Placement Year | website

PRE-PLACEMENT PORTFOILIO WORK

SUMMER:

Having somewhat of a break, the search for placement had fully begun.

Knowing full well that my work would not get me anywhere, I kept working on many solo projects to help hone my skills at Z-Brush and modelling. After a pretty stressful year, I didnt want to put myself off or have any crashes so I focuses in on pretty loose ideas and quite fun and outlandish concepts. Here are a couple of links to a breakdown of my summer work.

CREATURES

ENVRIOMENTS

SUBSTANCE DESIGNER

With term time coming around, and at the current writing of this blog post, I still do not have a placement. There have been some good rejection emails, but I have found myself in dire need of some structure.

I want to expand into Unreal and I want to key in my animation skills. I have to proposed to some other members in the class that I want to get a group together and to make a short. I think that when im in a group with other people, it makes me much more conscientious of my time scale and my own deigns and concepts.

OCTOBER- SEA TEMPLE

With September over and no other progress with jobs, I decided that I should try and work a group project. I have found working by myself tedious, going around in circles with various ideas to not much avail.

I have been drawing a lot. Regular sketchbook work is really important in idea development.

I also have been piling on design podcasts, a particular favourite of which is concept artist Feng Zhu's Design Cinema https://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL/videos

A big thing that I have picked up is that the high tier studios and production companies like to see artists that have some sort of overarching narrative in their work. I had done a lot of z brush work in designing a temple like structure, but, I have found this by itself to be too oddball in design and not really of much use. I decided to build a narrative around this original idea, and pitch it to other members of the class who haven't found a placement yet. They really liked my idea, and from that we have set out a full production to be finished by mid January.

DESIGN SPECS

From the design cinema podcasts, I have worked into my head a stronger idea than I have ever had before for design in my work.

IN ENGINE WORK - A lot of jobs are looking for game engine experience. there seems to be a lot more out there for this kind of thing, and now looking back at this as I write, I'm questioning why I didn't suggest working together on a group with this kind of thing sooner. We decided to go with Unreal, as we have already had brief experience with Unity.

FOCUS IN ON MY ROLE AS A TEXTURE ARTIST/CREATURE ARTIST -

Having nearly full creative reign over this project, I want to make sure that we all have room to specialise ourselves and work like we are in a full scale production environment. I believe I'm the only one in my class to be working with Substance Designer. Piers wishes to hone his skills as a character artist, and Juan, if willing, wishes to get into VFX. There will be amble opportunity for everyone invited onto this project to make it shine in their own way.

REAL WORLD DESIGN MERGING WITH SURREALIST HORROR -

A lot of projects are looking for people to get something behind them which is based in some form of real, historical situation. Looking at a lot of the media out nowadays, it is shying away from sci-fi and more into real life situations (for example, the popularity of such IP's such as Red Dead, GTA and Call of Duty), but as students, our in-experience still limits us in ways. Although Cosmic Horror is a very hard genre to get behind, something with a much more wider creative freedom in the way it does not necessarily need to be completely tied to the real world, may be an advantage. Plus its pretty fun, and a deeply interesting topic. Knowing that this project is going to be an enormous amount of work and discipline, I would like to helm something that I wont want to kill myself over in a months time.

THE ACTUAL IDEA

Set in late middle ages/early Tudor times, two men, possibly a father and son, have travelled to a mysterious temple. The son has been gravely wounded. When they enter, they come face to face with an ancient God.

Here are some of the first sketches. From the get-go I wanted to keep it ambiguous in the way that the viewer is not sure weather it is the beginning of a story, or the end of one. Growing up, I loved games such as Silent hill and Dark souls. The type of atmosphere they build and the symbolism which lays behind the design of the environments and characters builds such an atmosphere. I also wanted to keep the it simple, knowing that it would allow for people to grow and develop their individual roles to build narrative.

From the intial pitch to my classmates, the first thing we did whenever we decided on an idea was to start working on a production schedule.

Starting on roughly around the 4th of October, our fist animatic and block outs of the environment would be done by the 21st. On writing this, it is the 27th. We finished at animatic for the 23rd, and had presented the idea to tutors and course people over the last couple of days. Even though I do not have a job, I believe that regular updates and presentations with faculty members will be of extreme importance. Even if we don't get jobs, we will be standing on our feet when it comes to the work we will need to do for final year.

PRESENTATION

I managed to nab some people at end of the day, and the feedback that we got from was incredible. Below is a summary of some of the work i did for the presentation and a collection of some references and mood boards I have been using so far.

UPDATED STORYBOARDS:

ANIMATIC

MOOD-BOARDS

3D TEMPLE/ENVIRONMENT BLOCKOUTS

SPINE IDEA:

When developing the interior, I loved the way that the design of the environments in Alien involved both organic and mechanical forms. I liked the idea of the pair of characters having to travel to the heart of the temple, so I had the idea to make the interior look like a rib-cage.

Creature Design:

Following a lot of the Design Cinema Podcasts, and also a want to keep up my practice on Photoshop, I did a lot of drawing over the past few weeks. Here are some of my sketches:

FEED BACK

TLDR; Core idea: good. There is still a marathon to run.

Timing: The key aspect from the first meeting was that to slow everything right the fuck down. There needs to be tension, its half the point of the whole thing.

Bring everything out: Make the landscapes stretch all the way out when we are doing environment shots, and whenever we have the characters together, we need to bring them close. If its a Lovecraftian theme, the composition of the shots need to make the humans feel petty, and dwarfed.

Lighting: The lighting in the temple is going to be key to how to audience reacts to the environment. The pinnacle of the entire piece is going to be the reveal of the so called "Sea God", and it better make you shiver.

Cinematography: The environment should be framed and built around the 21:9 ratio we are going with. This is fundamentally important to see how our work will be perceived. The shots and character movments will need to be roped under this aswell.

Symbolism and the Abject: Cosmic horror is steeped in this. We need to get around and develop the design of the temple and the creature to really hand this home.

Turning it up to 11: If we are going to make something pop, we are going to make people feel disgusted. The "Abject" theme we are going with (which I could write another 6 pages on) needs to be something that is just not uncanny, but something so vile it goes against human nature. This can only be achieved through all the specs we set out with in the first place; a good environment, and good characters.

This will probably be the most challenging project yet. But, even though I know that there is going to be challenges and stress, I am incredibly excited to start next week and throw myself into this.

OCTOBER- BBC GRAPHIC DESIGN

In stark contrast to the other work we are going to be doing, there is going to be a project with the BBC.

DESIGN BRIEF:

Design a logo for the newly formed "Brand Ambassador's". It will be an internal campaign. They will be involved with company outreach to employment events, research gathering and show running. It will be appearing on internal emails, promo videos and social media. Design submissions will need to attend to these specs.

Key words:

Non corporate

Inspiring

Inclusive

Unity

Diversity

Motivational

There will also need to be a Vector format available in final submission.

Since this is essentially an advertising job, the first thing I began to think about is composition and colour.

SEA TEMPLE - DEVELOPMENT

Since the last posting, there has been considerable updates and developments.

After redoing the storyboards, I have realised that a key area where where I have misunderstood is the sheer amount of time and development needed to be put into indie film making, particularly if you don't know how to make a CGI short from start to finish.

As time is ticking on and there are jobs to be had. I have decided to narrow things down to developing a core environment and the creature.

Here are the updated storyboards:

Some things still to work out, including the end creature sequence.

However, I think that this would be easier to work out whenever the environment is modeled and fleshed out.

Because all of this is going to be a huge amount of work, the environment I have decided to choose for my showreel is the final inner chamber.

CREATURE DEVELOPMENT:

Gach Máthair

Original Sculpt:

The idea to change the gender of the creature was a pretty big decision

Talking to some older students, we got into the topic of cosmic/Lovecraftian horror. A key part of this type of horror is a psychological term known as the "Abject". Defined by Julia Kristeva, the term means "the state of being cast off".

However, this definition lies nothing short of raising more questions. The feeling is one of the most deepest upsets a human can feel, and can be realised and described similar to that whenever we see a corpse. It is a reminder of our limited time of existence and our own moralities.
The younger of the two characters is being brought forward to sacrifice by an older father figure. It is a lot more fitting if the creature had similarity to a mother than anything else, pushing the abject concept of reverse birth.

This entire process was a huge test for me developing my anatomy skills. It was exceedingly hard at first trying to bring a lot of stuff together. One thing that I was insistent on was not using any bash meshes and sculpting everything from hand. It added a long time onto the development of the creature but I'm really glad that I stuck this out. I made a bunch of separate pieces, considerably low poly, and adjusted them about. This was really handy to fall back on when I had to re-sculpt a couple of times.

With great feedback from a guy at a local studio, I began refining the shapes and thinking about different ways to abstract the form a little bit more. This was a really fun process. It made me really realise the role of strong concept art has for modeling. Figuring out design answers for yourself can be a very long drawn out process.

Sculpting the hands was a pretty hard process. Getting used to the proportions and the subtle differences between male and female hands was a big problem.

Going back and fourth with my studio friend was a big big help, rolling ideas off each other and and adjusting slight details added a lot to the creepiness of the creature.

The legs where the next big challenge. If the arms where creepy and alien like, I needed to do something with the lower half. This took a lot of re-sculpting, because the legs of a figure adds a lot to the overall perception of proportion of the sculpt. I think at this stage, this was either the fourth of fifth time It had been redesigned.
I liked the idea of it being able to bend its legs the wrong way, so it could maybe climb down a wall or hang from something in a really disturbing way.
I was also told to rethink the chest. The idea of it as a walking vagina came across as a bit to vulgar and undermining for this kind of thing.

female_body_08_inverted_legs_boots_with_

Re sculpt number 6. Although salvaging a lot from previous bases, the legs here where very hard to work out. There was a lot of development with the shoulders and back which needed to be made, then the rework of the legs was a completely different beast. Took inspiration from a bird with this.

The "Sea Cucumber" worm thing definatly needs a lot more development. If it is meant to represent some sort of formless monstrosity, then definatly some thought is going to need to be had on it. But im really looking forward with this, I can be a lot more free and experiment with a load of freaky ideas. Meanwhile, its time to go and retopo the body, which is going to be a pile of fun.

Aaron Williams

Animation Degree Blog