Thought as you’d put up with my rantings and ramblings about the course for a whole year, you deserved to know how I did at the end of it really. (Not to mention its a slight excuse to show off 😉 )
IDAT204: Workshop 2- 71%
IDAT205: Creative Industries- 70%
IDAT209: Workspaces 2- 63%
IDAT210: Strategies for Art and Technology- 68%
IDAT211: Reflexive design- 64%
SOFT232: Software Development for Digital Art: 82%
Which gives me an average overall of 69.667%. Not a bad year’s work!
Term two has been a bit better than term one I think. The work load has been enormous, well no actually, the work hasn’t been too bad, it’s just that it all came at once. The stress got to me once, but i think having my car in Plymouth really helped because Will and I could just escape to one of our homes, or just for a day trip, when it got too much.
IDAT204
My goal from last term was to work outside my comfort zone a bit, which I think I achieved with our HTML5 project. I was able to use my illustration skills a bit by designing icons and good interfaces for mobile, but expanded my knowledge of both HTML5 and javascript. Working with Chris on this project was also good fun, we got all the work done about a week early and were then able to sit back and gloat at the end of it while others were still panicking! I still really like the fact that Vlad gives us our marks straight back at then end. However, the second project of the term was a real let down for this module. We had to work on Augmented Reality, but it really felt like Vlad was holding us back. He kept insisting that the gesture and voice recognition technologies we wanted to use did not exist, although we proved several times that they did, and that they detracted from AR which “is the future”. I was working with Chris again for this project, and we did not like being told what the future will be for definite, or being told to limit our imagination for the future. We’ll just have to wait on the results of that one too.
IDAT205
My goal from last term was to find a group I could work better in, and I have definitely achieved that this term!! I am working with Chris, Flo and James, and we all get on really well, and work really well together. Flo started out saying he had no motivation at all for this project, but has done more than his fair share of work! I am back to graphics in this project, which suits me well, and Chris has so far proved to be an excellent project manager, although he has had little luck getting James to pull his weight, it isn’t for lack of trying. I really think our end project will be excellent, and that we are in with a good chance of working for the charity too!!
IDAT209
My goal from last year was to pick a good project and get started early, however I didn’t get much of a say in anything! Simon put me in a group with very unimaginative first years, which I can stand, but they were so stubborn that they wouldn’t change their minds on anything, or listen to advice. Or in fact, do any work! They insisted on a difficult game that no one had ever heard of, and that we were just going to make a flash version of it. I wasn’t impressed! Chris joined our group then, and between us, we had the idea to create a guess-who based game for twitter, which we finally got the first years to agree to. However, Chris then said he’d like to do all the PHP work to get the experience he needs for placement jobs, and the first years were more than happy to let him do all the work. Anyways, it got the 3 days before hand in, and Chris hadn’t started. So yet again, we were working last minute, and I’m not too good at PHP generally. However, we managed to pull something show-able together for the hand in, and got 60% overall. Not a good module this term!
IDAT210
My goal from last term was simple, to make an amazing project. I’ll admit I’ve not had a lot of motivation for this project so far, but after doing some more research now i’ve had more time (this hand-in is well after all others, which is helpful!!) I’m starting to get quite excited about it!! The essay is still worrying me to be honest, not because i can’t write or any of the reasons Hannah was trying to reassure us about, but just because i’m not sure I’ll have enough things to put in it for the word count. Anyways, I’ll just have to keep you updated on that one.
IDAT211
Goal from last term was to get my project done early, which we definitely did! This project surprised me, I had to work with Alec because he was one of the only people left without a partner, but he actually did a fair amount of work for it, and all on time too! Our project was good I think, and the presentation went really well. I enjoyed researching into learning methods, and am now just looking forward to the results!
SOFT232
I got on really well with Java, and Android, and really enjoyed learning both. However, the final project I feel was a bit of a joke, they way Martin kept changing the criteria, just to make it easier. And yet even despite of this, I struggled with the time constraints, and was working on my report right up until the end. However, I was really happy with my final hand-in, my report had lots of diagrams and good explanations, and I was very proud of my code and interface.
Overall, year two has been more of a lesson in team-working and time-planning than learning any new DAT related skills. However, these skills will be very useful next year, if I hopefully get placement, and so I have gained some very valuable, albeit hard-learned lessons.
Although I was very pleased with the final video I produced, I was not too happy with how the presentation went. I think the anthropomorphics, the main point of my video, came across really well, it seemed that people really empathised with the panda.
However, it was too fast in the dome, and not too well corrected. I was told by my colleagues after that they thought it was dome-corrected and it was just me because I knew how it should look, but I’m don’t know if they were trying to be nice 😛
Thought you might like to see my final Adobe Illustrator file where I created all of the graphics for the video.
“Pandathromorphics” was officially finished about 11pm last night, and I then spent about 3 hours playing with the optics compensation to get it looking dome corrected without chopping too much off the sides.
I have uploaded to youtube a version for standard flat screens and the dome corrected version. I also tried to make all the frames for the video (created frame by frame, then loaded as a sequence into Adobe After Effects) available for download, but there was nowhere (not even my webspace) that I could upload the full 823mb the folder takes up. That’s 3947 individual frames.
The original aim
The aim of my video was to experiment with anthropomorphics (how people perceive human likeness) by continuously developing the design of my characters throughout the story line. The development stages, and the timings of this were to be based on the development throughout history of Disney’s character Mickey Mouse. A side experiment was also to see the effects of vector illustrations and claymation in the dome screen.
Timings
As previously mentioned, my original plan was to have the timings of the video run in accordance with the years that it took Mickey Mouse to develop. However, I found this very difficult to stick too because when creating the animation frame by frame, there is very little sense of how long everything will take. The below comparison states the stage the character is at, the time I had planned for it to take, and the time it actually does.
Analysis of each scene
Opening Credits
The background of the opening credits is the same grey as the background of the first scene to ease the transition between the two. I used a rounded font to compliment the rounded anthropometric form of the pandas, and replaced the “o” with a panda face for added typographic meaning. This scene may be a little short reflecting, there may not be enough time for the audience to read the title.
Black and White
This scene is deliberately saved in low quality to reinforce the later changes. However, I am not too happy with the way the two pandas leave the house, hopefully it is too fast for anyone to really notice it, but they are chopped off in strange places, and just sort of slide sideways. The bridge also looks a little flat, but too much detail at this stage would have really shown up the low quality of the first animations, so it was a decision that had to be made. The river noises add atmospherics over the music.
Colour
The male panda is purple to contrast with the blue of the antagonist, but still show his masculinity. This shade of purple also goes nicely with the female’s shade of pink, which alongside the fact that she develops at the same time as the protagonist (not the bad guy who is earlier) shows how they are well suited to each other. I am particularly pleased with the paralax scrolling of the background in this scene.
Clothes
I chose birds to bring the pandas clothing to him because they have been used to carry clothing in many Disney films such as Cinderella. The bird song here also adds some more atmospherics. The frames where the t-shirt is dropped onto the panda could be a lot smoother. He again goes back to the girls house, where he finds her crying and alone, this makes it obvious that she has been left. They hug, which is a very human thing to do, and he winks to give him some more character.
Date scenes
The music builds in volume up to the date scenes to help distinguish them from the other scenes. They have a series of dates very typical to love movies, which helps the viewer to identify with the narrative more because it is similar to things they have seen before.
Again, these scenes are activities that only humans perform, which helps the viewer to perceive them as more humanlike than pandas.
These scenes end with the protagonist walking down a street, stopping outside a jewellery shop and looking around. By the looking around, the audience are told that whatever he is doing is secret. He then enters the shop, and takes a diamond ring. This is typical for an engagement ring, a fact which is reinforced by his initial secrecy.
Separation
The music dies down to quiet background sounds again as the panda walks up to his girlfriends house, only to find her back with the bad guy, who is now claymation. She doesn’t react at all when he approaches, but the bad guy turns his head, which then makes the protagonist leave, making this action seem very aggressive. As our hero is leaving, the girl actually kisses the bad guy, which is something she did not do to the male panda.
Bedroom/Bathroom
The panda has a bedroom and bathroom, which make him seem quite human, but to keep some aspect of the panda in his character, I coloured his bedroom in typical colours of the panda’s environment. He follows the usual morning ritual of most people, so the audience are able to identify with him further. The music starts to build again, as he becomes claymation as well.
End
Hopefully predictably by now, the male panda then runs back to the girl, where he finds that the bad guy has not developed any more. She then stands up, and embraces him as the music draws to a climax.
Credits
The title is then shown again, this time on a black screen which is very typical for movie credits. I decided to give reference to my friends and family who have been very supportive putting up with midnight phone calls asking what a certain panda should be wearing or whether they should get together in the end. I also listed the websites where I got my sound effects from, which are as follows:
Bowing
This was actually a last minute idea, but I thought as the film is so focussed on the pandas, and the credits are rather clean and professional, I would bring it all back to the character again at the very end. I really wanted to line up every version of the panda and have them bowing in a row, but working out the bow in vector was too complicated in the time I had left, so the claymation one was used instead because he was the last incarnation of the panda anyway.
Over View
I am over all, very pleased with the amount of work I put into the project, actually being able to stick to my schedule for once and my final output. I think if I had more time, I would probably add some more ambient sounds, and definitely go back and redo some of the first scenes as I gained more experience in good animating practices as I went along. However, with the idea being that the video continuously increases in quality as it goes along, I think it works.
I have also really enjoyed looking into anthropomorphics and perception, and am thinking of basing my project for iDAT210 on perception or psychology in some area. I think my anthropomorphics really work in this video. They come from a combination of a narrative that people can easily identify with, and the character design of the pandas, with each supporting each other. I also think that my video has a magical, childlike quality, whether that be from the choice of an animal as the character, the love theme to it, or simply the colours or changes.
‘The magic of Disney is based on anthropomorphism’ (Platt 2000)
I’ve created the scene for my claymation bathroom:
So what happens in this scene is the vector panda walks into the bathroom, washes his face, and looks in the mirror. (I cannot draw this bit yet because I want to trace a photograph of the scene to get the vector exactly the same as the claymation).
In the mirror, he sees himself in clay, the shot then changes to one of his actual face in clay, and the bathroom in the background. He then walks out of the room.
The next shot shows him walking up to the girls house (as has happened some many times before) but she will run up and hug him.
We then zoom in on the hug, before the closing credits.
Although I have finished the opening title sequence, I have an idea of how to make it look a lot better, and of course the ending credits need to be made as well.
I’m busy animating the panda’s waking up sequence, which naturally involves a yawn. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a sleep-deprived student, or because I have managed to make my panda human enough, but I find myself yawning along with him!
I’ll be quite interested to see if I can make any of the guys in the audience of my presentation yawn too!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn7tuP5eXEk
I really couldn’t make up my mind about how well this worked, I think it’s too dark. But I have had some lovely feedback from everyone who has seen it, so I guess I’m on the right track.
What do you think of my make-shift greenscreen too?
I’ve also made a little sink and bathroom matt for when the good guy discovers he’s claymation in the mirror.
The scenes pan out like this:
The good panda walks up to his girlfriends house with the ring he bought, only to see her kissing the now claymation bad guy. So he turns away sad again. (He might go to bed now, not sure yet)
Then the next scene shows him waking up from bed, going into the bathroom (all still looking depressed) he’ll look in the mirror and see the himself in claymation. The camera will then pan out to the whole claymation scene. He will then grab the ring and go running back towards his girlfriends house.
I’m not even sure if the girl panda will be in the scene, I don’t know whether to end it with him running to her house, or with them hugging.
To twitter again to gather votes!!
I’ve now completed the female model as well, hardly took any time at all!
And I think I have decided to leave the male as he is because, well, look how happy they are together!
(I quite like how the bad guy decided to sneak into the background of this picture too!)
And here’s a last one of the three of them together:
At 12am, I think that’s it for tonight. Tomorrow’s job: Sets for these little guys, and then they get to star in their own scenes!
Lizzie Seymour 