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 Dungeon Dweller
 (The Dungeons of Torgar)
By :
Deborah Susan Jones :
Editor
At
the time this picture was created, for the Joe Dever Roleplay Gamebook series Lone Wolf, Peter had developed a technique honed
by a half-decade working in film and TV and the background of which he
calls a "scene setter" which is a term used at the BBC in London by
program designers he worked with, on series such as Captain Zep Space
Detective and The Two Ronnies Show as well as regional News in the South of England and which derives from multi plane
camera techniques, originated by Disney and others decades earlier, and
which the BBC took a step further by using linked multiple cameras
instead of various sheets of glass through which one camera filmed (a multi-plane camera).
Called "CSO" technique (colour separated overlay) one camera is synced
so that a specified colour, typical but not exclusively blue, is unexposed film allowing for an element
filmed on a separate camera (or several) to be syncronised with it.
Essentially, it
is a matte technique.
The
background was created first, painted in acrylic, as it would have been if it had been a
piece for TV, shot on transparency so that it could be used again
and have different characters appear over it, like actors on a stage
walking in or off, and then the foreground character was painted
on. A photoprint was then made and the monster character painted on it in oil paint.
The
CSO technique became frequently used at the BBC by the artist in the
80s and his "scenesetters" typically had actors walking around in them
and in the case of the Captain Zep Space Detective series had overlay
foreground characters drawn in felt tip markers by Trevor Goring
producing a blend of comic strip foreground and imaginative realistic
backgrounds and live action actors
also interacting with the drawn characters, a visual combination
created as the program style, invented by he two artits and a then
senior BBC designer called Ray Ogden.
The
Captain Zep series was Peter's introduction to the CSO technique when
invited by Trevor, a colleague from his St. Martins School of Art
years, and his quick and intrinsic grasp of the technique led to
many more TV projects that followed at the BBC and soon his reputation
with the technique led to commercial projects for companies such as
Ford UK.
Eventually,
after half a decade of using the technique in TV the artist felt the
time had come to move on and take the concept of multi-layer use into
the book cover and computer game areas where the image was visualised
as a multi-layer scene but actually painted as one piece rather than
split into actual physical layers and to this day, where deemed
appropriate and useful, he still visualises some paintings this way.
Deborah Susan Jones
About "Artist"
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