Sunday, November 25, 2012

D4M Final: Character Development

So I decided to change my overall schedule and focus on the characters for this week. So I'm pushing back all of the background work to next week; I also plan on having actual finalized color palettes next week. This week I worked on the character expression sheets. All of them have been completed as seen below:


Ralphie Ragger

Adrian Ragger

Scott Ragger


Celia Ragger


Kharen Ragger


Zandra Saku

Terra Gaea

Mar Keys

Natalia Hanes

Abi Lane

James Bowens

Charles Houston

Kieran Price

Shade Chance


Here is the updated chart:


Tuesday, November 20, 2012

D4M Final: Week 1

So it's the second week into the final project for my Design for Media class. This week my goal was to create the full storyline and some character and background sketches.

Storyline

Ralphie, a high school boy, discovers an online chatroom known as Shadechat over the summer after his Aunt Kharen's death. Ralphie is the son of a well-known detective, Adrian Ragger.

Shadechat is a chatroom in which someone talks to an anonymous person, and it is not known who or where they are from (absolutely no IP addresses are saved or anything, and it is impossible to trace the person talking). This site is basically set up where it will randomly pair two people up to talk. Once someone logs out, the other is not notified, it just immediately redirects them to a new person. Word spreads that the people on the site are from the dead. The site is connected to the spirit world.

After a few times of using the chatroom, Ralphie eventually decides to try and communicate with his Aunt Kharen after reading through his dad's unsolved cases in his office. He finds out some information from her and decides to try and solve this unsolved case.

Ralphie eventually ends up talking with some new people on Shadechat and even meets with a couple of them in person at some points. Natalia and Abi are the two who Ralphie talks with most often. At first, Ralphie's friends do not believe him. Eventually, his friend Zandra decides to use the site. After some time, she eventually goes missing and Ralphie and his friends must figure out her whereabouts.

I have established more of the storyline, but I will avoid spoiling the entire game.

Character Sketches



Some basic character sketches. None of these are very finalized, they're all still just planning out ideas for the characters presented throughout the game.


Here are a bunch of digital sketches for the mugshots. I plan on finalizing these a lot more and adding whole expression sheets within the next couple of weeks.


I also made a basic size chart of the silhouettes of all of the characters that appear.


Here's a basic layout of what I imagine the game screens to look like. There will be a drawn out background, a character mugshot, a text box, and the date and time of day in the top right corner.

Background Sketches



I did some basic floor plans for all of the major areas that are presented throughout my storyline. Since this is a detective game with an ongoing mystery, it will take place all within one small town: North Harbor.


Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Design for Media: Final Project Proposal

So it's coming to the end of the semester, and it's time to start on my finals for pretty much all of my classes now. In Design for Media, our next project is a free reign project in which we are allowed to choose basically anything. So naturally, a lot of ideas came to mind. I've got myself with two main ideas, but I'm leaning a bit more towards the second idea, first prompt.

Idea #1: Animated Comic


I've always wanted to create an interactive comic using a combination of Flash and Photoshop. Basically what I would do is create all of the elements in Photoshop, while animating and putting everything together in Flash.

I got a lot of inspiration for this idea from 1000 W0RDS, a story on deviantART by yuumei. She created a comic using a combination of Paint tool Sai, Photoshop, and Flash. I loved the idea of how she would slightly animate or make the comic look as though it is moving to create great visual effects.

I created a couple of concepts for the type of style I was hoping for in this project:

I wanted to play around a lot with silhouettes and using a monochromatic palette. I pulled a whole lot inspiration from the style used in the video game, LIMBO.

Schedule:




Idea #2: Video Game Concepts

The next idea I came up with is to create the concepts and pre-production work for a video game. Depending on the time that I have, I may or may not begin actual creation of the game itself. Within this time frame, it will by no means be finished, but there is the possibility of at least creating an opening or beginning to the game itself. I have come up with two different ideas for video games that I could potentially create.


Prompt 1:

The first prompt is a game about a chatroom-styled website where people can talk to the dead. The protagonist of this game is a young boy by the name of Ralphie, whose dad is a detective. Ralphie comes across an unsolved case in his dad's old files. Through using the website, Ralphie attempts to solve his dad's unsolved case and find the true murderer behind the many unexplained deaths.





Prompt 2:

The second prompt is a game that takes place mostly in a dream world. This game provides with a balance between the real world and the dream world. Basically all of the events that occur in the real world during the daytime impact how the story progresses within the dream world. This game follows the storyline of a female college student. The beginning of the game involves the heroine through her life in the real world, as well as the life of her dream self in the dream world.





Schedule:

Thursday, November 8, 2012

The Ugly Dinosaur Production: FINISHED

This week we finally finished up The Ugly Dinosaur production. It's been a very crazy week and a lot of us have been working nonstop. Jinny and I had spent a good four or five nights straight in our common area and the animation labs working on it, only sneaking in a few short naps as breaks. But now it is all over, and we've got a nice animated short, so check it out:



I basically spent all week compiling all of the videos together and importing everyone's work into the individual scenes. It was very frustrating at times, but overall it was worth it. Now that this project is completed, I look forward to whatever comes in our next Design for Media project. I've got a whole lot of other final projects starting up now in all of my other classes, so I will be pretty busy until mid-December.

That is all for now! The earliest I will have anything non-Design for Media related up will probably be around Thanksgiving or mid-December, so I apologize for that.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Ugly Dinosaur Production: Coming to a Close

So this is our last week working on The Ugly Dinosaur Production. Our production will be done this Thursday, so now we are basically wrapping everything up and putting things together. It has been an extremely busy week, so I have been working on it a whole lot to help finish things up.


Clean-up:
This week I worked on some of the clean-up for Oscar. I only did the basic lines for the majority of these, but I started on some coloring for two of the scenes. Vincent did these original roughs, while Blair finished up the clean-up on the rest of the scenes of Oscar in Scene 3 while I worked on other parts of the project.

As the Pipeline Director, I updated our Youtube page, Facebook group, and Dropbox. I've put all of the Harmony project files onto our team flashdrive and sorted through them to place them in order. The majority of this week was spent compiling everything together. Although I have not yet uploaded any of the files online, I have been working on putting everyone's files together within the scenes. I have been sorting through all files, putting them in order, and exporting them. I found which parts of the scenes were missing and assigned roles to those who needed to fix them.