diagon Alley setting from Harry Potter

After given the brief I started my research on Diagon Alley from Harry Potter. The first thing I started to make was a mood board in pureref to get an understanding of what the atmosphere and style are like in these pictures.

Diagon Alley

These are the pictures that I have collected from Google Images about Diagon Alley. The Atmosphere I get from these pictures gives a very daunting feeling as the buildings are very tall in such a tight space, however, they also give off a very magical feeling with all the bright colours that are being shown off. I've noticed that a lot of the designs on these pictures show that most buildings in Diagon Alley have some kind of cylinder-like shape sticking out of the building which is an interesting design choice that I will consider putting into my work.

Building/shop concepts

After looking at the Diagon Alley research I started to note down some interesting ideas of my own that I could 3D model for this project

• magic shop (wands, cauldrons, brooms, potions, spells)

• food shops (bakery, sweets, herbs/spices )

• social shops (pub)

Some of these ideas even though I have written them down are most likely not going to be made as mentally I have already crossed them out for reasons like not interesting me with the concept, However, two main concepts stood out to me which were the wand and spells shops as they seem like an interesting concept to expand on.

victorain shops

After deciding on what kind of shop I wanted to make I started to look further into Victorian shops and how they were designed. To do this I made another mood board using pure ref. From these pictures, I can see a common design choice with the Diagon Alley images started to emerge which is that the store has some kind of store window that comes further out of the building itself. However, an interesting difference I've noticed between these two mood boards is that the Diagon Alley shops have a lot of signage. However, these Victorian shops do not.

signage

I realised that signage is a huge part of the diagons Alley's design which makes a lot of sense as the shops at diagon alley trying to attract customers to their shop using these signs. knowing this it will be important to add signage to my shop to fit into the Diagon Alley style.