Live Brief - Qwertee - After Thoughts

While voting has not yet ended for my final design, it has already gotten more votes than the first four designs, still, it is nothing compared to the number of votes received on other far more popular designs. In order to find out what designs appeal the most to Qwertee's audience, I suppose I would have to investigate further by sending in other designs in the future. While it would make sense for a Marvel or DC related design to be popular on a site like Qwertee, my SHODAN design also racked up a decent amount of votes. 

Something definitely went wrong with the Street Fighter one, perhaps the design could have been better, or perhaps it was because of a little glitch that occurred when I tried updating it with a better mock up image... Either way, it shows that a design based on a popular series might not always get as many votes as one would expect.

In the end, I believe it all comes down to getting a strong enough following that can practically back you up with a snap of a finger (Metaphorically speaking), and so you really do just have to continue designing things as well as constantly promote yourself to get your name out there. It will take time, but if you feel that there's potential in your designs, you just need to keep going...

These designs (Even the least popular one) definitely did a lot better than my cushion designs for Ohh Deer, though I suppose this is because Qwertee is a much more frequented site as compared to Ohh Deer, it was interesting to see how many strangers took interest in my designs, and it was wonderful getting a few comments too saying how much they liked my design! I do feel a little braver now about sharing and promoting my works, though I know that it will probably annoy others, it really is necessary if you wish to get enough supporters, or at least recognition for future works.

WWF - Submission

After adding the finishing touches (Such as numbering the pages and putting in any other text... also, I quickly removed our names after rereading the brief on how your work should be submitted), it was finally time to submit this bad boy in.

The submission process went by pretty smoothly much to my surprise (Especially after all the warnings we received from others), I was just expecting to submit our entry as a zipped folder, but apparently if you were to submit images, you would have to upload and title them individually, which does make sense considering how strict they are on how many images you are allowed to submit in the brief. It also felt a little weird submitting JPEG images, especially since I was so familiar with PDFs (Hey, they print out better too), but I got use to it eventually.

Even the payment process was not much of an issue, and soon enough, we had everything submitted in less than half an hour.

With this done and over with, we just hope that there will be no issues with our entry when it is finally presented to the judges. And right now, it is once again time to move on and finish our other projects.

WWF - Finishing Touches

Anna and I spent the last few days finishing up our entry for the WWF competition, while she was drawing and hand making several pieces (Such as the fishing net and lumberjack) and sending them over to me, I was spending the first day gathering some clearer and larger images (Since some of the photos I used for the final critique were actually a tad more blurry than I wanted them to be), while also cleaning and editing them all into PNGs that I could then easily put together later on.

Seen here are one of the photos Anna took for me that we could use as trees.

Some were definitely a lot harder to clean up as compared to others.

For some reason food colouring on the second photo turned out a lot greener
as compared to the first photo, so that needed to be digitally altered to match.

The fishing net took quite a bit of time considering how delicately thing the threads
were, but it was worth it!

With Anna's work, this definitely looks so much better as compared to the piece
we presented during our last Responsive session.

I think she did an absolutely wonderful job on this net, she had poured her sweat
and tears into it, and it clearly shows.

Also now and then, with all the images I placed in, despite the fact that I rasterised them, the file size would reach nearly 2GB, slowing down my laptop performance, and so now and then I had to go back and see if I could merge any of the other works to bring down the file size, hoping that I will not have to go back to alter them later on.

While Anna said that we should just go with the hands I made...

I honestly think the new pair she drew out looks much better, all I did was darken
them a tiny bit more.

I also showed Anna an alternative where a darker table surface is used for the slides, while I suppose it stands out a bit more (Well for this slide at least)... Anna and I believed that the lighter table surface still works better for our concept, plus it might hurt some people's eyes when looking at the second one for too long.

We also decided to add a little summary page to better explain our concept, it will be submitted in as a supporting item, a much shorter summary was put into the entry form, and hopefully this still isn't that wordy to them...

Food for Thought - Production - Background Designing 1

That rough storyboard also allowed me to roughly count how many backgrounds I needed to design for the animation, with two directions that I felt that we could possibly take them in. Design elements that would be retained in both directions will be the fact that there will be a tiny bit of animation inserted into them to make them a little less static.

The first idea would be the more challenging one where we attempt to retain the same art style throughout for all of the background designs while the second one would allow me to lightly replicate the art styles used for the various time periods (Such as a hieroglyph for the egyptian setting, a lithograph for the medieval setting and so on), which I think would work better for a chronology on any sort of subject matter, especially during that scene where Johnny is being placed in several different time settings when the history of cake is lightly discussed upon.

The design process for these backgrounds turned out to be trickier than I initially expected, various considerations had to be made, such as whether the backgrounds should merely present the time period itself, or whether kitchens should also be incorporated into each one of them, the latter was a problem when it came to the background design for the Industrial Revolution, I wanted to show all the smoke that would come out from factories and initially wanted it to be an outdoors setting, and so it was a problem if the other settings (Egypt and Medieval) took place in kitchens.

Another issue was once again attempting to use the same art style for all the background designs, especially when it came to designing the Egyptian setting, it was just a lot tougher visualising something for it as compared to the other settings, while still making it recognisable enough to the viewers (Which I felt would work better if they were each given their own unique art style). And if we were to go the other way round by simply designing settings that showed what time period it is, it doesn't seem as effective without showing something of relation to baking.

Again I did some really, really rough sketches, the decision is up to my teammates after this.

Another interesting element that I decided to retain is keeping the oven to the right, other parts of each setting can change a little however (Like other people in the kitchen will be doing other things such as rolling and flattening dough, mixing mixtures, etc.), so the composition wouldn't be the same for all of them. The colour scheme will most definitely be differently from one another as well (With more vibrant colours for the Egypt design, warmer colours or black and white lining for the Medieval one, and something more sepia for the Industrial Revolution one).

'Slightly' clearer sketches.

Food for Thought - Production - Rough Storyboards

With Cara planning to spend the weekend polishing up and hopefully finalising our storyboards so that we can finally begin animating, I thought it might help if I roughly drew out how I roughly envisioned the script to go. I was a little worried the other day, especially when we were discussing how certain scenes went, and it felt like it was getting a little too complicated to animate, especially with the amount of time we have left (We have about two months left, including this Easter break, and we still have to get other things done aside from animating).

Hopefully we can get most of these issues settled over the next week...

Molding Workshop

During one of our tutorial weeks, we came in on Thursday and Friday to learn the basics of how molds are done. Compared to the Armature workshop, this workshop went by pretty quickly and was a lot less stressful, we thankfully didn't have to rush with our works as much as we did with our armatures and clay heads. 

It was also a pretty fun and messy experience, especially when it came to making the plaster and foam (I mean I was the one watching but still...). I was fortunate enough to avoid getting any drying foam on my hands, unlike one of my classmates, who had to painfully remove it with a sander later on back at home... eek.

These are some examples done by the first years that Donny
showed to us, apparently they have a slightly different
curriculum to us.

Donny showing us how to set up our little workspace when we
begin sculpting our clay head. We simply need to use one of the
wooden squares and wrap it in newspaper to protect it.

I think I was a little more ready this time round when it came
to working with clay, this one looks a lot smoother as compared
to the previous piece I did last year.

I hadn't had the chance to work with this clay last year,
and I can see now why almost everyone else prefers it over to the
blueish grey one.

After our clay faces are completed, Donny then showed us how
to set up a make shift tray for it for when we start pouring
in the plaster.

We start by flattening a large slab of clay that we can place our clay head on top of.

After that, we use a long strip of vinyl and wound it up with tape.

Make sure it's big enough to place over the clay head.

Like I mentioned earlier, tape it up.

Seal up the bottom with more clay and this is what you should have.

Rosy and Bex volunteered to make some liquid plaster for us.

Seeing that a lot of powder is going to be used, they needed protection.

They were interested, we were all just super tired with
upcoming deadlines.

We had to make sure that there were no bubbles after pouring
the mixture in.

Anna's plaster covered clay head.

Elliot helping out with pouring the second batch in.

And then we just needed to wait for it dry...

Once the plaster has dried after lunch, we then started taking
apart our tray.

This is where we begin digging out our clay faces.

Not too shabby.

On the second day, Donny shows us how to make foam,
which is comprised of wax and white spirit.

Seeing that we are not doing half a face, we didn't need to make a lid for
our molds.

Before pouring in the mixture, we needed to make sure that
our molds were well waxed. So that removing our foam heads
later on will be a smoother experience.

Oh yeah we have to wear gloves.

Everyone taking their turn to mix their foam formulas.

The 1st foam head looks better but overall I think they both turned out pretty alright, it took awhile to clean off most of the clay stains though.