Character and Narrative - Week 2 Summary

Over the past week we have solidified the story to a good standard, designed our characters further and i started to model the shaman character in Maya since i was happy with the designs. I have learnt a lot already from collaborating with another person, i have learnt that i should be more critical with my ideas and look at them with a level, unbiased opinion to see if they work. Another thing i think is very advantageous when working with others on a project is the fact that everyone's mind works differently and everyone's consciousness is greatly varied which means everyone interprets the world in different ways and therefore thinks about things in different ways and has different thought processes. This has an impact on the whole process of animation but especially idea generation and story development, if each person is open to other's ideas but also clear about what they like and dislike and egos are nonexistent i think its a really productive way to work.

Once i was confident with the designs for the shaman character i decided to start modelling the character in Maya straight away because i want as much time saved for solving problems as possible because i don't know how many problems we are going to have to face at the moment. The modelling process was fairly straight forward although i had to re-do my topology to make the character deform better. Whilst modelling certain tricky parts like the hands and feet, i played around with different ways of modelling them and different topology. When designing the colour scheme for the shaman i realised i knew very little about colour theory so i will need to study that before i go much further.

Character and Narrative - Week 1 summary

To start the project off we started working on some story ideas based on the starting themes, we chose to focus on the 'a message' theme and started thinking of rituals as a message to higher powers or spirits and narrowed it down to native American rituals, summoning spirits. We were thinking of either doing paint on glass animation or doing CGI in Maya, we decided on Maya because for character animation it is easier to get across the characters emotions and feelings accurately with Maya. We used a whiteboard to get down ideas for the story and the characters, I've been reading books on story development and character design over the past week because i feel like this is my weakest area.

 I think the story and characters are the most important stage of the animation process because its fine to have strong technical skills but if the story is boring and the characters are unimaginative and uninteresting then there isn't really much point in the animation. If the analogy of a tree is used, the story and the characters are the roots and the technical skills and post production are the branches. Since i am working in a team i have had to adapt to working with another person and splitting the workload which i haven't needed to do that much so i thought it would be good to try it out since it's good practice for working in the industry. Once we decided on the characters we each assigned ourselves a character to design, i am designing the Shaman which is the spiritual member of the tribe who can contact the spirits. I made sure to start simply and design the character in terms of basic shapes and i kept in mind that i would be modelling the character in Maya.