BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaAssignment Title: Final Major ProjectUnit Title: The EncounterUnit 6: Application, Exploration and Realization in Art and Design

Start Date: 23rd October Finish Date: 5th March

BriefYou are required to produce a Final Major Project of your choosing.

TasksTask 1 - Grading Criteria P1, M1.PROJECT PROPOSALYour project proposal must be produced as a focused outline brief: Your proposal must be not less than 300 words and no more than 500 words.Section 1Working title or theme of FMP proposalWhat you will work towards producing(Guide: 100/150 words)

Section 2Influences, starting points and contextual referencesEarly ideas research and sources (you should include a short list of research sources e.g. books, films, videos, exhibitions)(Guide: 50/100 words)

Section 3Intended techniques, media, processesTimescales (an action plan is essential)(Guide: 50/150 words)

Section 4Proposed method of evaluation (how you will review your FMP in critical and analytical ways — self and peer review, tutorials, critiques, questionnaires to target different audiences etc.). A supporting or artist’s statement would be useful here.

Ongoing review e.g. work journal, annotated sketchbook, reflective diary mapping progress against unit criteria(Guide: 50/100 words)

Space is becoming a premium EcoRecycled materials

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaScheduleWeek 1: ResearchWeek 2: Ideas/ Design DevelopmentWeek 3: ProductionWeek 4: ProductionWeek 5: ProductionWeek 6: ProductionWeek 7: Questionnaire, EvaluationWeek 8: Presentation for Art Design, Media Exhibition

Research further into your chosen Final Major project. Look at the history and how your chosen field has evolved.

Task 2 - Grading Criteria P2, M2, Using your project proposal produce ideas /working roughs/ storyboard with annotations using a variety of media.

Task 3 - Grading Criteria P3, M3, D1Generate media assets using appropriate software and implement your designs using appropriate hardware and software.

Task 4 - Grading Criteria P4, M4, D2Review and analyse your work in progress / production in a clear and concise order. Evaluate the whole assignment.

Task 5 - Grading Criteria P5, M4, D2Produce an A3 board of design ideas and progression with final outcome for portfolio and electronic outcome in correct format for Art, Design & Media exhibition. Present research, design/development work and progression evidence in a folder in a clear concise order with section breaks and evaluate to your peers and lecturing staff.

Evidence Folder containing the following: research, ideas/storyboard, work in

progress, evaluation and bibliography. (Folder can be paper based or send as a Word or PDF document through moodle).

Electronic version of final outcome for Art, Design & Media Exhibition.

Grading Criteria

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

Proposal

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaFor my Final Major Project I’m going to create a small animation to present my concept art for a game idea. The game itself will be as historically accurate as it can be, I will focus on the storyline and images themselves to produce a small film to present my concept to a game publisher. I will focus on how the possibility of science fiction was believable in the 1940’s. I will focus my research on famous concept artists so I can produce an art style of my own style with inspiration from the greats. I want to create concept art worthy of the main publishers.

Concept art design is crucial to the design process and is the way of communicating you’re idea just from the images. From a young age I have watched concept art develop into some of my favourite games. I want to produce a high quality animation to present my work. The art style throughout the film might change because of the different methods I hope to use for my concept ideas. I will aim my trailer for the younger audience of 15-25 years. I want the game to be educational and factual as well as exiting and intense. The science fiction theme will be created to how the 1940’s pictured extra terrestrials. The conspiracy theories of the 1940’s will produce a strong background and a good structure to the storyline.

Research

Concept Art and presentation

Concept art is a simple or complicated work that can represent a feel, mood or surrounding to a movie or game. Concept art is used for everything and can create some imaginative ideas. Concepts are a key part to a production and is where the ideas generate before

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Mediafinalizing or just improving. There may be many versions of one idea that can be conveyed in different ways using concept art. The visual development of an idea is a key and can be presented to a production company or a content manager who will decide if the idea is good enough to be included in the game, film, comic book or animation. This is a useful website that shows a presentation of a concept design for a game, it seems like he is in college or school. http://prezi.com/yhrcshs_tc1y/concept-art-presentation/ concept art has ben used since car design has been around, Disney has been using concept artists since 1930’s. in the early stages of production there will e a quick turn over of work to provide a broad range of interpretations, most of this being in the form of sketches, speed paints, and 3D overpaints. I found simple sketches and finalized pictures work well for concept ides. I will focus later pieces of concept art, like matte paintings, to produce as realistic as required.Not all concepts can be the same style but game and film concepts often follow the same theme to drawing or finalizing the image.

Concept artist-Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu is my favourite concept artist because o his love for tradition art styles. He paints the fundamentals of art history using just a graphics tablet and an idea. He is one of the best artists for conveying his representations to digital canvas and producing incredible works for film and game. He has had famous clients buy his work from James Cameron, George Lucas, Michael Bay to videogame developers like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft.

Finalized concept sketched concept \/ \/

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

These are fairly generic landscapes for any modern artist, digital or otherwise, but they are fantastic. Sci-fi and fantasy are his most common themes and each one develops as you look, into it. He uses techniques that have had a place in fine arts for centuries: chiaroscuro, sfumato, composition, but suddenly there is a giant robot or a monster with foot-long fangs. Not to mention how he seems to put together alien worlds as if he was taking his easel down to paint the hillside at the edge of town.He is a great perspective artist and can catch any angle on the canvas. Its fascinating how he envisions his own city’s specifically the bland colour and pastel shades. The lack of colour in some of his works gives a atmospheric and realistic effect.

His image of warfare and environments is captured perfectly; he can capture motion and still make it a still concept. His work is mostly used for book covers, spread pages and concept art for games and movies. He only stays with a few colours at a time and works around the light. He creates shading and lighting to another level of detail. His images often look realistic with creative perspectives. He can capture textures of pretty much every material but keeping it though the science fiction theme.

Jack Kirby

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

Jack Kirby was the concept artist who designed famous characters for the most famous comic book publishers of all time. He started his drawing by tracing figures and characters. His first professional characters where captain America for the publisher timely comics, predecessor of marvel comics. He inspired me for my 1940’s style comics from his original captain America character. A typical American patriot that I felt would have been some sort of propaganda at the time. This fits in with the whole conspiracy theories.

He inspired so many to create the classic comic book heroes and science fiction comics to. His work is bold and edgy in his early years. He gave each character a personality That would stand from the others. The early comics didn’t perfect the proportions of real people and would often be overegsadurated. He inspired me to create an introduction in a comic book style that can be turned into a small animatic of some sort.

His bold colours and dramatic font creates the iconic comic book theme. He would overhand some pictures within the comic as if they where jumping from there section. I find that this ties the story and images together. The images use bold block colours with no gradients, the shading is done by colouring bold black lines to represent the lack of light. They would create different crosshatch patterns to give different textures for different materials. The layout of the comics is effective and easy to follow and by using the Comic sans font it makes it effective and easier for the reader. The bold stroke surrounding the main boxes and images shows the importance of the figure or image. It’s an easy way to draw the reader t what’s important. It looks as if he uses more pastel colours instead of making them to bright. They often clash and look s if there might be to much going on.

James Paick

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaJames Paick has worked for many of today's top entertainment companies for clients such as Naughty Dog, NCsoft, Trion and Sony Computer Entertainment America.

This painting gave me insight into how concept artist is one of the most free minded jobs you could find. The scale of you’re concept is only restricted by how strongly you can picture your outcome. James paick can picture scenes and worlds from what looks like the future or different planets. He can capture the realistic views in his images by his detail and creative angles. He creates all of his work digitally and using a graphics tablet and an image. He had a reason for all of his images; it shows he planes out every detail before putting pen to pad. You can almost see the structure to the image by how clean the lines are on the river and buildings. The image is called Waterfall Fort, this image is like his other environment designs for videogames, television, and films. His detailed para-geographies are some of the best concepts I’ve seen. It’s easy to picture the type of feel and theme of the art style.

The Copper texture and colour fits in well with the futuristic theme well, the use of the Bright blue and orange are effective and modern. This colour scheme is a recurring theme in today’s media; the colours have been used in modern fictional games, movies and comics. The detail of the textures work well with the shadows and highlights, they give detail to every arch or curve of the buildings.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI did some primary research by sketching from books in Cardiff library so I could get proportions of the aircraft I was going to use. I gathered information for the plane I chose and began sketching the angles I would use for my first few frames. I could easily transfer the images to digital by scanning and drawing over the images.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI decided to sketch some layouts of the comic book image at the start, I wanted this style because of jack Kirby the concept artists. He began his comics in 1941which is close to the era I wanted to re create in my story. I gathered information about the year I wanted to base the story on and tried to produce a factual structure for it. This gave me a strong structure for my story and a factual background. I wanted this to be detailed with as many documents to back up my story. I gathered the research and general knowledge of the year into one word document so it would be my reference to check.

I began writing out a small story in bullet points showing the main points of my story progression with steady facts to back it all up. I researched into conspiracy theories to

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Mediatry and compare the stories from the sightings. There are newspaper articles that back up the conspiracies.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI used advanced search to pin point some documents and crazy conspiracy theorists so I could create my own. I searched for the most recent theories in the us to see how they have changed or if details had been altered.

I found one theorist that describes the Roswell theory in his own vision. The strange thing is that the facts are still the same and the alleged facts are still correct, they just have gone into a lot more detail about hat happened. The more detail that’s in the story the more believable it would be. Making people doubt what they believe is a good way of keeping people interested. He posted his theory to a blog containing his visions of other theories.

http://mysterioustimes.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/i-was-wrong-2/

Work in progress

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI created some concepts of the aircraft I was going to use by using Photoshop. I sketched some angles of the plane I wanted in my sketchbook and scanned them in using the Epson scanner that’s provided by the college. Its not the best quality but was the only one to hand. I could have had a better quality image if I used a different scanner. I think this would have changed the art style of my outcome to a more rugged and sketchy theme. I had to draw over the scanned sketches with the paint tool and some fine watercolour brushes I downloaded from ‘www.Myphotoshopbrushes.com’ because of the present brushes not having the right texture to them. I found some creative methods to creating the images. I started with a grey background so I could have a solid base layer. It means I would only have to add shadow and light by painting over the image with a transparent brush at about 50% opacity.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI edited the downloaded brushes by adding, texture; shape dynamics and noise so I could give the brush a more realistic feel. I coloured the aircrafts with simple blob colours and used shading and highlights for them to stand out using the same brush types. I created the concept by adding some information about the aircraft and a simple stroke around the pictures on separate layers. I used the eraser to get rid of some stroke so the image would look layered.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI also created some concepts of the building used in my story but because of the angles of the aircraft and building I couldn’t use them in my final presentation. I used similar style to the aircraft but tried to recreate lighting effects using a rectangle tool and a gradient that faded to 0% opacity. I liked the effect and decided to use this in my final images.

The effects of the sketched fading into the rock was effective so I decided to keep it and use simple splat colours to give the feel of a jungle environment. I feel the colours I chose went well together and decided that for the final animation I would keep with pastel and lighter colours.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

I began my animation with the layout of my first scene. I chose the simple comicbok laoyout of having the progression lead from left to right. I used a simple line tool with a 10pt thick border for each image.

I then decided to re create some angles I liked from existing pictures and only traced the outline. I then drew detail using the Photoshop brushes I downloaded previously. I wanted to focus on the scenery but it was harder to keep the same style when I tried so I put a simple background of pastel colours to give a mellow feel.

Using the grey background I can keep the plane the same colour and add shadows and light reflections from the aircrafts. Tracing the scanned images I used felt crucial and gave me a good understanding of the angles I needed to use.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

I Coloured the images using pastel colors so it would suite the theme of the comic. The colours of the flames look as if they burst from the page. I decided to overhang some of the images to make it look more like a comic and less flat images. I removed the images I traced and began shading the way I thought it would look best. I used the rectangle tool and the gradient for some of the lighting effects.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI created a storyline for the introduction to by finding old documents used by the FBI in some ufo conspiracy cases like the Roswell incident. I recreated the documents using my own briefing and felt it was a bit boring to look at. I later decided that I would create a overlay of my voice reading from the document. I feel it would give atmosphere to the document.

I used Adobe Photoshop to delete the main body of text so I could replace it. I used the eraser tool to remove some parts of the text and a simple black brush to give underlining and look as if parts have been removed because of confidentiality. I found a simple typewriter font on www.DaFont.com. I felt it suited the theme and era more than modern computer text.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI began placing all of my artwork and documents together into IMovie so I could begin editing the animation. I began with the simplest of themes on IMovie called Comic book, which I thought was very fitting to my theme. It didn’t quite look like a comic book but classified documents instead.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive MediaI added some simple transitions that I felt looked right and fit into the theme. The pan across the page looked professional and as if they where documents laid out on the page.

I then added a transition into a picture of a document containing the credits at the end. I feel as if it’s a nice finish to the theme.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

I created the sound using Logic pro and importing a simple 1940’s piano song, I then added sound effects from the pre-set loops because of there vast range. They had perfect sound effects that where fitting to the film. I added the video to logic so I could

add the sound effects side by side to the animation.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

Evaluation

I created a animation that could tell a story with picture and sound. The presentation was poor and felt I could have done much better with better time management and tools to create it at home. I could easily improve the animation by adding more sense and the full story. I feel as if the task was to big for me to handle on my own and was a bad decision choosing the project I did. My editing was poor and didn’t have a high enough quality to present to a big game production company. I feel that the story and idea where strong to begin with but may have peered of track from the factual concept idea I had in mind. I tried to complete the final presentation to quickly and spent to long on creating story and concept images. My research and background structure to the story was strong. I needed to keep the same quality for the drawings and animation, which I failed to do. I am disappointed in how it ended up and thing the next time I could improve by a lot. I had very little experience with IMovie but now know the basics to create an effective film. The sound and sound effects where strong and felt the chosen song was fitting to the theme and images. I chose logic pro because of my knowledge of it and the reviews I found online. Most where positive like “The first thing that existing Logic Pro 9 users need to know about Logic Pro X is that nothing has been taken out of Apple's revered DAW in order to make the transition to its tenth full version.” From http://www.musicradar.com/reviews/tech/apple-logic-pro-x-580421. There where better programmes I could have used like Fruit loops because of its vast range of effects and instruments. It would have been a better program to create the song on according to Peter Sanders from www.amazon.com, he said “I found the interface pretty easy and the manual is great if you have a question. The multitude of file formats it supports and is able to create is outstanding, and the interpolation system is practically flawless. The built-in sounds and effects are really good. I, personally, love FL Studio, and I recommend it to anyone who's a new producer or interested in music production.”

The method of scanning drawn images to Photoshop to re-enhance was a good idea, I feel it was effective and gave a high-quality image that could be easily manipulated into the storyboard. The Images from photoshop might have not as been as high quality if I used a different programme like Illistrator. There where also many negative reviews about it online like “Ive used Adobe CS and illustrator for almost 10 years. I stick with it only because I know it well already. Purchased CS6 and found that it is non-functional. Loads but cannot open anything or start new project” from www.amazon.com by ‘the user Actual person who uses this product’

I am disappointed in the quality of the presentation but feel the concept art itself was a high standard and looked professional.

BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Interactive Media

Biography

http://xchosun1x.cgsociety.org/I used this website to gather examples of work from James paich

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/the_art_of_feng_zhu I used this website to gather information and examples of feng zhu’s work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kirby I gathered information about the artist from here.

. http://prezi.com/yhrcshs_tc1y/concept-art-presentation/

http://mysterioustimes.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/i-was-wrong-2/

www.DaFont.com.