Research 29/7

Developing the proposal to hand in on friday.

Identify your Question: How can I subvert the masculine Hero's Journey to develop Aeliwina into a fully realised, feminine hero character.

Concept: I am attempting to create a completed, in-depth backstory for my character that will clearly show the stages of the Heros journey to the reader but from a feminine perspective. To accompany this, I want to take aspects from the story and turn it into an obvious visual representation. Bex suggested having the biography sections popping up as part of an animated turnaround, potentially create a slideshow of different poses that morph into each other?

Context: Digital productions. (Need to curb my minecraft addiction before I start failing due to lack of doing schoolwork)

Audience: Anyone can enjoy it! but more people in the creative industry that have a understanding of character design.

Aesthetics: Professional finish, dark, semi-realistic.

Theoretical Framework: Monomyth

Medium: Photoshop, Toon Boom, Make a booklet with story and photoshop pieces to accompany the presentation? Animatic or fully animated turnaround?

Key Practitioners/Influencers: Joseph Campbell - creator of the monomyth. Nalini Singh - guild hunter series

Technique: Storytelling, digital drawing, animation(refining my finishing quality for animations) time management.

Methodology & Planning: First, I need to get the story written, reviewed and finalised. Then I can use that story to create the accompanying visual art in photoshop and migrate it to toon boom to animate sections.

Props: n/a

References: Theres very few ppl that have successfully reversed the male and female roles when writing character stories for film/TV. The question is whether society doesn't want this reversal due to lasting views on the role of the female in the household, or whether its just too uncommon currently to be accepted as normal. So far the female hero only seems to be successful when she still goes through some type of damsel in distress situation with a male having to help her out. It will be interesting to see how people react to my attempts.

2D Animation 24/7

Spent the class going through my animatic, reducing panels by converting to key framed movements where I could. There isnt that much tidying up left to do of what I currently have, but I need to get the adjusted ending drawn, lined and timed out asap for the pitch bible.

Research 22/7

This image was from when I first created my angel character last year in gaming. The feedback Ive had from two diff tutors is that the backstory needs work and so I have decided to re-write her backstory using the Hero's Journey and seeing if I can successfully adapt it to a female journey.

I plan to create an A3 character biography poster, with her backstory, character art and world art all influenced by the story I create.

I originally came up with this character when I was reading the Guild Hunter series by Nalini Singh. As I thought of her, I just imagined what I would want to be if I lived in that world and my characters personality was created from that. Joseph Campbell is the man that is credited with The Heros Journey theory after many years of research. This journey theory provides the basis for the majority of all good stories even to this day.

I hate presentations, especially when I forget that I actually had one to create!! Lesson Learned.

Drawing 24/7

Part of the feedback was that I need to work on eyes, and so I chose this as my "alluring" pose since my main character is a cat. I started the fur around his eyes but ran out of time befor ei could even start texturing. I like the way they turned out, but Im still falling into that trap of taking too long to create the images.

Screen Arts 25/07

World Animation 1960-69

Bob Godfrey - made Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit in 1961, using cutout animation like Month Python used later in the 1970's. Could be considered as lo-fi animation - refuses to take itself seriously.

Dusan Vukotic and Zagreb Film - created a modernist short animation in 1961 called Surogat, which won an Oscar(first animated short to win that was not made in the usa).

Fyodor Khitruk - Story of One Crime from 1962 is a modernist film on human noise pollution that Communist Party officials thought was attacking the housing policies of the government at the time. Kickstarted the new wave of social satire, irony and original ideas for russian animation. This one definitely struck a nerve, sleepless nights are most definitely enough to drive someone to murder from personal experience!

Wan Laiming from China had a two part animation called Havoc in Heaven base on a Monkey King story from Buddhism tradition. Part one was released 1961, and part two in 1964. In 1965 both parts were edited together.

Italian Osvaldo Cavandoli created a film called Carasello to advertise a tv show called The Line in 1969. It later got turned into comics and a tv series between 1972-1991.

Francisco Macian from Spain made The Magician of Dreams in 1966, base on a Hans Christian Anderson film.

Another russian Andrei Khrjanovsky created There Lived Kozyavin in 1966 also, another of his films was the first animated film to officially get banned in Russia(The Glass Harmonica in 1969). His fiml was approved by the KGB despite it being a commentary on how absurd the communist bureaucracy was in Russia at the time (according to him).

Japanese Toei Doga was responsible for Cyborg 009, a manga comic that was later adapted several times into tv animation, similar to astro boy. Fellow japanese creator Hiroshi Sasagawa had Mach Go Go Go which was sold in the West as Speed Racer, although "americanised" by reducing the killing into just being stunned. This was pre-Astro Boy, as the market took off for japanese anime afterwards.

Ngo Manh Lan from Vietnam was an ex soldier who directed The Kitty in 1966 made by Hanoi Cartoon Studio, which was primarily a propaganda studio. The Kitty was the first international success for the studio.

Jules Bass produced a stop motion film called Mad Monster Party in 1967 with the help of japanese studio MOM productions. This later became an influence for Tim Burton. 

Fuji Television from Japan began transmitting Sazae-san in 1969, and it is still currently being made today. This suburban domestic life cartoon is the worlds longest running animated series.

Belvision Studios of Belgium adapted Asterix the Gaul in 1967 without asking the comic creators, but by the time they found out they couldnt stop the release, however they managed to stop the sequel. Today 12 films have been made in total.

Ziatko Grgic is another croatian animator, working for Zagreb Film Studio. In 1967 he created Professor Bathazar for them, with a grand total of 52 episodes over 7 years. Fellow croatians Pavao Stalter and Branko Ranitovic directed the 1969 adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe.

Candian Eva Szasz directed Cosmic Zoom in 1968, which was based on the 1957 book Cosmic View. The same year Ray and Charles Earnes released their film Powers of Ten the same year, also based on Cosmic View. Another canadian Ryan Larkin was known for his psychedelic style and made Walking in 1969, that in 1970 was nominated for an oscar.

Terry Gilliam (YES FINALLY!) is the creator of Storytime in 1968, and Monty Pythons Flying Circus. His style of cutout animation, victorian era images and almost steampunkish style machines is well known even to this day. Love love love monty python!!

Another british company Smallfilms produced several childrens animated series like Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Dog. Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin used a converted cowshed as their studio to create the basic animations.

Game Design 25/7

Game design vs Level design

External Goals

• Aesthetically pleasing
• Easy
• Degree of difficulty to prevent easy completion
• Finished well, produced to a high standard

Internal

• Achievements for the player
• Has exploration
• Player learns something while playing

Game Design

• Lots of goals for the player
• Set rules to create the framework

Level Design

• Rules are already known
• Interprets the game rules into an environment

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by R. Koster(2004)

"One of the subtlest releases of chemicals is at that moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task. This almost always causes us to break into a smile. After all, it is important to the survival of the species that we learn— therefore our bodies reward us for it with moments of pleasure. There are many ways we find fun in games, and I will talk about the others. But this is the most important. Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. In other words, with games, learning is the drug."(Koster, 2004)

Koster, R. (2004) A theory of Fun for Game Design. O’Reilly Media USA

Good level design

Large span ideas

• Physical rules of the environment
• Character abilities
• NPC abilities
• Internal Economy
• How is it worth playing? Strategies for success

New Gameplay Introduction

• Prepare the player
• Test them straight away
• Confirm knowledge
• Positive reward
• Challenge
• Positive reward
• Escalate
• Positive reward
• Master
• Positive reward

Dont dump the player in the deep end without good design and no warning, tends to put the players off.

Make sure the success criteria is clear and precise.

Structure

Linear - pacing is important to make gameplay engaging. player must go forward regardless of their actions.

Semi Linear - player can choose their direction in parts of the experience, but still following the linear progression. Create the illusion of choice while still being controlled.

Non-Linear - sandbox design, lots of interactivity and decision making.

Use a flow chart to show the structure of your level design.

(semi linear level map? "exploring the room" instead of just jumping up???)

Level Design Composition

Environment composition consideration

• Everything a player sees
• Foreground-midground-background
• Points of interest - information/pace change
• Sight lines - emotional cues/pace changer
• Sight angles - emotional cues
• Bottlenecks slow the player to teach the player or change pace
• Balance - visual weight vs direct sight
• Staffage - human/animal - movement - direct action
• Eye catchers - details - leading lines - colours - light - scale - motion
• Everything must be linked to pace.

Homework

Title page - finished artwork

Contents page - finished

Story flow - finished diagram

World - finished artwork 

Level design - finished maps

Mechanics and Hazards - artwork

Character - finished bio and artwork

Pc or Mobile version? Pc enables more detail, more control options(semi-linear). Straight vertical platformer(tap jump style) is more suited to mobile but requires a different design style. Stick to the simplistic, bold art style. Define a success criteria - catches the ghost? collects all his toys back? Completes the level before time runs out? Introduce puzzles?

Check out Krita as a photoshop alternative

Game Design 25/7

2D Animation 22/7

Note to self - colour palettes, finalised character turnaround for Simba and Ghostie.

Exporting frames from storyboard to bitmaps - make sure to set a snapshot in frames that have keyframe animation otherwise only the first image will be exported(not the layer animation). Use the photoshop template to setup the best storyboard panels for the pitch bible.


Allow camera scaling needs to be ticked to allow for the bigger background exports. Removing the Limit export size in preferences is necessary as well. This is so you can get the correct camera size when you export the panels, so you can make pretty backgrounds in photoshop. Use the play-head to select a single shot to export and edit in photoshop for ease, instead of exporting all of them at once.

Ruby mentioned the text layer overlays which i had no idea about. Double clicking on the text layer brings up the options so i can tweak it without having to convert the text into a shape. Youtube some tutorials for ghostly/cool pattern words

Drawing 17/7

Silhouettes and shapes in character design

Screen Arts 18/7

Cinema Veritae and Direct Cinema

Background
In the 1930's-40s, cameras became bigger to accommodate the lip sync requirements that everyone wanted for their films. The end of 1950's introduced things such as smaller sound recorders, better lenses and film stock as technology improved. 1962 was when cameras became easily hand-held without interference to filming. This revolutionised film-making in the 60's/70's for documentaries as they could follow their subjects around in public spaces without huge disruptions.

Things such as David Attenborough come under the Cinema Veritae column whereas parks and rec is direct cinema.

Ethics
Documentary film-makers have a responsibility towards their human subjects. It is expected that the subjects are treated with respect and honestly represented on camera. Exploitation in the name of entertainment is a moral conundrum. Special care must be taken with vulnerable subjects like children and the mentally ill.

Titicut Follies is a 1967 film that observes the life of criminally insane people in a home. Showed the public events that they werent aware were happening like force feeding, humiliation tactics and bullying. Despite having permission, the film was banned for public viewing due to violating the patients privacy, keeping it strictly to medical professionals until 1991.

Documentary revival in the early 2000's include March of the Penguins, Bowling for Columbine and Super Size me. Some programs blended real with unreal as a style ie. Reality TV shows(Survivor, Big Brother), Found Footage style(Blair Witch Project) and Mockumentaries. (This Is Spinal Tap). What We Do in the Shadows is a NZ example.

Cinema Veritae film
Crocs Down Under by Steve Irwin (1998)
Definitely a cinema veritae, Steve Irwin is known for getting himself in the middle of his subjects to the point that it is an internet joke/meme. His trademark is provoking animals and heavy australian slang speech while educating the viewers on the animals he is interacting with.

Project X (2012)


Direct Cinema Film


This Is Spinal Tap

Game Design 18/7

One Pager

Game Design - Writing your game.

• Make a title
• Who is the game design for?
• What is the gameplay style?
• What is the goal of the game?
• Rewards and gratifications

Loglines

• One or two sentences describing the story
• Embody the essence of the story
• Main Character
• Motivations
• What do they want/need
• Whats stopping them achieving their game
• Whats unique or compelling about the game

Story/Lore

• Whats the back story?
• Even simple lore helps drive the game
• reason for the gameplay
• explains the rewards
• explains the environments
• Helps develop fan base, merch, collectables, fan art.

Game Writer

• Concerned with the narrative
• Writes the script
• structures the story flow
• helps with the script elements/storyboarding

Game Flow

• Gameplay can be linear or non-linear - uses flow charts to show all variations and for organisation.

HOMEWORK

Look through the game design story and embellish it further. (use the document on blackboard to find out what I need) 

Turn the one pager into a 5 pager

• Logline
• Paragraph summary of the story
• World Description with completed artwork
• Character bio with completed artwork
• Mechanics with sketches
• Internal economy with sketches
• Other games with a similar style that were inspiration

Research 15/7

Happy with my mark, yet again its verification that even though I was flying blind, I managed to understand what I needed to do. What I didnt think about at the time was exactly how to use my literature review for this semester, but after a chat with Bex I have decided that creating a fully developed character backstory for my angel is probable the most sensible thing. Im just a little concerned it isnt going to be enough for Think and Create. We shall see.

The facebook inspiration group is a great idea, I think it will help a lot of people this semester. My only issue with it is I dont have that many inspirations so  it will be hard to keep up with the amount of posts of the rest of my class.

2D Animation 17/7

Keyframe animation

Use the rotate tool to move the pivot point of an object to where u want it. Make sure to create a peg layer, and that the animate button turned on(little yellow man).

At this stage for simple, short animations I dont see much of a time difference between the key frames and frame by frame, but I definitely think it will save drawing time with longer, more complicated animations. Using keyframes to manipulate my ghostie character is probably going to be the best way to go, but I think the kitty(or at least his legs) will need to be frame by frame.

Pitch Bible

1. Title Page
2. Contents
3. Logline and Treatment (hunt it down and refine it)
4. Character Bio pages (one for simba, one for ghostie)
5. Concept art and background art - all finalised
6. Finished storyboard export

2D Animation 15/7

Frame by frame bouncing ball animation. Working on timing and squash and stretch.

Screen Arts 11/7

1950-1959 Animation

1st Yugoslavian cartoon was created in 1951 by Duga Film Studio. It was called The Big Meeting. The credits at the beginning of the cartoon is something you dont see these days. It does seem very propaganda-ish from the visuals, but of course not understanding what they are saying makes it purely guessing.

Neighbours is a 1952 film created by Canadian Norman McLaren. Won an Oscar for documentary after some killing scenes were edited out. The sound track reminds me of the old school 8bit video games, and the escalation of the fight over the flower became ridiculous quite quickly.

Halas & Batchelor created the first British animated feature, Animal Farm in 1954 based on the novel. Was a retelling of the Soviet communism story, and Stalins rise to power. The drawing style reminds me of Footrot Flats.

In 1958, George Pal created Tom Thumb while working in hollywood. It won a special effects OSCAR in 1959, using giant sets, superimposition and stop-frame animation.

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne was made in 1958 by Karel Zeman(Czech Republic), using live action and stop-motion animation. He was an inspiration for Terry Gillam of Monty Python fame.

A Venice film festival prize winner was Samac(The Lonely) by Mimica and Marks(Croatia). Was the precursor to the flood of existential films in 1958. It looks like what I would expect an acid trip to be like, commenting on the human machine that is the office job.

Legend of the White Snake(1958) is a Japanese full length animation that provided a basis for what we know as Anime and Manga today. Produced faster than the western features of the time.

2D Animation 10/7

People - who is in your story
Place - where does your story occur
Picture - what do you see when u think about the story
Plot - what are the pivotal events?

Basic Structure

• a character wants something badly
• something happens that moves him to action
• he meets with conflict
• things get worse until character is in crisis
• he nearly loses it all
• learns a lesson
• makes a hard choice in order to succeed

 Go back to storyboard blogs to help refine the story into something I am happier with - particularly the ending.

Things to do:

1. Fix the ending, either  go back to the one that I had written or come up with a new one
2. Rework  the bookcase scene - keep current plot or go back to original?
3. develop background angles - photoshop?

Gaming 11/07

2019.1.8f1 unity version - update home install to match. Look into the software bundles I got from humble and see if they are useable for class or not.


Look into NZGDA

Discuss and analyse 3 games that appeal to me

1 -  a NZ developed game
2 - an indie game
3 - a AAA game

1 - Path of Exile - https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=57&v=dURQBqMiwIk
     I havent actually played this game, but watching the game-play I can definitely see the Diablo III influences and so Im rather keen to give it a go. It has that dark gritty dungeon crawler vibe to it, along with the standard fantastical magic elements in battle that make these kind of games fun to play. Even the UI is very Diablo III which makes me wonder about the copyright side of things.
   

2 - Machinarium - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZBdWRSBRs
     I love the puzzle mechanics and artwork in this game. The subtle colour palette fits the      steampunk-ish type world and creates a fitting environment in my opinion. The game-play seems deceptively simple, but you definitely have to use your brain to solve the often "out of the box" type maps. Ive played the free access maps, and even those were enough to keep me occupied for a decent amount of time considering it was essentially a trial access.


3 - Diablo III - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q17FDfU7-ds
     I am a big fan of blizzard, in particular World of Warcraft, but for solo play Diablo III is the one that keeps me coming back. The choice to either follow the story, or jump straight into bounties with each new character means I can skip that boring repetition that happens when you level various classes, and just run around doing my own thing without having to worry about falling behind the storyline players.

2D Animation 8/7

Goin thru the schedule for semester two. First priority is deciding what story to go with either my storyboarding one, or a new one using my existing characters. The story must be 1-1.5mins long and no more than 2 main characters. Proposal is a Pitch bible this time around.

Animation pipeline - 1 Management, 2 Pre Production, 3 Production, 4 Post Production.

Research 8/7

Library database searches.  Using the advanced search to narrow down articles,  make several keywords to search with.  If some words are not effective,  use a thesaurus to find alternative key terms for the desired results and create a weird cloud.  For Boolean searches use the words and, or, or not. And includes both search terms to narrow the results, Or uses both terms to expand the results, and Not can be used to refine the results,  but may exclude useful items so use carefully.  Use quotes to search for phrase as a whole,  use brackets to search for one keyword,  and one of two alternate options (brackets gets searched first think BEDMAS) ie. Men AND (single OR married). These terms work with YouTube and Google searches as well. Make sure to only use legitimate sites for sources, .edu, .gov, .org etc. Be wary of .com. Use the first 3 page results, as beyond that the quality drops dramatically.