Final Project Due Date and Guidelines

Final presentations will be 8:00 a.m. (yes!) Monday, March 14 in our usual spot.

Final presentations should be a clean presentation of all of the magic you've been generating over the quarter. Walk us through the narrative of your story and your process. These presentations should be well-organized and show your work in its best possible light. No apologies or excuses, just show us what you've got! You can include a mix of rough and finished work. You're not presenting to yourself or your best friend, you're presenting to a group of potentially interested folks - how do you hook us in? How do you use your work to create maximum impact? You'll definitely need a title and a three sentence overview description. Get to the point!!

Pitch Refinement

We'll cover the other few folks who didn't get a chance to pitch their idea last week.
Everybody should have a .pdf of their pitch ready to turn in by Monday, February 15.
We'll talk about scheduling and organizing for the final project run-in.

An article featuring Fallout 4 concept art

Project 4: Midterm Pitch

On Monday, February 8, you'll be doing a 5 minute .pdf pitch of your work. Post it to your blog, so you can call it up from this site. We'll be doing a strict time limit, so be prepared.

In getting your pitch together, I suggest:

Getting all the work you've done so far in the class. Look at the images, read the writing. This sounds obvious, but I see people skip this step all the time.

Come up with a working title and a logo of some sort. It'll help the project lurch into life. Make sure to tell us what medium the project is intended for within the first 30 seconds as well.

Practice telling us the story. Distill it down to a bare essence. No extraneous, meandering details. Leave us wanting more, not waiting for you to shut up!

Project 3: Development

 Miles doin' it for his first animation, Francisco Pulpo's Scincinnati.

Let's take a minute to review what we've covered so far in class. We'll discuss a common vocabulary we can use to write and talk about the visuals we're creating and help us in our visual research. It's also time to talk about the format you'll be designing for - animation? movie? game? etc?

We'll also talk about story. Create a one paragraph treatment for a story that takes place on Trittonia. Then create a one paragraph treatment of how that story can be broken down visually. In this treatment, you can use your formal vocabulary (how things looks) and your research (basis/inspiration/precedence for how things may look).

Create 5 drawings that show characters, sets, and props as they may appear in your production.

Here are some examples I did for a 3D animated film, Francisco Pulpo's Scincinnati, way back in the ding dang day. These are a little more formal/coherent than raw thumbnails, but still not what I would consider high-end finished work...
Vocabulary!

Value - dark and light
Dynamic - movement/life of characters
Theme - tying characters and sets together
Narrative - purpose of a drawing in the storyline
Jerk - personality of a character
Setting - time/place/visual character of/
Context - rules of the settings and how characters operate within those rules
Shapes - basic forms, "skeleton", even of a landscape -- angular, soft, combos of...
Silhouette -
Scale - relative size of shapes to each other and the format (character to character, character to landscape, elements within the composition)
Shadow & Light - as a compositional tool - creates additional shapes within a composition, as a narrative tool
Color - As a rendering tool, but also as a mood/design choice
Color - Warm/cool. Hue (name), Saturation (purity), Value (darkness/lightness)
Line weight - modulation/change in light
Space - not objects!

Project 2: Vocabulary, Analysis, Creatures sketches and Landscape Thumbnails

                                   I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 

                                  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. 

                                  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate...

Roy Batty, Blade Runner          

Well, we don't have class on Monday, January 18, MLK Day, so we'll be doubling down on this week's project.  For Monday, January 25...

1. Working with your silhouettes, create 25 sketches of the creatures of Trittonia and put them onto a clean sheet. Black and white/gray scale. These do not have to be 25 separate characters, but develop at least 5 characters (5 characters x 5 different poses/actions/views each = 25 sketches).

Character studies by Jamie Noguchi from his sketch blog Angry Art Monkey

David Hockney's costume designs for Mozart's The Magic Flute (click for larger view)

Kiwi studies from Jennifer Harlow

Herodotus Studies by Miles

2. Create 25 environment thumbnail sketches. These should be SMALL. Put 'em on a clean sheet.

3. Create 20 original images of visual research. These must be original images and may be photos or drawings based on observation.

4. Create another sheet of found visual research images. Yup!

5. Analyze 3 images formally using your new-found power of... vocabulary. Write a short one paragraph analysis for each image.

All of this is due to your blog on Monday, January 25.

Some links we discussed in class:

Destiny concept art
Kim Petersen
OMFG Bonus: Blade Runner!!

Project 1: Trittonia Silhouettes

 

image courtesy of Creative Juices

 Uh oh, it's a BIG SISTER!!! Concept art by Colin Fix for Bioshock 2

Design Brief 1: Trittonia

Welcome to Trittonia, a small planet where plants have merged with animals and insects to create strange new life forms.

Deliverable 1: A clean page of 20 character silhouettes that show possible inhabitants of this exotic place.

Deliverable 2: A clean sheet of 20 reference sources that you used to develop your characters.

Deliverable 3: A one paragraph written description of your inspiration and approach to Trittonia.

Post all of these to your blog by Monday, January 11.

Suggestions.

·       Develop a method that lets you move from loose and exploratory to more definition as you go.

·       You don’t have to make them all on one sheet. You can always synthesize your characters onto the same sheet later.

·       Color correct and clean up all final presentation work.

·       Save all of your work and let yourself do more than the minimum. Focus on quantity first and then quality. Get rough ideas for several characters down quickly.

·       Visual research is critical. Do it early and often. It’s probably the quickest way to producing better work.

Lotte Reiniger's great cardboard silhouette animation!

Michel Gagne's digital silhouette animation...