Watch me go ham about the art book!!! (in a positive manner)
Lately from January to this month I've gotten REALLY into B.O.O. due to a false rumour going around that resulted in me drawing my first OC for it and I spent the eventual first half of my year trying my best to research EVERYTHING I could about the movie, even if some of them were scarce at best or non-existent at worst.
But in April of this year, an early copy of the art book itself got leaked online, and I was so ECSTATIC about it that I spent almost an entire school day trying to look through the art and read through the script of it inorder to peice together what the movie was completely about. I was originally going to save it earlier, however they took it off of The Wayback Machine, and I was only able to screenshot a few images before doing so. HOWEVER!! They did infact also save it onto a Mega file, and so I spent an entire friday afternoon downloading both the art book and the guide-book/pitch bible onto my computer incase I would need it for either my art, writing or for research (I am,,, normal,,, about this movie,,,)
It's not actually that hard to find it's both on The Lost Media page for it and also for The Cancelled Movie wiki page. Although you do have to download them first because they're both zip-files.
Regardless of the fact, I'm going to dwelve into parts of the art book that particularly caught my interest (I plan to do the guide-book for another post). This might take me more than one post to do but I'll try my best.
Since it is pretty much an unfinished version of what would've been the final product (the date underneath each pages say that this was worked on around September 30th of 2014), text from every page had the HTTYD2 art book text added in as a temporary placeholder. The actual text itself is within another file that you have to open separately.
It's also important to note that some of the images haven't been completely added in yet as of the time this early draft was created, so it is mainly left to interpretation on what was originally going to be added there.
Ever since clips of the movie surfaced around, some people were speculating on where the movie itself was going to take place (aside from the cosmic realm). And We've actually got an answer for that right here!
The town where most of the hauntings happen is called Gateway, which is somewhere around Illinois.
I very much love the whole vibe of the town, as it looks almost like an early, dreamworkish version of the New York City shown in Soul (oh no,, the afterlife hyperfixations clash !!).
The mixture between the different architecture from both the past and the current era really shows how much this town changed overtime and emphasizes a reason to feel close towards it. It also gives more meaning towards its name (while also tying into the whole ghost plot)
The Character Designs (For the humans, that is)
Although not that visible within the rendered animated models, it was actually intended that humans and ghosts would have followed the teardrop theory way of character design, with humans being wider from below while ghosts were more wider from above to showcase how ghosts are more lighter since their forms aren't actually corporeal.
(I actually followed this when doing the second designs for my OCs!)
