Week Summary

This week has been a lot different than what I'm used too because this week is a cross - course collaboration project which year 2 fine art students. We were placed in a group of 5, on my team we had two fine art students Jo and Shin and three of us from games art which were me, Michaela and Elly. We were give the task to make a 5-60 second film, we where then given a object to based our film around which was 'Rabbit' we had a image to go by, the image was of a Angora rabbit. After the lecture we met up as a group and discussed our ideas for the film. At first we decided to go with a cute idea about a fluffy rabbit that symbolized a dandelion flower that was in a field and when the wind picked up it would blow all of the fur off the rabbit. Below shows drawings that I drew to show a short scene for the film just as an idea.  Also we decided to make a rabbit each out of clay or what anyone could get together, these will be used in the film.

 

Each one of these drawings are in order for the scene.

I went out and bought some pink plaster - seen and some felt wool to make the rabbit. The idea was to build a clay rabbit and place the felt wool on top which can then be blown off in the video using a hair dryer or fan. The images below show the rabbit that I built.

  Rabbit with the felt wool, I wanted the fur to be able to blown off easily.

During the week we all met to film with our built rabbits. When we spoke to Jo she said that she did not have time to make a rabbit model as she was busy with her exhibition which we understood but she did say she and Shin did research into the Angora rabbits and what happens to them during harvesting of their fur. It was awful what she told me, Michaela and Elly and how some of the rabbits are kept and how the fur is ripped from their bodies while they are a wake. So we decided to change our idea and theme our film on this. We put all of our rabbits together with the fur on and then film a few shots of our hands ripping the fur off our  made rabbits. With our video shots done Elly offered to edit the film, I told her I would get some sound effects for her from www.Freesound.com that she could place into the film to give the film a deeper effect and meaning, to make the viewer unconformable while watching our video.

Above are some images of our rabbits together with and without fur, and the wool and cotton balls.

This is the final finished video.

I have enjoyed doing something a little different, something I would not usually do. It was nice to meet and work with distinctive students from fine art as it has given me an insight in how they process work and how they portray creative ideas in a way that game art students may put across  differently.

Also on Wednesday I had a interchange session to attend, I chose the UI/UX design in which we were given some tasks to do during this morning session. At first we were put into groups and were given some 'Lego'. With that we had to 5 minutes to design a swimming pool out of Lego. It was a fun exercise. After we were given another task in which we were given a photo of a person, we had to write what this young boy and what we think he would want at there local swimming pool and who we think this boy is. Below is a image of what we had at the end of this task.

Also in this session we were shown how eye tracking technology works while promoting a product. Two groups from the session were place into a room with an eye tracking system and one of the team members had to play a mobile game while the other team member had to read out questions about there experience while they played the game. We watched this on a screen, it was very interesting to watch how the technology worked. This session did give me more of an insight in how to promote a product (Game) to an audience. 

Also this week we had a guest lecturer, called 'Gina Jackson' from The imaginarium studios.This was one of my favorite guest lecturers who has spoken at the university, she spoke about what she does and how things work at the studio, she was honest about what she thought about concept art and how the industry runs and how hard it can be. The studio is a motion capture studio that the actor 'Andy Serkis' owns. She spoke more about motion capture and different roles that you can take in the industry from artist to PR.

Because this week has mainly been taken up by the Fine art project, I feel that the game project has been pushed back a little. Because communication hasn't been so strong this week I am not so sure what the others have been up to as much, I only know that Curtis has managed to get a coin shape object in the game that the player can collect. The object does light up in the game this is a nice touch as it could be used to guide the player around the level more easily. I have done one concept piece for the game which is a treasure piece, a coin that you will collect throughout the game.

 
 This will be one of the treasure pieces in the game.

The above images show the blueprints for the coin and the blueprint for the coin to be destroyed while collected, and the coin itself with the light added.

This is a short video of the player collecting the coins within the game, this video also show well how they are lit.