Short movie visual, some crits?

[Alchimi]

Hey daggers,

A friend of mine who is a short movie director asked me to do an illustration of one of his shots of his script, to have on the first page. The final printed image is going to be on a european A4 sheet, (approx 7 inch wide), so it will be small...
Now that it's finished, I'll be happy to have some crits!

  illu bloc opera.pdf (Size: 1.56 MB / Downloads: 259)

The moment of the story his a dream where the main character is at the opera, all alone, with the diva looking straight at her. The director wanted a kind of halo around the diva to be transmitted to the character, like something feeric...

(For the record, the director was happy about the final image, but I want some crits anyway...)

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(Seems that the jpeg was giving a bad color once seen on the web, cause I worked with CMYK colors, so I had to put a PDF in. You might have to upload it to be sure to have the right color. I'm afraid I don't understand how to avoid this color shifts from my screen to the internet...)

[par gin]

I think I can see a couple problems, but I'm no expert, and I know I won't hit everything.

First, the direction of the light and the direction of the shadow it's casting behind the main character don't match. Draw a straight line from the light source through the character to see what I mean. And the cone of light seems to get more round as it hits the character. I would maybe get some reference of spotlights being pointed toward a camera. It also kind of looks like a hole for some reason; maybe hint at the support structure for the spotlight or something?

Second, the lady in the balcony isn't going to catch any light right now. Really, she should be in shadow. Maybe if you had some sort of secondary lighting mounted on the columns, she could be mostly in shadow but still catch rim lighting or something.

Finally, I think the place my eyes go to first is the spotlight, then maybe the back of the girl's head. If this is an illustration about the characters, that's where the emphasis should be. Faces and hands are the most important and expressive things to show when painting characters. So right now, we've got one face, really, really far away, no hands, and the back of someone's head. I feel like if you're going to do this kind of confrontational image, where one character is looming over another, you need to crop in a lot tighter. Position the camera right behind the character in the foreground and show us what she's seeing: the bright light in her eyes, the expression on the other character's face, make it less about the opera house. Maybe you could turn her head just a little bit so we can see a little of her face, maybe she would sheild her eyes from the light, wave her hands expressively while singing, flip this lady the bird, whatever, just so we get a little interest in the main character. Oh, and her right upper arm is a little short, make it the same length as the left.

Hope that helped. Keep it up!

[Alchimi]

Thanks par gin!
Actually you're dead right as of the direction of the light and the shadow, I should have sought about the direction of the light.
About the lighting not too realistic, that whats the director wanted. So yeah, nothing realistic here, unless we imagine that there's a second hidden spot lighting the character from outside the scene... And yeah the light looks like a hole, I wasn't too sure how to paint that.

About the comp, yup it's not the most expressive piece (lol), I actually made a couple thumbnails for the director who wanted something out of this scene from the script, one of these he liked more, and that's what he asked... Eventually it will be printed on a very small size, so well, didn't really needed some facial features.
But good thinking about tilting slightly the singer, I'll think I'll do a couple thumbs on spare time, just to see how it could have gotten out.