D4M: Final Post!

So I finished up my final for Design for Media class today.

I created a website that compiles together all of the work that I have done on this project. You can check it out here.

Shadechat Preview from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

Backgrounds

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D4M: Starting Up Backgrounds

This week I worked a lot on the concepts for the final backgrounds. These will be all of the main backgrounds that show up in the game, since they are the main areas visited. I also tested out some concepts for coloring the backgrounds; I'm most likely going to stick with the second style.

Background Sketches:

Background Color Concepts:

 

This coming week I will be focusing on finishing up these backgrounds, putting together the graphical user interface. The final compiling will be started as soon as those portions are completed.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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.

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.

Ugly Dinosaur Production: Well On Its Way

We're nearing the end of The Ugly Dinosaur Production and things are starting to come together. We've got about a week left.

Rough:

Clean-Up:

I animated all of the roughs for the Torvosauruses in Scene 4. I also did the clean-up of Dip in Scene 3 (roughs originally done by Izzy Kertis).

As the Pipeline Director, I updated our group blog, Youtube page, Facebook group, and Dropbox. I've put all of the Harmony project files onto our team flashdrive.

Starting into Animating

So this week we started animating for The Ugly Dinosaur Production. Since I am one of the general animators, I was assigned to do some of the roughs and went ahead and cleaned up part of it.

Roughs:

Clean-Up:

I animated the roughs for the Compsognathus in scene 1, and I animated the roughs for Doop in scene 3. I also did some clean-up work on Doop in scene 3, although that part is not completely finished.

Other than animating this week, I also have been updating the Dropbox account. Jinny also bought us a Team Flashdrive, which I keep and upload our project files onto as a back-up.

I have also been helping Hillary update the Youtube page. We've been updating all of the progress files into a playlist called WIP Animations.

The Ugly Dinosaur: Finishing up Pre-Production Work

This week I've been pretty busy with my team's Ugly Dinosaur Project. Here's basically what I did this week:

Animatics:

(If you cannot view Scene 2, click here)

I put together the Animatics for Scenes 2 - 5. I only drew the storyboards for scenes 3 and 5, but I timed out all 4 of those scenes. Hillary put together scene 1 and combined all of them into the final animatic, which can be found on our Youtube page.

I also updated our Youtube page a bit. I added a Production Playlist, which includes all of the videos created for our project. I also added a Crew List of links to our Members' Youtube pages on the right side of the page.

As the Pipeline Director, I've been continually updating our Dropbox account. As I receive files, I  upload them to the specific folders.  This provides for easy access to all of our files among our group members.

Thumbnailing:

Since I am one of the general animators, my job was to do some basic thumbnailing for some of the characters. Jinny suggested experimenting with the Torvosauruses and Dot's parents, since they were not assigned any specific members to animate yet.

Practice Sketches:

And as always, I have been practicing drawing the characters. Since Vincent finalized the model sheets earlier in the week, I was finally able to experiment drawing the characters in the finalized style.

The Ugly Dinosaur: Project Launch

So this week in Design for Media, our class was split into three groups. Each group is working on a different project. So I get to work on Jinny and Laura's idea, The Ugly Dinosaur. I have been assigned the jobs of: Storyboard artist, Animator, Clean-up Artist, and Pipeline Director. So here's what I have so far:

Storyboards:

Scene 3 Thumbnails

Scene  5 Thumbnails

Practice Sketches:

These are basic concept sketches so that I could get an idea on how to draw the characters. I'm mostly trying to get in the habit and get used to drawing them. I also did an overhead view of the scene I was working on, so that I could get a better sense of space for the storyboards.

Since I am also the Pipeline Director, I created a Dropbox account for the group so that we could all upload our files there.

Project 2 Proposal

This week my Design for Media class is starting up a new project called Project Pipeline. Basically we have to pitch an idea that will later turn into a group project, if chosen as one of the three that our class will be working on.

So what is the idea exactly?
I would like to create a short Point-and-Click Adventure video game. 

In order to create this project, a couple of us will need to know how to do some basic programming, of course. I am proposing that we create this game in Adobe Flash, since I am fairly familiar with Action Script 3 and it is not difficult to learn enough of the basics needed to create this game in a short period of time.  Although, if there are more experienced programmers on the team that would be able to create it using another programming language, I am completely open to that as well--in fact, I'd definitely encourage it!

Obviously with the time given, it will not be a terribly long game. I am very open as to what the storyline will be for this game, but I have created a few quick concept ideas to start us off.

First Idea:
This game will be about a middle-aged woman who was attacked by her boyfriend, and accidentally ends up killing him in self-defense. After murdering him, she is wanted by the police and heads off on a quest to escape their pursuit.

Second Idea:
This game will be about a young girl, by the name of Lizzie, who was abused by her peers in the 4-H Club. After being abused for a long enough time, she eventually snaps and murders all of those at the camp. She ends up killing more innocent people, and the whole game is about playing as Lizzie, murdering victims. Her method of murdering her victims? She beats them to death with a golf club.

I am basically thinking this will work as a reverse of the usual detective-styled games. Instead of playing through the game as a detective to trace down the murderer, this game will be about the murderer who must stealthily escape from the police, without leaving tracks for them to find. Although I have not uploaded concepts for the second idea, that is the one that I am leaning more towards. It will be up to the team to decide on which of the two to expand on, though.

And here are a couple of concept sketches that I put together for character designs for the first idea:

Note: All of the storyline ideas and character concepts are very rough and can definitely be negotiated and changed around by the team. This is just a starting idea to kick-off the project.

Roles
Here is a basic flow chart for the roles needed for this project:

I have chosen a couple of people who I believe would be very well fitted for the positions. These are the descriptions of each job, as well as nominations that I have chosen (the nominations are very flexible and subject to change if necessary).


-Director: I personally do not want to direct my own project, so I am open for suggestions on who would be willing to take the job. The director must have a strong passion for the project in order to help it all come together. They must be able to take control of the team and keep everything in order.


-Head of Art Direction: The head of the art direction must be able to instruct all of those in the visual development of the project. I feel that Jinny Hinkle would be best suited for this position.

-Story Director: Although I created a basic storyline for the game already, it is very far from a final concept. The director of story is in charge of creating the script and overall direction on how the story is drawn out.

-Programmers: For this game to be put together, there will need to be at least two programmers. The programmers must have an understanding in at least some kind of programming language (Note: If no one on the team has any programming knowledge, I will be willing to take the position as one of the programmers and help teach another how to use Action Script 3 in Adobe Flash, if necessary).

-Background Designers: There will need to be at least two background designers for this project. The background designers will be the ones to design the landscapes and spaces in which the story takes place. They will also be responsible for creating the objects that the characters will interact with, in the game. I am nominating Laura Mansfield and Tara Nester and as background designers.

-Character Designers: I have designed a few characters, as seen earlier in the post, although these may not be the final concepts. This project will require at least two character designers. The character designers will refine the designs and unify them together. They will be responsible for designing model sheets and final concepts for the characters. If I am not a programmer for the project, I would hope to be one of the character designers.

-Animators: This project will require at least two animators. The animators will be responsible for creating the animations of the characters within the game. They will also animate any objects that the characters interact with. If there is enough time, they may also work on animated sequences within the game. I feel that Emma Pennington and Katie Fuchs would be best fitted for this position.

-Sound Developer: The sound developer will be in charge of locating or creating the sounds for this project. Their job will include locating the voice actors, creating or finding the music, and sound effects for the game.


-Head of Editorial: The head of editorial will be responsible for the organization of the group. They must maintain the blog and organize meetings for the group.  This position is for someone who is very organized and a great note-taker. Hillary Hastings is definitely the one best suited for this position.

-Publicity Director: The publicity director is in charge of the overall marketing of the game. Their job is to search out competitions and ways to advertise our project.

-Branding/GUI Director: The job of the branding and GUI director is to keep everything unified. Their job is to create the overall color palette, logo, and menu screens for the game. They will also be responsible for creating a unified type and fonts to use for the game.

-Documentary Director: The overall creator of the making-of video. The documentary director must have strong knowledge in video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere or Adobe After Effects.



Overall Timeline
And here is the overall timeline to explain roughly when everything should be completed by, and within which time frames.