Summative Evaluation

Responsive has my love and hate. At the beginning of the module, when we were informed to respond to a range of competition briefs, I was not ready to entre any competitions because I have no confidence in my work or animation not even mention the bad communication skills I have with other people. Since we all have no choices, the only solution to solve this problem is face it. I was only doing three briefs minimum but I started realised the benefit and the fun bit of entering competition and work with other people shortly.

The first brief I did was the Penguin Children’s Book Cover Design competition. I have never done a book cover before and not even read a lot of books. My original designs are rather complicated, full of illustrations with a tiny title. The whole concept changed dramatically when I researched previous winners’ design and found out that all the book covers are very simple, just a representable illustration and big title. It is a challenging brief as this is the first time I have a client and considering my own style would not be attractive enough for children, I tried with worked in graphic style. After this brief, I noticed that it is vital to know about the target market if working on a commercial brief that my design might affect the sells directly. My interests in challenging increase and soon I entered more competitions such as illustration competition Onform and International KYM Cartoon Competition brief. Neither of them have similar content or requirement so it is important to know what they are looking for. Onform is a weekly creative challenge on Tumblr, there will be a shape online for each week and it is our job to be creative and interpret the shape. We can only use black and white and the colour of the shape so that it is a very exciting competition. I regret not brainstorm too much ideas but draw straight away in Photoshop because I might came up with other great ideas but I went for the second idea since started even though the I am pleased with the final illustration. It is also an opportunity to have my work shown to the public by having a Tumblr account. I think I should get more diverse feedback from different area and social media is a perfect place for that. Since then I have been posting my work on Instagram, Tumblre and also facebook, seeking more feedbacks to improve myself. The International KYM Cartoon Competition brief is a brief that I feeling emotionally connect to. The title is refugee and it was the period when refugee has become an international problem and the brief raises the awareness of the issue, hoping more people could provide aid. I looked at a lot of documentaries and news before I started sketching and all the ideas came directly from the research, they are drawings of some impactful scenes. I used different methods to amplify the frustration and sadness refugees have by using heavy pencil strokes, cold and dark tone. From the first crit, I gained quite a lot of constructive feedback saying that those illustrations are very powerful and could really show the mood and atmosphere of the refugees. I think they success because they are situation from reality and I appreciated the impact they have and hope more people can care about the refugee issue.

Do it Ten and Loopdeloop are the two animation briefs I did for individual briefs. I took totally different approaches towards the briefs and hope I could discovery or practiced skills I have. I drew frame by frame in Photoshop for Do It Ten and luckily found that my skills are not rusty at all. It took about three days to finish the brief so I was quite impressed with the speed and quality. At first I animated the cat without any reference, which looked like a monster and found out cat would not walk with two legs at the same time. It improved when more research on cat walk cycle is done and I learnt the system rather than just copying directly from the reference and I am happy with the result. Loopdeloop is a bi-monthly competition and I was going to animate a simple animation that allows me to try out new rigging tool called Duik for After Effect. Although it took quite a lot of time to experiment the tool, it is a very useful animation method that produces smooth and natural movement of characters. I spent about fives days on the animation and I should have worked faster. I also receive feedback directly from Loopdeloop once I submitted my work. They pointed out that the speeding of the animation could be adjusted in different parts for instance speeding up when the rabbit pull out make up so it is more of a surprise.  Immediately I changed the speeding and once again feel the power of useful feedback that could change the quality of work immensely. I really appreciated their reply and my work looks much more natural and consistent after correction. This proofs that I need to look at my work from different perspectives by showing to others and not to be shy or worried about the level of the work.

For the collaborative brief, I work with Greta in animation instead. The reason for this was because I missed the meeting because I was ill that day and soon the holiday came and I was not brave enough to talk to any illustration or graphic design students, and Mike helped me grouped with Greta which makes me feel so relief. However deep inside, I understand this is an unavoidable issue that talking to strangers is the ultimate goal I need to aim for. I was not impressed with myself therefore I hope this could be improved next year. The YCN Orchard Pig brief is very flexible because there are not restriction or requirement but to show the company’s logo and core value: bold and stay rooted. Greta and me is a good team, we have our posts sorted out very quickly where she is in charge of character design and I am in charge of background. At the beginning we were planning to make a set of posters and a set of gif version of the posters but it has changed when we finished the poster design. We decided to go for 3D mascot and I am very happy with this decision because it can defiantly make out work stands out from the crow and suggesting ideas for cheap PR for the company. However, we only have two weeks before submission when we had this mascot idea and we almost rushed the work. Greta was making the model in maya and I was UV mapping the model after her. There were some problems with the model that some edges are messed up and the only way I could solve this problem is to select different loop of edges instead, avoiding the messed up part to reduce confusion of the mesh when unfolding in maya. The schedules does not allow us to remake a model so I decided to edit the flaws on the mascot in Photoshop instead and luckily it looks great on itself and also with the photo background.

Working in a team needs to take a lot of things into account. I have learnt to keep in touch with Greta everyday to check if we are on track also I am open for any suggestions. Try to be polite and respect others’ work. I think I could be a good leader because I love to keep everything organised and work with timetable, I also found that I care about group mate and encourage coming up with ideas together. After all, it was a good experience working with Greta and we did not have argument through out the entire production.

Project Report

http://issuu.com/wing0wing/docs/project_report_wing_chiu_ouan503_tc/1

Individual design boards for Collaborative Brief

Design Boards for the individual practice brief

Responsive:Final Crit

We were told to get our work ready for the crit so most of our animation student did not pay too much attention in giving information in the board, explain the brief but to show most of our work, hoping for feedback on the work itself. I put my work together in a clean and organised way, stating the name of the brief and very little detail about the brief.

However most of the crit I receive from the other is saying how I should have done the design board instead of the work itself. First, we weren't get told by our tutor about how we should include in the board and thought it was only a crit and feedback day about work. So I was not happy with the comments and the quantity of them. However they give me a lot of advices on how to make a good design board and how I should do it like including the purpose of the brief and why I want to do this brief.

Responsive: Present board

For the submission, we have to make a PDF file with a lot of supporting writing and big picture to demonstrate our idea as said on the YCN website so I made a design board and layout the document in word then convert it into PDF.

I think the design board is better to be clean with the mascot in different direction with some original sketches. I did not put any writing in the board because I think the pictures are enough to tell the process and story. The background is not white or black as it needs to stand out from the paper so I choose a minty colour which is quite neutral and peaceful to look at.

The reason why we choose this brief:

The Orchard Pig brief provided us with a great degree of flexibility in media. Also the simple but powerful core value of the brand “Stayed rooted”. We love to think creatively and innovatively, look for new ideas. We believe we have managed to achieve that for this brief and found our selves really enjoying the process of production. Our view of the brand has not really changed through out the project, which we consider to be a good thing, because that means the brand is very distinctive and so we managed to keep it consistent. We stuck with the values and the principles of the brief, but with our own interpretation of them and hopefully it comes out through our work. We are very satisfied with the final result and hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Description of work:

We are providing two sets of work for this brief: a series of posters and a mascot proposal. The ideas behind the posters were to introduce the cider making process as well as the history of Orchard Pig that truly rooted in Somerset’s in 1850’s so as to amplify the craftiness of the cider through the sepia toned illustrations. We decided to create a series of humorous posters that reference the real cider making process and tools at the past along with pig founders and workers that could represent the brand in an interesting way. Through our research process we have noticed that Orchard Pig sponsors the Bath Spa rugby team, so we took this opportunity and built the idea of a mascot from it, proposing that the mascot would be suitable not only for festivals, beer stands and public PR events but for the sponsored team as well. We have created the mascot in 3D using Maya to provide a more realistic representation of the idea. With appropriate texturing and editing in Photoshop we have managed to also provide a context to the character.

Me and Greta both have a chance to write about our thoughts on the project and these are the final words we both agree and hoping to tell Orchard Pig.

Proof of submission!

Responsive: Editing in photoshop

We decided to get close to reality so searching photos and reference pictures that really exist in real life. Therefore I took some photos from their website, sponsor training kit of local rugby team and christmas market shop, deciding to include the mascot in the photo using photoshop in order to improve reliability .

I absolutely love the product because it fits so well in the photos which really could come to life! The lighting of the mascot is edited to fit the surround by adding colour filters and altering the level of light. The mascot stands out so well in public and the logo is eye catching as well.

Body size mascot could defiantly attract different target groups, from kids to adults, even though kids and teenagers can not drink, they could interact with the mascot and have fun with it. Parents might remember the brand though the interaction that enable a chance of purchasing. After all we want a friendly and approachable character that bring joy to everyone.

I was not sure about blocking any people in the sponsored rugby team so I made two experiment and Greta chose not to block the team member and that's what we go for at the end.

I am going to make a character design sheet for the mascot so as to show professional presentation skills and make the design more understandable. Also it is need to be made into a pdf file with all the supporting writing and picture which I am going to do tomorrow. In term of the limited time, I think we are doing pretty good in scheduling and managing workload.

Responsive:UV mapping

I am in charge of UV mapping and which is totally new to me. From the last project, we use toon for the colour of our pig characters therefore I did not have a chance to try UV mapping in any of my project so this time I carefully follow Mat's video guide, deforming the mesh step by step. The mesh was not created perfectly in terms of some collapse edges and a lot of extra edges left due to deleting unnecessary edges. One main part of UV mapping is to cut the mesh into parts and unfold them like sewing a teddy bear but it is extremely difficult with the messy edges therefore I told more time than I should, attempting to solve the problem as best as I can. I select different loop of edges instead of involving the messed up part in order to avoid confusion of mesh.

I was just able to get the UV map but that is not really perfectly extracted and it is something out of my hand. If we have more time, I would have redo the whole mesh to make sure organised edges in order to proceed. The mesh is very important to the rest of the production which is what I have learnt from working on the mesh made by someone else.

The complicated part is to colour the map. Since I fail to get a perfect map, I need to refer back to the area of the map in maya when colouring in photoshop. Luckily it did not take long to find out the area and quickly applied some texture material like felt fabric (below)

and denim texture, multiply the layer in photoshop so as to make them show on the mascot. I am very happy with the texture and there have been several trials of textures and colours. Here is the final UV map.

At first the mascot look very scary with no eye white and suspenders to its trousers. The blue is lighter and could not really see the details (especially in a black background). Greta suggests to add suspender and yellow stitching alongside the trousers, I also give it eye white and darken the denim.

I also tried different lighting and angles when experimenting. It cannot be too bright otherwise the details on the texture might gone and the same when too dark which is very difficult to mange the lighting.

Eventually I decided to use grey to export the image and edit in photoshop. It is very difficult to get stills from maya especially when we are in hurry. The quickest way is to edit lighting and colours and shadow in photoshop.

I regret spending too much time on unfolding the mesh and left with not enough time for the colouring and lighting which is as important as the modelling. We should have started the production a few days before and should not wait until the last few days to make the model. At this point, I really dont want to rebuild the UV map anymore therefore it is best to focus on the editing working in photoshop and fix the flaws while getting ready for the next part: apply photo background.