Introduction to Creative Play: Presentation of Our Work (Week 12)

Dec 15, 2016 In the last session I managed to finish this animation:

The week that has been leading up to this final session, in other words, the presentation of what we have produced in this brief has certainly been a busy one. TZ and Geanina managed to finish this first draft of the sound design. I was not pleased with the first draft of sound;

I requested strongly that the rap song that was included on the night scene was to be removed, as I thought it was far too distracting from the piece and made our green screen characters look like they were rapping. Thankfully my teammates agreed and we then changed to just atmospheric sounds on the night scene, I feel this was more effective than using any other form of music, the absence of music, does put the viewer at an unease, especially with the anger present in the characters faces and the sounds of gunfire being heard in the distance. With that alteration made and my animation added, TZ also decided to speed up the characters by x1.5, this overall made the motions appear more dynamic along side with the fast paced animation of the advert. TZ has decided to title our final piece: 'Visages of a city', in simple terms, the different faces of our city as an entity.

We set up the projection in the 'Egg Room', in the main atrium, and I'm really pleased with the result:

Shortly after we presented the our piece to our class, most of what I said is included within this evaluation below: Evaluation I think the main goal, I had for this brief was for our team to create an installation that was an interactive piece. The aim was that by walking into a series of projections, one becomes immersed in this fictional city we have created, one that is a dystopian city; that portrays itself on the surface as a, "well-developed and functioning society, with strong leaders and honest media" but in reality it is a far more sinister place. Much like an authoritarian dictatorship regime. Throughout the course of this brief I feel that our initial ideas really evolved as we went along. The evolution of the idea was not so drastic that it completely changed from our original design, rather, the design became enhanced. An example of this is evident in how our we added finishing touches, such as the logo intro and credited outro, (which included Geanina's character design). If I were asked, 'Did we fulfill the brief, concept-wise?', I would argue that we have, to some degree, in the sense that we have shown the two sides to the city that we aimed to convey, but perhaps we could have communicated better, when in the initial design phases were taking place. What I mean by my previous statement, is that perhaps TZ and Gean could have consulted with me when drawing was taking place, so that we all followed the aesthetic of the moodboards that had been created. That being said, we did still use things like a colour pallet, picked from various images in our moodboard, so for that i am pleased there is some consistency. How did we respond to old and new? I would say that the old vs. new elements of our final piece vary in concept and in actual development. From things as superficial as the old architecture drawn in the government building, to the modern architecture present in the city's skyscrapers. However conceptually, there is some what of a dichotomy present with the subculture of Vapourwave, in the sense that they take modern-day video footage and deliberately make said footage static-ridden and noisy. to put it in a nutshell, using digital technology to make a synthetic analogue technology. We tried to recreate these effects to the best of our ability, with the TV interference effects used on the two characters and the fictional advert, (that were influenced greatly by the Japanese adverts of the late 80's and early 90's, More often than not- not making much coherent sense to a foreign viewer). This is also why the advert, I animated is deliberately a bit jittery and fast-paced. Even the art style has a slight anime influence in it, (I took this into account during my character design process). Indeed this was one of the risks we took, I don't think the effects came out badly, with TZ being very successful with the glitch effect, that was present in the intro and outro of our piece. I would argue that we could have done more to recreate the grainy and noisy VHS look on the entirety of the final piece. Other risks my team took were; The fusion of so many art styles and aesthetics that were present in the moodboards, I feel we may have failed in this one, as there were simply just too many for us to fuse together. I feel, in hindsight, that had we just focused on just two basic art styles to fuse together we could have simplistically created a much more effective art style. Alas, I will take this into consideration next time around, to create a much more concise and consolidated design for our art style, at least we did have a consistent colour pallet. The use of green screen, (a skill in after effects none of us were familiar with), TZ successfully tackled this, after we filmed a successful set of videos in the university's TV studio. I also took a massive risk by taking on animating the advert with only a week to get it finished. I was glad that I have discovered of myself that I can get work like this completed in time for a deadline, whilst working under pressure and tackling other jobs, (such as my other modules). In conclusion, this has been a party creative play that I have really enjoyed and truly felt challenged by. I'm pleased with the mutual ambition shared by my team mates. Working with TZ and Geanina, I have really felt motivated by the energy they have shown. It's pushed us all to do hard work. Speaking for myself, I'm still surprised I managed to animate the whole advert by myself in just 2 and a half days (20 hours of which were devoted to purely animating.) It's only now, I can look back on this module and fully understand what it was trying to teach, that this has all been about: allowing one's self to fail and learn. By introducing us to methods and technologies such as idiation and arduino, we have been forced to take risks out of our comfort zone. In hindsight, I was negative about come of these sessions but perhaps that's because I could not see what lay ahead for my class, with this brief (making all of our previous creative play sessions essential and relative). My only regret is that the time we had to work on the brief was not longer. With perhpas some more time, this idea could have evolved even more, none the less, I feel we've made a very impressive outcome, I've enjoyed myself and I am proud of my team.