PR02: Setting Influences

 With my story pretty much decided, I want to get my idea of the setting decided. The western cowboy influence has been getting bigger the more and more I plan out my story, but I don't want it to be 100% cowboy. I think that adding a bit more of a modern feel to it will give me the opportunity to do much more interesting designs, and avoid any ideas too cliché. I do however want the setting to be cowboy enough that viewers can recognise it and not feel too confused about where this is set, especially considering I do not intend to add any dialogue in the film.

Star Wars

Though a little too futuristic, Star Wars, Firefly and Cowboy Bebop are things that I want to look at when it comes to mixing styles together. All are set in space, or at least involve space travel but with western influences. Star Wars is more subtle about it than the other two, but Han Solo has a lot of typical cowboy mannerisms, and his outfit is much less futuristic than many other designs in the film, and some locations in the films are reminiscent of those is cowboy films, such as Tatooine and Jakku.

Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop involves plenty of bounty hunting, which is was traditionally associated with Western genres (even if it is now present in many space/futuristic genres). The pacing and the types of plots encountered episode by episode is what gives it it's biggest Western feeling; most designs are relatively modern to futuristic, but many of the planets have a kind of abandoned, isolated western feeling. Thought not native to the western genre, Cowboy Bebop has a lot of old, worse for wear looking technology to dial down the futurism a little bit and pull parts of it back to feeling 'old-fashioned', which helps to make the western vibes stronger.

Firefly

One of the biggest mashups of the genre though, is Firefly. Again, set in space as bounty hunters and a group of people trying just to get by, the Firefly crew encounter many stories and situations common within Westerns, with extra music and costume to help. The outfits of the main crew are a lot less futuristic than those in Star Wars, and even feel less modern than in Cowboy Bebop. The colouring especially takes a lot of influence from cowboy films, using warmer earthy colours which also makes the main crew feel more inviting and friendly. Firefly feels more like a Western that just so happens to take place in space rather than a story about space, and this helps to give it an organic, believable feeling.

I like the different ways of incorporating the Western genre into others and vice versa, so I want to take this into consideration when writing the script, designing the characters, locations and for music, if I do choose to create an animatic or further that may need this.