IOL Week 1 - Intro

For our Week 1 class exercise, I was partnered up with Angus & Yao, pitching a project design for Angus.

After the interview process, it sounded like Angus was very interested in world building and the interactions that can occur in an environment, with an interest in 3D games. My project pitch for him was to create an interesting and interactive 3D environment that held unexpected interactions.

I demonstrated this through a paper diorama, with one picture showing the natural states of environmental objects and the second picture revealing an interacted state, e.g. a flower blooming and releasing stars. (Yes, the lake pictures are in the wrong order.) Despite being a very basic prototype, Angus was able to clearly understand the meaning behind the diorama and was able to identify how he would differ in his approach to the project, which hopefully helped him generate a few ideas of his own.

Yao’s pitch for me involved a pipe-cleaner model of Snow White, indicating his suggestion for me to look back at Disney’s Nine Old Men and their approach to animating using live (or video) reference to capture the movements and expressions of actors.

Reflective Questions:

How did engaging with a real person change your direction?

Engaging with a real person helped to clarify the direction I was intending on pursuing. Yao was able to point out the key areas of focus from the ideas that I already had in mind, reinforcing my need to push live action video referencing further in my practice.

What was it like showing unfinished work to each other?

It was fun to see everyone else’s quick pitch representations, and while initially stressful to try to figure out how to create my own pitch representation, I think the prototypes we built were fairly succinct and easy to read.

How did the pace of the rapid iterations feel?

The interviews went well, but having three people in our group made the rapid iterations feel extremely tight. We didn’t get to go into as much depth with our questions and responses. 

What stage would you revisit/do next?

I’m very keen to start gathering a collection of example works and references that will help inform what my project outcomes will look like.

What is one thing you want to try tomorrow? Is there one thing you can take forward with something?

Something I can start doing is filming or searching for video references of varying movements in humans, animals and objects that I could create pencil test animations from.