Unit 8: Three Concepts

The Society

A group of people that preserve the border between the “real world” and the “spirit world”. This requires them to discover the truth about what is really out there and perform investigations.

Link to treasure:

-These characters view knowledge and truth as valuable. Their investigations provide them with this.

Pros and Cons:

• Unique idea-not many similar titles come to mind
• Allows for a lot of freedom with designing with different kinds of monsters/entities

• Unsure how to make it work in terms of gameplay
• Could get too ambitious

Purgatory

The journey of 4 ghosts progressing through the 7 stages of Purgatory in order to redeem themselves.

Link to treasure:

-The idea of second chances and a chance at redemption- viewing life itself as a treasure.

Pros and Cons:

• Something I’m interested in researching
• Easy to picture it as a functional game
• Character designs could be potentially very fun and unique

• I don’t know a lot about religion, I feel like this is a topic that I would have to be careful with
• Some character designs could get complex

Awaken

A young boy has lost all of his memories. Prompted with items linked to his past he must work to regain his memory and remember who he is.

Link to treasure:

-The idea of memories and childhood being treasured and valuable.

Pros and Cons:

• Allows for more abstract themes
• Would be able to approach lots of different genres varying on the “mood” of the memory

• Could need lots of medical/complicated research to present something like memory loss accurately

Unit 8: FMP Finalised Concept

Purgatory

My finalised concept idea is ‘Purgatory’

It follows a group of four spirits destined for Hell who in order to redeem themselves have to endure and get through the seven levels of Purgatory.

Each of the seven levels is based on one of the seven sins- an embodiment of the sins themselves will be the final boss of each level

My concept is linked to treasure in a conceptual way- my characters are fighting as they treasure the chance to redeem themselves

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For this project I will need to research the concept of purgatory/limbo through different cultures or religions.

Character wise I need to design my four protagonists, regular enemies for each floor, and a boss for each floor.

Other than this I need to work on environment designs inspired by places such as The Tower of Babel, as well as weapons for each of my characters

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Research Boards:

Unit 8- Initial FMP Research: Treasure

Initial Thoughts

Treasure can be interpreted in many ways- it can be something of monetary value or it can be something personal someone cherishes.

Things that can be considered treasure: Gold, jewels/gems, knowledge, possessions, a person, family, memories – anything of value. Personally I would like to explore the idea of treasure through a rare discovery. I’d like to include supernatural and adventure themes too.

Initial Concepts/Ideas To Use

-Someone searching for a “mythical” book

-Exploration of memories- childhood, traumatic events, happy memories etc

-Secrets behind mythology/superstitions

-Second chances. (Conceptual)

-A secret society that collect treasure

I’d like to incorporate the idea of treasure being something conceptual rather than something typical such as physical treasure. I would like to incorporate unique themes such as the supernatural/paranormal to make this more interesting as well as play with the idea of the truth and knowledge being valuable/treasured too.

Initial Research-Games focused on treasure

Uncharted Series

The Uncharted series follows Nathan Drake: an explorer and a descendant of Francis Drake. Each of the games follow Drake attempting to uncover historical mysteries and typically end finding valuable treasure. This franchise is an example where treasures are physical rather than conceptual.

Persona 5

In Persona 5 you play as the Phantom Thieves- a group of students who attempt to “reform” the corrupt adults around them. They do this by entering another realm and stealing the corrupt heart (the treasure).

In Persona 5 the treasure is conceptual- you are not literally stealing a heart, you’re stealing a conceptualized one.

Rough Concept

The Society- a group of people that preserve the border between the “real world” and the “spirit world”. This requires them to find supernatural occurrences that are getting out of hand and put a stop to them.

My characters treasure their jobs, ‘the book of anomalies’, and their person-specific weapons.

This Pinterest board varies greatly from my former one now that I’ve settled on a specific sub-theme. I combined two of my initial ideas to reach a concept that combined the two.

Unit 5/6/7: Stop Motion Test

I used my stop motion model to attempt a short stop motion animation of my character moving across the screen.

I found this extremely difficult as my character was too heavy to support itself as I moved it. In future I would use less modelling clay or build a more supportive frame. This problem also could’ve been solved with the use of a rig.

Unit 5/6/7: Modelling over stop motion frame

I started modelling over the frame I made for my stop motion character- I found this incredibly difficult to do as the frame had odd shapes.

In future I would probably use job specific tools to help me with the modelling.

I had hoped to paint and clothe the character, but this was suitable for me to do a test animation.

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Unit 5/7: Animation Frames- Contact Sheets

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Here is the contact sheet for my final animation, it shows all of my individual frames.

Unit 5/7: Final Evaluation

The objective for this unit was to create an animation based off of the theme “Escape”. As animation was already a main skill of mine and something I want to go into in the future I feel as though I put a lot of effort into this project- but I also realise that this was my downfall as I got too ambitious- I wanted to create something that I didn’t realistically have the time to create.

I decided that I wanted to try out a different style of animation, so for my research I looked at what styles and techniques I liked the best. The look of my animation was heavily inspired by early 2000s Western animation- with the simple designs and fluid, exaggerated movements and expressions. The colouring style happened due to a technical incident however it is reminiscent of Mewtripleds animation “Endlessly”. 

After my research I designed a character and created a storyboard. The challenge here for me was creating something with a ‘U’ rating. I feel like the original concept (Shown in folder) for the characters and story was more interesting but I scrapped it as I felt unsure if it was suitable for the target audience. My character has a basic design that I knew would be fairly easy to animate consistently and on-model. 

Following my storyboard I used my Wacom tablet and TVPaint Animation 10 to create a 10 second long, fully coloured, 2D, digital animation about a girl performing a solo heist- it opens with her jumping through the window and then shows her running as she makes her escape and flees into another building. I’m proud of the fluidity, quality of the motion and the fact I managed to colour the whole thing- but my main issue is that the actual escape itself isn’t self explanatory- if I had the time I could’ve had her holding a gem or a money bag and I could have shown an officer chasing her as she ran.

Unfortunately since the movement in my animation was so complex I had reached deadline week by the time the frames I had already drawn were finalised and coloured, so adding more was an unrealistic goal. I realise I should have simplified my character’s movements.

Overall, I’m happy with what I created but I feel as though I could have done more had I thought out a more realistic schedule and thought more about how ambitious I could actually be within the timeframe given. I think a lot of time I could’ve spent on this early on was spent worrying over the concept that I scrapped. I should’ve thought more carefully about what I wanted to go through with. I don’t think I’ll carry this character/story into a new project but I would like to revisit my original idea, “Hellscape” at another time.

Unit 5/7: Animation- Coloured Version

Colouring the animation took a lot longer than I expected it to. I initially wanted to add white outlines to show lines in her clothing etc however wouldn’t have the time to do so.

I’m proud of the outcome but there are some aspects that I would improve if I had time- the building she enters at the end feels rushed and I am aware there are a few frames where the colouring is not as clean as it could have been.

Due to a technical issue in which I lost all of the lineart for my animation and had to screenshot the frames from an earlier version from Youtube I had to use a no-lineart colouring technique. I found this time consuming and difficult although it has helped me find a style of colouring that I really enjoy working with.

Now that the animation itself is complete I hope to add sound that synchronises with her movement.

Timeline as of now:

I used three separate layers, the bottom-most had my lineart on it, the top has the main colouring on it, and the middle layer is the background for the running sequence. My animation runs at 12FPS- half of the standard frame rate.

Unit 5/7: Final Composition for Graphic Novel/Narrative Project and Evaluation

Evaluation:

This is my final composition for the graphic novel project- I explored time based issues by figuring out how to convey an action and movement by using photographs. Our photographs show a narrative and a sequential series of images that show a story.

The majority of my research for this task was on Pinterest- I looked at different picture stories and graphic novel pages and picked up certain techniques from them. The cropped detail images are inspired by tense scenes shown in many graphic novels. I also used my research to figure out what layout was easiest for me to understand, I settled on a linear right to left layout.

I like the final piece that I’ve created because it’s simple yet effective. It gets the point across with minimal editing and effects. After experimenting with different layouts I figured that this is what I liked the best. I also like that the cropped detail images help focus on what’s happening as well as remove the background clutter.

I could have improved this by using more effects to make it more interesting to look at. I considered turning it into a manga spread using the traditional Japanese left to right format and putting it into black and white however I figured this may be very complicated and hard for people who don’t know how manga is laid out to understand. I also think that some of the images at the top are very dark- I should have lightened these.

Unit 5/7: Digital Manipulation With Graphic Novels

Here I used the lens flare and lighting effects tool to create a spotlight on the focus of each panel. I find this helped fix the lighting in a lot of the images and created a more dramatic effect.

Photoshop tools that are useful in digital manipulation include:

• Selections
  • Selections allow you to select certain parts of an image. You can use this to cut out parts of images or to apply a filter/effect to a specific part of an image.
• Adjustments/filters
  • Adjustments are how you can change the brightness, exposure, colour balance etc.
  • Filters are pre-made tools that allow you to add effects and stylisation to your images.
• Layer/Blending modes
  • Blend modes are used to alter how two layers interact with eachother. There are 19+ modes.
• Drawing tools
  • The drawing tools are simply used to draw over an image- you can use a free-hand brush tool or you can use shapes e.g squares, circles, rectangles etc.