new blog

just to clear things up, this is the blog I used for 171 http://alyssadsdn171.blogspot.com/

171 introduction

well it's the start of a new trimester and that means new courses

to start this course blog off I was to write what I believe is an important moment in design history

personally I believe the creation and continuous development of 3-D computer animation is an important part of design history
this statement is probably really bias as I am a huge admire of all 3-D animation works from the earliest works to the latest techniques which copy human expressions and emotions better than some human actors. The main reason I believe this is a big part of design history is that it has become such a huge contribution to modern design with movies, games and other mass medias.

Project 3 part 3 - Letter

Dear Disney



First off I would like to express my admiration to your company and it's history. I grew up with your movies and still enjoy them at my age.

Now to business, I have noticed lately that some of your new "Live Action" movies such as High School Musical are turning into shallow musicals with no real story but to draw in Pre-Teens with current fashions. Although I can kind of see what you were trying to do in keeping up with the times but I must say that this was not the way to go. These movies have taken away some of your originality flair that was shown in all your other movies, be them Animated, CG or Live Action. I may just be ranting for no reason but I must say that I see no point in these movies.

Personally, I still enjoy most of your new release movies, even some of the musicals, but I just can't see how these other movies fit in with your reputation. Perhaps you should have a deeper story and more of a "Disney Flare" to these in order to get more than just this small group of Pre-Teens watching them.

Sincerely
Alyssa Riach

Project 3 part 2 - Poster

I would just like to mention that I made this with Gimp since my Laptop dose not have Photoshop.

Project 3 part 1 - Word

 

The Word is "Imagine" and it's made with striped balloons sewn together and lightly tacked on a Laptop. This is to reflect the child enjoyment Disney makes and how it's evolving with the time and technology. The background also reflects the innocent child entertainment Disney has and dose make over the many years.

Kasi Add

The comparison of the runner with the cheetah shows how our shoes improve performance and links with the kenya theme we want to show to the European market.
The deep drum music is also a link to the Kenyan roots we wish to keep when selling ourselves to the European market

Logo pratical assignment

we were split into 6 groups on Monday and charged with designing a logo and slogan for a company made up by the tutors
I was in group 3 with Reed, Tom and Daniel

Our company was a sports manufacture from Kenya called Kasi which translate to speed. We decided to concentrate on running equipment and focused on the culture of Kenya for the logo.

The logo is taken form traditional Kenya sheilds and modifyed to fit modern society and the sleak look for fast running (the whole ying yang look helps too)

Project 3 start

with this project we have to research into a logo and attempt to improve it somewhat (I think) so I decided to try something very well known and a challenge to do, Disney

The Disney logo (usually Micky or the Disney castle) is very well known around the world and seems to change slightly as the years go by to keep up with the ever changing society. Unlike most companies, Disney has a number of logo's and slogans for their many branches as well as the main center.

Disney dosen't really have any slogans rather they often use quotes from Walt Disney himself to promote the brand

I believe that Disney really dose do a lot to promote imagination and display the creations of their own so this sub slogan of theirs (although it's not the main one) is a very good fit.

I believe that Disney needs a solid slogan which fits a modern logo and will appeal with today's society of all ages though. There is always room for improvement and that is my goal for this project, to try and see if I can make this any better.

last minute storyboard upload

I was reading through my blog to see what I missed and then I discovered that I hadent uploaded my edited storyboard (sorry bout that)

Here it is now though

Final Video

Well, I finally got it done. It's not as long as I wanted it to be (since half of my fight scene was corrupted) but I still like it.

First Sign of Awesome

I finally got my fight scene edited (I now just need the start and end scenes, edit them and put in the sound track and I'm done, YAY!!!)

Brain Storm Rant

Since we have to show our brain storming to prove development of our own ideas, I decided to just type up a massive blog rant as my brain storm (mainly because I lost half of my brain storm, there was just soo much of it)

Ideas - What I want my movie to represent

My idea for this movie is to reflect my desire of gaming and computer graphics. What I really want to do with University is go on to either become a game designer or a CG animator and create things that seem almost real. So my idea is to have my movie about a game, someone playing a game and being sucked into it to play it as himself.

Development - How can I do this

I really want to use Green Screen editing for when the character is sucked in and playing the game to make the background seem totally un-real but with my skills right now and the time I have I realise it may seem but a fleeting fantasy to pull it off so I'll use extreme Photoshop filtering and editing to make the game scenes look real still but at the same time totally different to real life (maby use poster edge to make it look like the graphics from the new Marvel vs Capcom game)

Music - What's that sound

We've been told that we can use any music as long as we have consent from the creators but I really want to try and make my own track that fits my movie's flow. Hopefully I want to make it in two pieces, separating the scenes in the "real world" to that in the "game world". preferably have something like a simple rock melody for the start and end part and have like hard core techno fight music for the game fight scene in the middle (wow do I go on or what?)

Design - How dose it all look

I know I probably don't have to think about this as much as everything else but I'm an otaku and it's just my nature to be concerned with the look of my character creations. With the whole "real world" look I want my main character to look, well, normal (maby even have a cameo of my bad guy at the end looking normal as well) but with the "game world" look, I was thinking more of a Japanese RPG look. Have the main character as a Thief Brawler type character with the signature gloves and dagger (the hero knight is just sooo old and used way to often, I wanna be original here) and the bad guy kinda all black and punk looking (almost the same as some of the others but with a punk, otaku modern difference about him) I'll make sure to put up character profiles and evaluations of the looks when I get to the fight scene.

I think that's about it when it comes to how I plan to do this film and what I want it to represent but if I come up with anything else then I'll make sure to include it in one of my development update posts

Character Set Up

I know it's just a small stop motion film but I get so caught up with character creations that I need to at least explain some parts of them

The Hero - played by Joel Hibbert-Perham

Hwoarang - Tekken 5

This look resembles that of Hwoarang from some of the Tekken games but also has its own modern twist and an RPG feel at the same time.
This character also has dagger skills so the whole brawler class is split with thief from RPG games giving it more originality (yay me)










The Villain - played by Kit Humphries

Sephiroth - Final Fantasy VII

Rather typical look overall but added details which contribute different elements and genre of gaming.
Dressed entirely in black with fair hair and welds a sword (Japanese katana) this look may seem a rather modern punk version of the very famous (and hot) Sephiroth from Square Enix's Final Fantasy VII (RPG), but it also contributes certain elements from fighting games like DOA.

Story Board (mark 1)

This is my first solid Story Board for my stop motion short feature.

(sorry about the bad scan, I need to do it in pen next time)

It starts of with my main character playing a PSP but then he's sucked into the game and begins to play as the main character of the game (sort of a traditional Japanese RPG theme). He meets other characters and begins to play through the story until he comes across the main boss (the bad guy). Just as the fight begins between the two, the main character is brought back into reality

My idea for this is to show my desire to make games and/or films with such great graphics and detail to layout (story, theme etc) that the viewer feels like their actually part of the events.

My intention is to use either Green Screen editing or enhancing the colour concentration with photoshop with the Scenes involving the game world in order to separate the two atmospheres and show how intense the game is. My characters are real and will have RPG like costumes (except the main character when he's in the real world, his cloths will change when he's in the game and go back when he returns to the real world)

The music I will make myself, I intend for it to be real music (guitar and stuff) which leads into game music (techno/computer made)

I also intend to include the "over the top reactions" in the film (the question and exclamation marks reflecting feeling and emotion of character's) to show my own style and add a bit of humour (it never hurts to add humour, especially when trying to impress your marker)

I may have to cut out a whole lot out of this as when I tried a rough sketch version it was about 5min long (4min 30sec to cut) but I'll try the photo version with my actors first to see what I need to cut and/or change

stop motion test

In order to get the basics with the program "nero" I made a small test film with my "MegaMan" figure
It's a bit shabby but it's far from my final movie (since this was just a separate test and all)

since my final idea involves game themes I thought this was a good way to test with an "Obedient" subject (since I'll be using actual people and not just figures in my real project)

awesome inspiration

while looking for examples of stop motion films to help me with ideas and styles I found this video

since my video is based on Japanese Style RPG games i found this relevant (plus it's just awesome)

AXO Drawing

I must admit I was a little sketchy with this since I got back into the habit of sketching everything rather than doing a ruled graphic drawing (despite the fact I did graphics in High School)

I chose to do a 1:1 scale drawing of my little Tajima Craft Knife with a side view of the inside blade and a straight view of when the blade is out one notch. I chose to do this mainly becsuse it was the first thing I found in my bagI think I may have drawen it all wrong since it looks really Graphic like but I'm actually impressed with the visual of my outcome, I forgot I could do that.

Idenity

The first task in this brief, this really started to help me improve my drawing process and display. I chose my IPod, my ruler, my USB, my locker key and my headphones as the five items (the first things I found). I experimented with placement and solid block colour a few times before I decided on this layout. the idea of using inversion and having the white space show detail of the item somehow mimmiced a simple light against shaddow which I really liked. having the headphones go off the page and come back somewhere else showed that the items have parts you sometimes can't see and filled some odd spaces which was a bonus.

Sketch

This task was really fun to do for me as I got to go a bit loose with my drawing style rather than staying in set boundaries. 

I kinda cheated with this task though, I used the sticker on my laptop to do this. I drew curves in two different thicknesses over each other to create the shape (since the sticker is a shadow) and created this etch looking outline which I keeped filling with curves to give more shape and fill. I based this from the style given to us in one of the examples (there were three different styles in this category) none of the lines physically connect, they are all curves which reach from one end to the other (they may overlap but that doesn't count)

Draw

personally, this was hard for me to do since I'm not the best drawer around and still have some Graphics habits I can't seem to get rid of.

 I decided to draw my IPod since the shape is simple and a good practice for boosting my confidence with drawing straight with pen (I usually do it in pencil first then go over in pen to avoid most mistakes)

I must admit that despite the fact I wasn't aloud to use a ruler or a pencil, I think I did an OK job. I still would rather have done this with a ruler to make it accurate and straight but that's just my bad graphics habit.

Section

This is a section of the top view of a 2GB USB Stick (an old model and rather slack in construction) I chose to use this since it already had the cover broken off and everything exposed. The drawing is in 2:1 scale since if I did it in 1:1 it would be rather hard to put in all the little details and would be hard to see.

 

I also included a section drawing of the inside of the connection port (inaccurate as that part is still intact and I couldn't see everything in it) I do realise that the letters on the board are rather rough and crooked but I still had to do this in a bit of a small scale.

Hatching

I decided to go a bit mathematical with these since I love doing geometric designs and illusions. I drew each square separately so as to give myself some freedom and demolish the risk of smudging of going over the hatch next to it. Obviously the final layout is done on Photoshop and slightly edited with brightness and scale adjustments.

This is actually my third attempt of the hatching criteria as the first looked like a map and the second got smudged to hell.

Font Design

After hours of planning and constant changes in my media choice and quote, I finally finished my font design for this project. I decided to use Nerds (flavored sugar) in creating o font which went with my quote "Give Words A Certain Colour" to try and create a mixed look in shape, colour and texture. I used two boxes of Rainbow Nerds (my parents brought them back from America) A ruler, some tweezers and a white cloth to create my letters and then rendered them on the computer using Photoshop. I then adjusted the size, brightness and even the thickness for some to create the complete letter set. The quote however was layered up fully and then rendered onto a background that matched. I also used a Poster Edge Filter with the font to help make the letters more readable and let the colours stand out.

Final Quote Poster

Full Letter Set

I decided not to include extras such as Astrix as there are a few existing fonts that do not have these (and someone kept eating my supplies) but I did include numbers (only 1 2 and 3 though) and lower case letters.