1.
2.
Purpose - idea generation,
inspiration for team members, but before that: pitches.
3.
What I was looking for this year was the right way to
design.
As though there is a ‘right’ way to design! But I’m a
perfectionist, right. I wanted to do it ‘right’, so I was searching for and
trying to understand a specific process.
4.
An artist that I looked at for his process was Feng Zhu.
Runs a super expensive school in Singapore, has worked on x
and x and x and creates regular technical and theoretical videos for Youtube
channel. Some of his work.
5.
Silhouette-based process.
The idea is that shape language and the initial quick read
of the silhouette is important, especially when we may only see the design
on-screen briefly. Communicating as much as we can visually. We want to use
iconic shapes that quickly describe the general character of the thing.
6.
So I did that for a design in Semester 2, and it seemed to
turn out alright.
Show design.
I’ll talk more about this in a few minutes.
7.
So we were talking about the right way to design. I wanted
to figure out the best possible way, the most ideal way to design. I wanted to
learn all the skills I could in this final semester. I wanted to come out of it
as perfect as possible. And that’s impossible.
8.
But what I know now, I didn’t realise then! So this semester
I went and looked for more information on processes and tried really hard to
understand and follow these processes. I realised I didn’t have much formal
knowledge on design rules and principles, so I hunted those out too. These are
all things that are very hard to do when you’re in that final stressful
semester and outside of the typical classroom environment.
9.
Matt runs the site CtrlPAINT.com, which has again has both
technical and theory videos, as well as text posts. [screenshot] along with
some paid content. I found a video series that explains his silhouette design
process, and so I decided to follow that.
10.
How that process breaks down in certain situations – times
when silhouette can’t portray the aspects. We revert to LINE
Ongoing questions - The balance between compositional
choices and thematic or storytelling choices – when do we value one above the
other? I don’t know.
Do I want to carry on with it after uni? I don’t know.
Do I want to spend my life telling stories? Yes.
My original plan – overambitious – would normally have a
whole team of people doing it and, with my current experience, I’d be near the
bottom of that hierarchy
You’d have – A Director, a producer, writers, you might have
researchers, you’d be working under an art director and there would probably be
more than one person doing the same job as you.
My trouble – setting up walls, defining successful outcomes
and knowing when a design is worth holding on to.
My new plan – simplified, more enjoyable. Use the book to
define the character of an object and try to stick within the descriptions of
the text. Present a range of outcomes instead of working towards a single
perfect one.
Final Presentation Slides. Script for each slide is typed below the related slide image.
Hi,
my name is Zac Hogan and my creative practice is storytelling and being way too
ambitious. Storytelling is one of the key things that
links all of the projects I’ve done during my time at art school. Being way too
ambitious is the other thing.
This semester, I tried to do both of those
through concept design.
Concept design begins near the start of
the production of a creative product, whether it’s a film, tv show, video game or the creation of a
theme park.
It
involves the design of most of the things you see on screen – from characters
and creatures to buildings, locations and vehicles.
Pitching
is a very important use of concept art these days too. It used to be enough to
get funding or approval to make a film just by having a good script or
screenplay. But nowadays, with the huge budgets that many films require,
investors and studios want to know that they’re going to make a profit. So
being able to show these guys how you think the final product is going to look
goes a very long way in securing the millions of dollars that you’re going to
need to make the film itself.
Your
goal as a concept artist is to provide images for the other creative teams.
Sometimes that’s just coming up with good looking and functional ideas for new
props or locations. Other times it’s taking one of those ideas and developing
it, then drawing it out nicely, maybe in a plan view so that the prop makers or
special effects teams can physically make what you’ve imagined.
One of the things I love the most about
concept art is that as an audience, the rougher and less refined images from
earlier in the creative process can show you how your favourite
stories could have turned out. Or, how your favourite characters could have looked.
The other part of my practice, and something that’s been an
unexpected roadblock this year, has been me being way too ambitious.
From
the final weeks of last semester
onwards, I was trying to do all of this at once.
And
it’s obvious now that trying to manage all of that was never going to work.
And
this has been a massive part of my practice from the start
– trying do so something huge and impressive in the smallest amount of time. But I’m talking about it now because it’s
becoming a bit of a problem Before
now it’s always worked out. But this year, maybe because I thought I should
prepare myself for the real world and try to cram as much learning as I could
into this final semester, and maybe because I was trying to learn the perfect
way to do things, I put so much pressure on myself that I couldn’t enjoy it.
And so not a lot of making got done.
I
know that there might be other people feeling the same way right now. I don’t
have all the answers but, hopefully, this might help.
Towards the end of last semester as I was
narrowing my focus, I started bringing together ideas for my project.
After speaking to some lecturers I
settled on creating
designs based on a fantasy novel which was Jingo by Terry Pratchett.
But
keeping with my theme of being too ambitious, I decided to use design to
convert the book from fantasy into science fiction.
This
book, Jingo, is set on the Discworld, a flat world that’s carried
around the universe on the back of a Giant Turtle.
This story is about a medieval fantasy
police force known as the Watch in the city of Ankh Morpork and how, after some international
shenanigans happen, they find themselves trying to prevent a war.
Before I could start making, I felt I
needed to learn and perfect a whole bunch of concept design skills. I started
my search by looking at a guy called Feng Zhu.
Feng Zhu
is a concept artist.
He
runs a concept design school in Singapore and also creates free technical and
theoretical design videos for the school’s Youtube channel.
He’s
worked on a huge number of films and games, from The Sims to X-Men, Star Wars and
Transformers.
The knowledge I get out of Feng’s
free videos is always helpful. But probably the most important thing I’ve
learned in relation to this project is how to use silhouettes.
In films, games and other screen-based
media, the initial read of a design is important. If you just glance at a
character or monster or vehicle, can you get a sense of what it is? Is it good
or bad, friendly or an enemy? Fast or slow, natural or man-made? Quite often we
need to be able to figure this out really fast, because we might see the design
on screen for just a second. It’s about unity too, the importance of having all
the parts of the design tell the same story.
It probably wouldn’t work to have the castle of the big ugly bad guy
made out of soft curves and circles.
This
is all especially important in video games, when we might have to react to
something almost instantly. A bad guy shows up and you don’t have time to walk
over and look at the pattern on his shoes and do research on his family history
to try to figure out if he’s an enemy or not. You’ve got to be able to tell
right away, and then react.
So
for instance you’ve got these two vehicles. The smooth, pointed shape of the car on the left tells us
right away that it’s fast. The big, bulky and angular shape of the truck on the
right tells us that it’s probably a lot slower and heavier, designed for
carrying things rather than getting around quickly. And that’s a psychological
thing that has a lot of basis in nature and how we’ve evolved to see the world.
Birds are often aerodynamically shaped and we know how light and fast they can
move through the air. Rocks, on the other hand, are often big, bulky and
angular, and we know for a fact that most of the time, they’re not going
anywhere.
Using iconic shapes is important too.
Cultures are full of iconic shapes that have meaning attached to them. The
shape of a suit jacket says sophistication and money, while the shape of a
t-shirt says laid back and casual.
Just from the outline of these two swords
we can get a lot of information. They’re both sharp and pointy, which
psychologically speaking says that they’re dangerous weapons. But we can also
tell that the one on the left probably comes from Europe, while the other has a
clear Middle-Eastern look to it. So they are given a whole bunch of associated
ideas – the cultures they’re from, the kind of landscape they’d be carried
around in, the kinds of enemies they might be used against, and the kind of
people who’d use them. It’s the difference between King Arthur and Aladdin.
So once we’ve got a silhouette that
gives the general impression of the thing that we’re designing, we can move on and
add detail inside that shape. We can take a black outline of the silhouette and
draw inside it with line, or, as in the example above, we can leave it fully
black and use values to pick out areas where the light hits.
Once
I’d decided on my Discworld project in the later part of last
semester, I started work on the first design. It made sense to start as large
as possible – so I designed the giant space turtle.
And
these are some of the images from the
process I went through. I started with a bunch of varied silhouettes, chose a
couple and refined them. I posted online and got some feedback and had some
help with choosing, and ended up with two similar looking shapes to take on to
the next stage.
Then started figuring out detail,
and did a lot of variations on the design of the front and side. I wanted to
create a sense of strength and stability, and also lead the eye from the disc
that sits on top of the design to the turtle’s head at the front. I already had
an idea of the colouring I wanted, but I tried out some
variations anyway, and I ended up with this.
Which is something I was quite happy with.
I found here that using weekly crits as a
sort of deadline helped a lot – it meant that I couldn’t spend too long
agonizing over decisions and trying to make things perfect.
Now we move on to Semester 2, and here’s where the pressure and the
roadblocks really started to kick in.
There were two things I wanted to
focus on in terms of education – learning the principles of design, and
learning the correct design process.
Matt Kohr is a concept artist who also runs a
website called CtrlPaint.com. It’s got over a hundred free educational
videos and a few that you have to pay for. I found some great videos that
really helped with my understanding. Matt is actually a really friendly guy,
and when I emailed him questioning something he’d said in a video I got a reply
the same day. Even if you’re not a digital painter, his site is well worth a
look.
My understanding of the design
process he describes is this:
We
start with a brief. This could be a detailed document, or it could just be a
verbal description from your art director.
We need to research and gather
reference images.
Then we start our drawing by doing
silhouettes that capture some of what we found in our references, taking the
iconic and psychological shapes and putting them together to create something
that begins to fill the brief. This is pure visual brainstorming.
We pick some silhouettes to carry
on with, then we go into detail and draw within the silhouettes. We pick some
to carry on with.
Then we draw some variations with
colour and with different materials and surfaces on the object we’re designing.
Is it metal or wood? Is it muddy or clean? These are things we can think about
earlier on and maybe hint at with our lines, but in this stage we can really
start to experiment and define it.
Then we draw the final output.
The brief that Matt was given here was to
create a communications robot – the sort of robot that might send out signals
to other robots. So he gathered a bunch of references that suggested certain
things he already had in mind – he knew that it would be good to play with
intelligence and non-violence. So while not all of these images are of robotic
shapes, a lot of them do show things that we read as being intelligent and
non-violent – we’ve creatures with large eyes which shows that they observe the
world, images of dolphins which we know are very intelligent, cute and friendly
animals that we think don’t pose a threat to us, as well as a lot of
technological inspiration.
And
here we’ve got the drawing stages, from
silhouettes, to two of these which were taken further and detailed with lines,
to a series of colour experiments and then a final series of material
experiments on the bottom right.
And the final result was
this:
We can see the impact of the
references – the heavy use
of big curved shapes to show that it’s not a fighting machine, the antennas
that show a strong focus on communication, the dirt and mud that shows that it
travels around the wide outdoors, and the almost frog-like arms and legs that
help it to do this travelling.
I
was so stressed out about this process, about understanding it fully and
understanding the principles of design perfectly that I hit a roadblock. I just
couldn’t make – I had no motivation, I had nothing to drive me. And I didn’t
want to fail, I didn’t want to do it wrong. I wasn’t going anywhere.
So
the first step to pulling that roadblock down was simplifying my Discworld project. I cut out the focus on
translating it into science fiction, and just looked at designing from the
novel itself.
My
first solid making of the semester was a fantasy submarine.
I
started by gathering descriptions from the
book. I pulled out the key points and made a list of adjectives, then went on
and found references that supported and expanded on that. I knew it was going
to be fish-like and I wanted a definite Leonardo Da Vinci look to it, but I
wasn’t sure how close I should stick to the source material. In the end I
figured out two designs – one that stuck closely to the book and another that
deviated a fair bit.
From silhouettes to line drawings,
to colour experiments, to these two images;
I
knew from the book that it needed to be cramped inside, and I knew that I
wanted it to look quite slow. I knew that I wanted to lead the eye to the front
of the craft – to that large eye-like porthole and the big sharp point. I also
knew that I wanted it look somewhat fish-like and sit clearly within that
medieval time period. I took inspiration from another fantasy submarine design
and gave it an angler-fish light at the front, but mine was made from an old
European street lamp. I looked at triangular ship sails for the fins, and
copper or brass plating for the panels.
And
I’m happy with it. The top one feels like it has much more character and
definitely feels more fish-like, but it’s also slightly less accurate in
relation to the book. The great thing is though that I don’t have to pick
between the two. In the real world, throughout the process and at this
particular moment, I could send these off to the client or to my art director
and they’d tell me which one they wanted to carry on with. I don’t think it’s
something that happens in all design contexts, but in this one it’s definitely
a helpful part of the process.
So
this design took far longer than I wanted it to, and I realised I needed to
figure out why.
I took some time off, did a lot of talking
and thinking and started to figure out a solution to my motivation problem.
I
ended up removing all the unnecessary goals. No more trying to make myself
perfect for the industry, no more looking for the best way of designing - no
more being a perfectionist. I had to figure out how to have fun with it! And
over the past week or so, I’ve started to do that.
Instead
of doing what I was doing before, and picking things to design from the book
based on how prominent they were in the story, I decided to design things from
the novel that interested me.
I
chose a device called the Dis Organiser
Note: the version I prepared had images on this slide for the audience to see. The version I had on my USB stick at the time of presentation was perfect apart from the fact that it was missing these images.
The DisOrganiser is a pocket-sized device like a
modern day digital organiser – it’s very annoying and you can’t
be bothered reading the massive manual so you don’t really ever figure out how
it works. The difference is that instead of having a computer inside, this one
has a tiny magical creature.
My
references included everything from old wooden jewelery boxes, modern day organisers and calculators to gramophones and
typewriters.
A
problem I ran into early on was that using flat black silhouettes to develop
the design in the first stage wasn’t going to work – it’s such a small,
box-like object that it’s very hard to express much at all through a simple
silhouette.
I
went with line drawings instead, which seems to be working out much better.
It’s still in the early stages, but I’m planning to have it done and polished
by the end of the week.
On a personal level
I’ve been through a pretty significant experience this semester. I’m
understanding my practice as an artist and how my way of working and setting
goals relates to that practice.
I’m
still not completely motivated but I think I’m getting there. And I still have
a lot of questions that I don’t have perfect answers for. But if I’ve learned
anything, it’s that it’s okay to not have the answers right now.
Thank you for listening!
