Seminar - planning, rough notes

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1.

Storytelling

Concept art

2.

What is concept art and what is the purpose

Product - ideas, ¾ designs illustrations, plan views, production paintings

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.

I found Matt Kohr (brief intro)

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.

The process is

Research – silhouette – line – colour – material – final

silhouette-based process, further explained by Matt Kohr

Research – silhouette – line – colour – material – final

The idea being that

How that process breaks down in certain situations – times when silhouette can’t portray the aspects. We revert to LINE

Thinking about design – composition, ideas,

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.

Current project – Jingo

Quick plot break down

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!