Finals

Fall - corrupt castle as the main view point of the dystopia, and people pointing at it from afar.
Curiosity - Half photo half drawing of a robot wanting to fit in with human society, but sticking out.
Chaos - It's in the chaos paragraph, go down.
Communication - Photo of people communication inversely with writing, real people hopefully if I pull my plan together.

Small talk

For my quote from the book Rant, I have decided to make the "scene" picture all about deception. (As the character picture is about ulterior motives, they will compliment each other) Looking in to the game Ico, the game has beautiful scenery and a boy showing the way for a taller girl. Having only played the game for a small time, I can't tell you the big revelation - but I am taking this as deception. Holding somebody's hand, leading the way to their demise. Which, is what the quote from the book is all about when in it's context. I'm hoping the make the message subtle enough so that some people just pass it by. Let's see how it goes.

Text

"History is, it's just a nightmare. Cut-off tongues laying everywhere"
From one of my favourite books Rant, a book which uses the artistic medium of a book to it's advantage, this quote is one of my favourite. Without spoiling things, throughout the book - you don't know who to believe or trust. As the entire thing is basically an interview with different people about the death of one man. This quote conveys the betrayal and "chinese whispers" themes which are weaved in to the book. Trying to show this visually is going to be a challenge. I'm trying to show how a character can have alterior motives through this sketch:

Working on the whole "chinese-whispers" thing. Get back to me on that.

Communication

WHY ARE YOU UPSIDEDOWN THIS IS SO PROBLEMATIC.


Anyway, looking at the fourth word; Communication, I looked in to how what we view as modern communication, isn't really communication. To put it bluntly, this is communication - you are reading what I am typing. but I am wearing a mask of ambiguity, a pre pass to be whomever I wish to be. How can you trust, if there's not a face to read?
I wanted to convey both the added power people have when communication like this - but also the lack of power as things can be read in whatever manner the reader is reading them. My final will involve more ambiguity in it's message to mirror the ambiguity of modern communication - still unsure how my final will look. but here are some sketches in the mean time.

photo uploader is gaff. watch this space.

Inspirations

Because inspirations are subjective - that means there's no real right or wrong answer. Right? So if you disagree with me you can go get to f-

FF:CC: Right. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is an amazing game. Shut up. It shows that you can use the Japanese manga-esque art correctly. Combined with a dash of pop-up book style and fairy tale brush strokes, it makes for one of the best looking games, ever. To say that this art has just inspired me would be a vast understatement.

Reservoir Dogs: The story of the most stylish messed up diamond heist. More of a character study to see how people cope under pressure and if their characters remain true, it's direction and writing (for me) made the world of Cinema interesting and artistic - a force to be reckoned with.

Calvin and Hobbes: There's not much I can say about C&H that hasn't already been shouted from the hilltops. When I was a child it was the simple yet great cartoon art that kept me reading, along with the few jokes I understood. But growing up, I kept on re-reading and finding something new with every re-read - growing to appreciate the characters. Two people who reflect on each other perfectly, in every way.

Sonic 2: Now here's a 16-bit game where the both the concept art and in-game graphics match and compliment each other constantly throughout. The art is perfect, being produced and released in the early 1990s obviously had a huge impact on the decisions they made. While arcade machines were struggling to stay alive - their art was surviving through home consoles, all the vibrant colours and animal-critters intact.

The Killing Joke: A short but amazingly sweet comic about Batman's constant struggle with the Joker. Written by Alan Moore and accompanied with artwork by Brian Bolland - it's a match made in heaven. The writing is stellar with it's unreliable narrator (The Joker) and the art has moments of realism when batman is involved but when the Joker is the main focus of the panel everything is thrown in to 5th gear to reflect on his on psyche (as seen in the picture)

Megaman: I'm a huge fan of 8-bit graphics and music, all thanks to this series. The chiptunes and art direction go hand in hand, always upbeat and never letting down. Megaman himself is such a simple yet effective design, Keiji Inafune created an iconic character for generations to come. With the return of him in the form of Megaman 9 and 10, it showed that you don't need high end visual capabilities to give amazing art in this modern era.

Star Wars (Battle of Hoth): Watching the re-release of this as a child in the cinema was, without a doubt, the best cinema experience. Ever. The vastness of the battle just showed what was possible with a bit of elbow grease and a lot of imagination. It began my interest in science fiction and film making.

Studio Ghibli: Hailed as the "Japanese Disney", studio Ghibli is, in my opinion, several shades better than it's apparent American counter-part. Although they use the same character templates (created by Myazaki) for a lot of films they make, that doesn't mean that the art direction is similar. Far from it. Each film breathes new life in a new world - with animation so fluent and vibrant it hurts.

FLCL: Although an animé, a medium filled with otaku sensibilities, Fooli Kooli has style. And boy, what a style it has. It showed me that an already established medium can be re-invented with the right (art) direction. Not to mention it has a soundtrack to match.

Watchmen: This is the comic book that made comics worth reading. End of. Ignorantly, I never thought of comics a true artistic medium - but Watchmen blew my preconceived thoughts out of the water. A depressing take on the "super-hero" genré, and one that people don't forget.

Zelda (OoT): This game is the master of the pallet. In it's art direction, it uses colour to it's advantage and plays with the primitive meanings of said colours. It gives you an added intensive to defeat the evil, as it's screwing up your beautiful green forests with it's black and dark browns. As a child, I just took this in on auto-pilot and it made for a near perfect experience.

Fall

Word 2.
Concentrating mainly on the Fall From Grace idea, man falling from his throne because of his own faults/sins. Trying not to get all religious up in this, but I may still go back to that idea.

*I know it's upsidedown. It's straight up in the file, I swear. I'm so bad at this.

 I gave most of my time to the idea of a dystopia and it's inhabitants working to live in this land of "the fall". But then I thought of people coming in to this land that has fallen, with fresh eyes. That land would be the norm. I tried to play around with a childlike mindset, the armour of seeing things for the first time. For the castle-like dystopia building I'll change the design to that of a more steam punk one.

Curiosity Worklog *COMPLETE*

Four words. The first of the four: curiosity. We were asked to sketch ideas about the words as we will eventually have to do a final project on them. Deep breath, clenched fists, here we go.

"Curiosity (from Latin curiosus "careful, diligent, curious," akin to cura "care") is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species" This is all well and good, I wanted to convey the sense of journey out of one's comfort zone because of curiosity - perhaps even hint at a dash of jealousy as well. But the ultimate curiosity is if something inhuman wants to become human. An impossible thought, maybe, but the quest of finding out what (literately) drives the said inhuman object is one a theoretical thinker would find as appetising as his supper. Because I ate his supper. The true irony, however - is if they felt the curiosity to find out what a human life would be like, they have already felt a human emotion themselves. They've completed the journey without beginning it. I wanted to try and convey how materialism plays a part in the image and I may work on this idea for my final: 

My other idea was to show curiosity from both parties. When something new shows up in life, the over-whelming urge to know everything about it is unbearable. The distance between the subjects being the gap between their values and ways of life. Trying to convey this came across as a bit too hazy in my sketch, but if I choose it as the final then I'll make it more clear, but still remaining it's subtlety. (we can hope)

EDIT: It's sideyways. I honestly don't know how to fix this.

I also began looking towards the human side of curiosity, what man can achieve just by wanting to find out more. That's the idea, "more.". Immediately I began to look towards space travel and science as these sketches show: 
 I always thought of the space missions as man's great accomplishment to venture in to the unknown. Instead of a war, we would have a Space Race - like children running to get their hands on the new toy first. Countries would heckle and shout, but never wage war over such a thing - as in the end, we do all benefit. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.". In my opinion, the perfect human curiosity.

To me, the space shuttle was the emblem for the curiosity of man. It's a timeless design, and I wanted to play with it's simplistic lines and curvature.

I liked the idea of an observatory as it allows man to look beyond, not touch or take samples - but only to observe. I love this idea of detachment from the main subject (subject being the stars)


But the thing about the human curiosity angle is that I assume that a lot of people will already be doing something related to this - although it was a good idea to explore to gather more ideas, I wanted to stick to  something different

 Having decided to go with the non-human curiosity, I started developing ideas for little robots I could use for the final. I decided to draw them in a cute style, so the viewer may form a sympathetic relationship with the robot. I also purposely concentrated on humanoid robots for this reason, as well to reflect on the curiosity of human behaviour. 

These are some different ideas, working on proportions and different styles (steam punk, new age sci fi etc) to see what works with what shape ideas. I found that a simple character design would work best with my idea of doing the robot as pixel art. I chose to work with pixel art as it further solidifies the notion that the character of the robot is man made, or made by a machine, made by a machine. Uniqueness is something not given to these robots.

(To image above) After I drew a pixel art version of one of the robot characters I was working on, I got an image of a human filled scene - as my idea is for the robot to try and live in a scene with humans, but by being there he will corrupt it. First of all, to integrate him in to the scene I used the  polygon lasso tool to cut out the part of his arm covering up the girl with the shoulder bag - to give the impression that he is in the scene.

As the main theme of this picture is the robot corrupting the aspect of human life that he so wishes, I thought how I could accomplish that. I decided if I give a visual aid to something we don't usually give a visual aid to - but the robot sees it like this as he's ill experienced to such things. (Sensing things objectively rather than subjectively) So I decided to pixelize a musical note coming from the club, getting more distorted the closer they get to our robotic friend.

 I used the pixelate mosiac on the musical notes to achieve the corrupt feel.

He's better off being a machine, but then again, aren't we all.