Grade: First

Our brief was to design a set from the book Reckless. I chose the Goyl City with is located within a cave. We were required to make a scale card model, technical drawings, concept art, storyboards and mood boards. On this project I used AutoCAD, Sketch-Up, 3D Printer, Laser Cutter and Photoshop.

Reckless is a mystical story that follows the main character Jacob. He travels through his fathers mirror into the Mirror World, a world full of fairy stories. The Goyl species are the villains in the book and are made from different crystals. The book describes the Goyl city as thousands of years old with Medieval architecture. It also describes how the Goyl species live within the cave walls and the houses cover the cave like wasp nests. It's a busy city full of different species so I varied the architecture to two types of medieval architecture and a fantasy architecture. In the Dwarf Town they have Medieval wooden beamed houses so I introduced them into this city.  I wanted it to feel like all of the different species in the Mirror World had come together here where the rest of the world is very segregated. The outcasts, the thieves, they all moved here.

The book states that the city has a steep incline which Jacob (as a human) struggles to climb. My main focus was to create a space that felt bigger than it really was. I designed streets to look like they never end, curving into the distance so the camera never shoots off the set. There is a large scene where Jacob has to search for his brother who has been taken by the Goyl. He goes door to door, shop to shop in search for information around the entire cave searching for hours. This required a big set and varying streets to give the impression he was searching a whole cave. Working on sketch-up I designed streets so that wherever you are in the set you wouldn't know where in the cave you are, using the space as efficiently as I could. With a few areas and streets on camera you could create a world.