1400s Italian Pot

This project was for a student film at the American Film Institute. It was a retelling of a story from The Decameron, wherein a woman’s lover is killed by her brothers, so they can marry her off for a fortune. She takes her deceased lover’s head and plants it in this pot, fertilizing a basil plant until she uses it in a dish to kill her brothers and herself.

The Decameron was written in 1400s Italy, and so I took that as my starting point in the design. I found a pot that had a rustic style that matched what the director and production designer had in mind, and sketched out a sequence of crops being sewn, grown, and harvested. This would allow the director to highlight different images to enhance whatever action was being done in a given scene, particularly the images of death associated with harvest.

When it came to the colors, the goal was twofold. One, in one scene, the family is getting their portrait painted, and so I would need to have some paints on hand. The second goal was to match the color tone to what was available in that time period, and the palette of the film. To that end, I chose to create the paints myself, using an egg yolk tempura and pigments from brick, charcoal, basil, and other experiments.