Tuesday, April 13, 2010

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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Final Project: The Little House of Horrors.

I really liked how our final project turned out. I was mostly in charge of designing the backgrounds for the pages, but also helped in coming up with the design for one of the characters, Zombie.

Let me give a brief summary of our FP on this blog, even though most of it has already been presented and submitted already. :)

Brief Storyline.
Our story revolves around Lil Red, a Monster Exterminator in charge of annihilating horrible monsters in order to keep the peace in her beautiful hometown, Happyland.

Red one day receives a call to exterminate several monsters residing in the terrible Haunted House of Horrors.

She quickly gets on the job and proceeds to the Haunted House.


However, at the Haunted House, Red did not find the terrifying, horrible monsters that she expected to. Indeed, the only thing terrifying and monstrous about those monsters was their appearance. As she visits the respective monsters' rooms and expects to find horrible things inside, she realises that they aren't threatening at all and are actually harmless in nature.

To show this, we used a pop-out effect, where readers can literally "open" the doors which are cut out for them. Take a look at this series of pages to explain this effect:

The "closed" door.

The "open" door.

Revelation of the character's harmlessness!

Our moral of the story is that “all that glitters is not gold.” and that people should not judge a person by first appearances or stereotypes. We should allow ourselves to look beyond the initial facade to the true inner character.

Character Designs.
When we first started out, each of our team was assigned a monster character to design. Initially, due to our different styles, the four monsters looked very different and inconsistent, although they were individually strong and pleasing character designs. Hence, we assigned Dexter to draw all the characters following our designs but in his style to ensure consistency. We came to a consensus to use his drawing style due to its several characteristics that made the monsters look cute.

In order to make our now relatively scary character designs more adorable, we squashed the proportions of the characters to the approximate ratio of 1 head to 1 body. Unnecessary details were omitted, and only the most striking and memorable features of the characters were kept for the final design.

Also, each character's scary silhouette was strategically designed such that the silhouette was essentially the same shape and outline as the revealed design. Mummy's design is the best example of this.

(Mummy's mop looks like a claw in his silhouette.)

My allocated monster design was Zombie.

The top sketches were all done by me. The bottom few were done by Dexter, who rendered Zombie in his own cool, unique style!

Backgrounds.

This was my main job in my project group--drawing and designing backgrounds.

Here are some of the backgrounds, sketched, drawn and inked by me:

This scene was supposed to resemble a "Hall Of Fame", even though it's more like a "Hall Of Terror". Its purpose was to show the monster characters at their scariest in order to heighten the readers' expectations of how scary the monsters seem. This is so that when they find out what the monsters are REALLY like, the contrast is stronger.





To keep the background perspectives consistent, the backgrounds were all drawn in a centralized and frontal view. It was difficult deciding on this, because things like Zombie’s bed look better and more accurately drawn when viewed from an angle rather than front-on. However, since a flat profile view of the character’s surroundings worked better for our shadow “pop-out” effect rendered on the characters, we decided this was the best way for the backgrounds to be drawn—flat and reminiscent of an old school side-scrolling game.

Colouring style.


We adopted a messy style of colouring using water-colours. This was the style we felt most suited the drawing style of the characters. Water-colour has a messy and haphazardly done feel that is suitable for the sketchy drawings. The original full-colour style of digital colouring on the other hand, would have been suitable for vectorized images, but wouldn't be consistent with the lineart and design of ours.


We intended for the artwork to seem like a child’s piece of artwork. This would suit the theme of the children’s storybook and enable children to relate better to the graphics. Secondly, this colouring style is consistent with our layout being a ‘top secret’ case file. It gives the readers the feeling that it was done by a third person witnessing the mystery scene, similar to cases in courtrooms where photo-taking is forbidden.


Full body digital coloring (above) made the graphics seem 2-dimensional and very flat looking. The bright colors that are used for the characters, especially when colored thickly and fully, made the characters too vibrant and optimistic, which was not suitable for the concept of our storybook. Our storybook was still designed along the theme and concept of a haunted house, hence there had to be an air of scariness in our designs.



Overall, this colouring style is refreshing, and suits the unique concept of our storybook.

We wanted our colouring, drawings, and characters to have a whimsical feel, like this image:



Hopefully, our story was engaging and entertaining enough. :) That's all I have for my LAST EVER NM2208 post! Thanks for reading! :)

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Assignment 5: Fighting Climate Change!

Our task:
Create ONE Infographic to illustrate an article on the topic of fighting climate change. The theme 'Fighting Climate' could refer to causes and consequences of global warming, deforestation etc.

I chose to do my infographic on this interesting, informative, and striking article I found online. The article talks about how humans have been abusing our planet in so many ways, that climate change and global warming have been accelerated tremendously in recent years.

The article talks about how the Earth will soon launch a whole host of backlashes in order to "rebalance" the global ecosystem. Quoting the writer of the article: "And how do you rebalance the global ecosystem? The most direct way, from nature's point of view, is to get rid of the cancer that's destroying the planet. That cancer, of course, is us. Humans are, by far, the most destructive force on the planet and the greatest threat to life and biodiversity on planet Earth."

These backlashes will come mainly in the following forms:
-Disruption of food production
-Droughts
-Floods
-Famines
-Infectious Diseases
-Breeding of antibiotic-resistant superdiseases

Here's the link to the article for a more comprehensive read:
My Chosen Article!

I decided to focus my infographic on the consequences of global warming and climate change mentioned in this article. Namely, droughts, floods, famines, infectious diseases, and the breeding of antibiotic-resistant superdiseases.

Here're my developmental sketches:

I had the idea of merging the toxic fumes with the canopy of the trees and have the boxes of information spiralling out from there like bits of toxic fumes and waste gases.

This was a sketch of trying to shape the clouds of toxic fumes properly for the right effect.

I decided to draw out all the little doodles I wanted in the inforgraphic and scanned them in. I made some of my doodles, like the skulls into brushes, such I could use them in the patterns of the infographic. You can find all of these on my final infographic copy.





Compiling and drafting background designs.
After scanning and editing everything in (which was really REALLY time-consuming), I decided to play with the backgrounds, because I wasn't happy with this plain pale yellow one:


Here're the other tricks I tried out.




And here's the final one:

I liked how the gradient of the background matched the gradient in the boxes, giving a rather pleasant look on the whole. The pale yellow background fading to white also helps the greenish brown boxes (the main focus of the infogram) stand out.


Assignment 4: Color Coalition.

Our Task:
Design ONE postcard (both front and back) to promote, or create awareness of a chosen youth theme. The theme can be international, regional or local.

Chosen Theme.
I chose to do my Assignment on Sounds Like Saturday, a series of music and dance performances taking place right in the heart of Orchard Road from 16 Jan to 27 Mar! Indie Rock Bands perform outside Orchard Cineleisure for free listening, and dance classes ranging from Jazz, to Bboy to Hip Hop, are offered to people interested. The event is organised by *scape and aims to promote youth culture in the arts.

Here's the website for further reference. :)
Sounds Like Saturday!

Drafting the postcard design.
For the first few tries, I wanted to focus on the text layout. Here are my first 2 drafts:



P.S. the font isn't a downloaded font, I wrote it myself using a tablet. So no worries on copyright-related issues there.

After these trials, I decided that there was too much text, and decided that I wanted pictures in it. These are the pictures I decided to use:



This is a picture of a friend of mine (top) and his instructor (bottom) taken during our Dance Night a few years back. The photo was taken by a senior of mine who has given me permission to use it for this project.

First I tried editing the photo a little before inserting it in. I upped the contrast after removing the colour from it.
This is what I got:





I then added the pictures to the design, and using brush effects, layer special effects, as well as several other effects in photoshop, came up with several colour trials.

Colour trials.

I tried being as adventurous as possible, and played with a few colours at a time.
#1:

#2:


I found that working with too many colours at one shot like #2 was not pleasing to the eyes. So I chose to go into colour schemes that involved at most 2 dominant colours, for example, brown&black, purple&yellow, green&yellow.
#3:

#4:

#5:

#6:

#7:



For the last one, I just decided to go crazy on bright jarring colours. Which I like. :)
#8:


Final Choice.

Front:


Back:


Reason for choice.
I liked how #3 turned out as well, but it wasn't as eye-catching and as visually striking as #6 was to me. The purple and yellow colours are shouting colours, and would catch my eye immediately if I were to walk past a postcard stand. I also liked how the dancer stood out in the design and attracted my attention, since I'm a dance-enthusiast. If my postcard attracts fellow dance-enthusiasts, then I would have achieved my purpose. :)


Assignment 3: U C What I C.

Our task:
Create ONE sequence of images comprises between 6‐9 photographs that tells a linear photo narrative.

Firstly, we had to come up with a storyboard for our photographs so that there would be a coherent story.

Draft Storyboards.
I thought of several storylines, but most of them were not feasible... I still like them, though. So here they are.
#1: Patch-Up.


#2: Face-Off.


#3: Munch munch.


Final Storyboard.
Here's the final storyboard I chose:
It's somewhat similar to #2, except with a different twist at the end. :)

The story is simple, and pretty much self-explanatory, but basically I wanted to show a dramatic, epic battle between 2 characters that carries on throughout all the frames, till one wins. Then the last frame shows REALITY, where the 2 characters, Blackie and Whitie, are revealed to be virtual characters, and the "REAL" characters are the ones controlling them using the game consoles--Domo-Kun and Monkey plushie. (2 harmless looking and adorable soft toys)

Rough Pictures.
And here're the rough pictures before compiling and editing. Oh gosh there were more trial shots and retakes than there were actual satisfactory photos!


These photos just don't look good with flash. That's why I turned off the flash for all my photos. :)

In these photos, I was practising on focusing my camera lens on my subject, my soft toys!:



(here, I tried to angle the shot such that it looks as if my subject Domo-kun is looking upwards.)



My main subjects! They look like they're dancing. O_o

I experimented with camera angles again and tried to give my subjects an intimidating look by giving them a low angle shot.



Focus Shots.
In these shots, I was trying to see which was better for these 2 shots I had in mind--focusing on the character in the foreground or on the character in the background.
Foreground character focus:



Background character focus:




I chose to focus on the character in the foreground, because this gave the effect I wanted--for the viewer to look at the photo as if he/she was looking from the foreground character's perspective. Hence a blurred background would work better for this effect.


Long shots:




Between these two shots, I prefer the second as it is more aerial and high-angled, and more of a long shot, which I believe is a good way to open a short photo narrative. The second shot gives the viewer a wider view of the characters and their surroundings, as well as their sizes in relation to their surroundings.



Experimenting with canted angles.


I used the following series to decide on the size to zoom in for one of the frames where Blackie and Whitie get ready to battle!






I thought it'd be interesting to include an unfocused character in the background, but realised this scene works better when there is only 1 character in the frame.


I considered Portrait shots as well :)

These gave a good "face-off" effect, leading me to choose them in the end.


Battle scenes:
Getting the angle and focus right for these scenes was crucial. It was really tedious to hold the figurines in place and take photos of them, without getting my fingers (or any other body part, for that matter) in the photo.




I decided to omit frame #4 in my original storyboard in my final product, because I found it somewhat redundant. Frame #3 reiterated about the same story, so repeating the concept in frame #4 was unnecessary to me.


Frame by Frame explanations.

#1: High-angle shot, long shot.
The opening scene was meant to resemble the beginning of a typical battle scene, where the camera seems to be looking down on the 2 main characters from an aerial view. This is to give the general feel of the environment the characters are in and open the story.

#2: Close-up, eye-level shots.
In this shot, which is a combination of 2 photos that I took, I wanted the reader to feel as if he/she is looking at his/her opponent from the 2 characters' perspectives. Again, this is supposed to draw parody from typical battle scene techniques, to heighten suspense and explanation that a battle is about to take place.

#3: Mid-shot, eye-level.
This shot shows the 2 main characters about to face off against each other, drawing parody from video games where 2 screens are made into one, showing one character versus another.

#4: Mid-shot, high angle, slanted angle.
This was my first action shot in the battle sequence. Getting this perspective was difficult, but I'm happy with the outcome. The high angle is supposed to give the reader a sense of superiority and power, which is what Blackie is feeling as he launches his first attack on Whitie. I wanted readers to relate to Blackie. The slanted angle also gives a sense of suspense that some action is going to take place.

#5: Mid-shot, slanted angle.
In this scene, Whitie holds strong against Blackie, defending against his attack, and sending Blackie flying. The slanted angle again conveys a sense of action and suspense, and is supposed to urge readers to want to read to the next frame quickly.

#6: Long-shot, eye-level shot.
The final scene of the battle is supposed to give an objective account of what has happened--Blackie has been defeated.

#7: Mid-close-up, low shot.
The low shot gives our champion a sense of superiority, to emphasise how victorious and heroic he is for having won the battle.

#8: Close-up, eye level shot.
The twist scene is a close-up one, to focus on the 2 crucial characters at the end. I wanted the shot to enable readers to see things from the perspectives of these 2 characters, hence I took an eye-level shot.

About Me.

Nicole Tay.
Freshie // NUS.
NM 2208 Student.

About This Blog.

This is my official NM 2208 Learning Journal. :)

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