Monday 30 May 2011

Polaroid Picture Illustration - 2

I've done another Polaroid picture illustration. Completed in Illustrator from a sketch. The sketch and the picture are below. I said I would do one of these a month to improve my sketching and my illustration work. I should have another up here by the end of June. The text is just a phrase from a piece of writing I am working on. More on this later.

Dare 2007- Part 3

In Part 2 I mentioned the problem I had with the other artist - but the team also had other problems. The characters I designed, modelled, textured and animated had to fit into an animation system one of the programmers was working on. He never finished this. So we had a game that involved daemons searching for a child, who the player was supposed to protect. The game itself had no daemons in it. The game didn’t work and looked terrible when compared to the other games in the competition. The games that tend to do well in Dare are casual games that are bright and colourful. Our game was a difficult, dark game that involved devils, an apocalypse and a child that could die. Not exactly cheerful.
At the end of the competition we had to present the game in Edinburgh to the general public- an event called Dare Protoplay – imagine a large room filled with games and young kids running around playing them- kinda like a trade show and a playground. This was actually fairly enjoyable, despite the fact no one understood the game, no one could work the FPS controls and the game was not finished. It would crash after about 5 minutes. Luckily most people had lost patience with the game by then. Not to mention after 10 weeks of working hard to get the finished the last thing I wanted to talk about was a game that wasn’t working.

Apart from these problems I believe that I completed a lot of great work and the team generally did get on and work very hard for the ten weeks. Never the less 4 years later and I don’t work in the games industry. But at least I can show some good work which I still stands up 4 years later and is still a major part of my portfolio. Some of the promotional images I created are below. The first image was taken by the organisers of Dare and partly used to promote Dare 2008. It was published in Edge Magazine and other publications. My association with Dare didn’t end there and I’ll post about this in the future. Never the less this years competition starts soon, but if I’m honest I’m not really aware of what’s been developed in the competition over the past few years.

Even though I was part of Dare To Be Digital 4 years ago I wanted to blog about it now. I feel my participation was wasted opportunity. Recently Dare was part of a channel 4 documentary. One of the industry experts in the documentary said (and I am paraphrasing here) “It’s unheard of a participant to apply themselves and not get a job in the games industry”. I disagree. I applied myself and even though I don’t work in the games industry (although I did after I left university), I still have a good body of work that allowed me to develop projects for Scottish Screen and Channel 4, not to mention the artwork I have exhibited recently.



More Lomography Photos

Some more black and white photographs taken on my Lomography Diana F+.
The shots were taken at Anstruther Harbour in Fife and in a multi-story carpark in Dundee. The fish was lying on the side of the road and I knew I had to get a shot of it.




Thursday 26 May 2011

Dare 2007- Part 2

I spent the first 5 weeks of Dare To Be Digital designing, creating and animating the characters in the game. I was then going to spend the final 4 weeks creating the game environment models and the last week cleaning up and tying up loose ends. However after 1 week the other artist had done nothing. His knowledge of 3D art and animation was minimal to say the least. He also wouldn’t ask for help and would not admit he didn’t know what he was doing. His major task was to model and texture a house. On the first day I ask him to design the house. He never did it and said he would model it without sketching and designing it first – this was his way of working. However, he did not have much modelling experience. When I asked him if it was going well – he always said yes and that he would have it ready in a few days. I gave him time to do this, even though we were behind schedule. Probably a bad move on my part but I didn’t want to boss him around. I just made the team know that we would have to scale the environment down, as he was taking too long on the house. This was how the first 5 weeks went on.
To cut the story short all the animation, art and promotional art in relation to the game was completed by myself. After 5 weeks I had enough, as a team we highlighted the problem to the organisers and they done nothing. As we only had 5 weeks left it was now my job to complete the art for the game on my own and leave the other artist to - pretty much do what he liked.

To put the problem in perspective the team that went on to win the competition and a BAFTA award had 3 artists. We had 1 – me. I don’t want to bad mouth the other artist but he had very little experience or knowledge and was a member of the team before I was – as mentioned in the previous post I joined the team only a week or so before the competition started. I joined Emergence Games in the understanding that, as the other artist had pitched the idea, he knew the game and had an idea of what he was doing. Turns out he showed the team a portfolio which had artwork that he never created. He joined the team on the backing of the folio and he hadn’t produced all the work in it. I had my work cut out. The organisers of the competition would do nothing as the artist has signed a contract for the 10 weeks and he was prepared to honour the contract.

In Part 3 I’ll talk about why the characters I created are hardly seen in the game.



Wednesday 25 May 2011

Some Old 3D Graffiti

As the Polkadots Punks - Streetland Festival is over I thought I'd post up one of the images of 3D Graffiti that was displayed. A Toy Design photographed on the street. Simple idea but I think it works.

Friday 20 May 2011

Dare 2007- Part 1

In 2007 I took part in Dare to Be Digital. This is a Video Game design competition where teams of 5 students form a team to make a video game prototype over 10 weeks during the summer. The teams are made up of Artists and Programmers.
The competition is very prestigious and the reward for the winning teams is a BAFTA nomination.
In 2007 I was very lucky. I was in a team that put forward an application which was unsuccessful. I was then fortunate, as a member of my team knew another team with a successful application who were looking for an artist. I joined this team and we pitched an idea for a motorcycle racing game to a panel of industry experts. The pitch was unsuccessful and the team never got in. I thought my luck had run out- but it hadn’t.
Another team who did a successful pitch were looking for an artist. The team Leader in this team knew the team leader in my second unsuccessful team. So I ended up joining Emergence Games who were in Dare to Be Digital 2007 with the game Forgotten Souls (turns out it isn’t what you know but who you know).
Forgotten Souls was to be a First Person Survival Horror game for the PC. The concept of the game involved a post- apocalyptic world where a child had survived. The world was roaming with daemons who wanted to steal the child. The player had to protect the child by using different found objects (boxes, debris etc) to build up barriers and ward of the daemons.

I could write at length about the competition and the problems the team had. Unprepared, badly organised, lack of vision and basically not knowledgeable enough to make the game the team pitch to the panel.
As I joined the team late I expected the current artist (the team was made up of 2 artists, including myself, and 3 programmers) to have done some concept work – he hadn’t. We were behind schedule before the competition began. This was annoying as teams had to prepare before competition starts and this was a pre-emption of what was to happen during the competition.

In Part 2 I’ll talk about the development of the game and the problems myself and the had.



Thursday 19 May 2011

An old 3D Poem

Here’s an old piece (from a couple of months ago). It’s a toy design with a poem written on it – 3D Poetry. The photo is not that great but it does show what I am trying to do with the 3D poetry. I doubt I’ll do anything with this so I though I’d post it up here. I don’t plan to do any more of these for a while, as I going to concentrate on sketching and updating the design section of my portfolio.


Wednesday 18 May 2011

Sketches

I’ve done a lot of sketching recently – since I’m taking a break from toy design, 3D Graffiti and Poetry. I’ve posted some of them here. Don’t know what I’ll do with them. I might fix some of them up and add them to my portfolio.







Tuesday 17 May 2011

Lomography Photos

2 new photos taken with my Diana Lomography camera. I was using a black and white film. I went out and took some photos around Dundee and I should have a few more developed soon. I’ll post them up when they’re ready.

Thursday 12 May 2011

New Showreel

I've update my animation showreel. Added a few short pieces. I probably won’t have any new work to add for another couple of months so I thought I’d post it up here.


Wednesday 4 May 2011

PaperGirl Bristol - More Photos on website

Some Photos of the Papergirl Bristol exhibition over on their blog.
Eagle eyed viewers will see some of my images in the background.
They’re going to hand out the artwork sometime in May. Not sure when though.
Links to the photos below.
Photo1
Photo2
Photo3
Photo4
Photo5
Photo6

Monday 2 May 2011

Polaroid Picture Illustrations

I’ve been messing around with Adobe Illustrator again – creating more detailed illustrations of sketches. This image is based on a piece of Flash Fiction I recently wrote. I’ll post up the story later. I wrote the story at an ‘Illustrate and Write’ workshop at the Two Dolls art shop in Dundee.
This image is a Polaroid picture taken by the girl in the story. I plan to create some more Polaroid picture illustrations with hand written text at the bottom. These will compliment the stories. Depending on the time I have I’ll try to do one a month. I’m taking a break from the toy design and the 3D Graffiti and 3D poetry for a while. I need a break from these especially since the recent Streetlands and Without Boarders Exhibitions.
I’ve included a scan of the original sketch and the new improved final image.