Building a World (Week 1)

For the first task of our semester project, after we had been situated within our groups of four. Was to brain storm some ideas on what types of work we wanted to create and some of the ideas which were presented was ‘Dog World’, ‘Snail World’ and ‘Vegan World’. We had gone for lunch as a group and brainstormed some of these ideas, having many great inputs for each of the worlds and including having different national dogs with different occupations for dog world and a cute village perspective, with a murderous contrast for vegan world, in order to highlight the animals eating the humans and how killing others for food consumption is harmful. However the idea which everyone in the group was the most excited for and creatively passionate about was ‘Snail World’ and there was many ideas for this world as Luc had pitched a theme of a snail dynasty, to which everyone else in the group then created a backstory of slugs versus snails, how the slugs became the less desired race of the world, how the snails became the worlds royals and the different conflicts that would occur within the world, this then led to the team decision of the name ‘Snail Dynasty’.

During the brainstorming I was eager to express my ideas and had loads to say on what we could include within the different worlds and how to develop each world with their own unique characteristic, however when it came to finalising ideas and putting pen to paper with a creative flow of everyone’s designs. I found myself a little overwhelmed at times and had gotten anxious about showing my drawing skills to others. After a while though after seeing everyone’s ideas and being more secure and accepted within the group, I was able to share a vast amount of ideas, listen to others, speak my mind and was really eager to start designing ‘Snail Dynasty’ the world and the characters within.

One of our first ever tasks within our group was to write down and brain storm our ideas onto a whiteboard within the class. This was a really freeing and energetic first task and allowed us to show others what ideas and creative styles we represented and had helped in connecting us with others and encouraging one another’s design. Some of the designs we have on the board is to do with a ‘Vegan World’ and how it would be interesting to create a world were the animals eat the humans and to flip to normality of today’s society. I myself have been vegan for two years and was surprised to find out Ellie within the group was also vegan/vegetarian herself and was eager to explore the idea and how it would develop. We discussed what the vegan movement meant to us and was able to explain to the rest of the group why we are vegan and how creating a world with a flipped dynamic would really open peoples eyes and show the dissociative manner most people have about eating animals. Another idea on the whiteboard was to create a human giant and have the giant as the world which people lived upon, the idea was to create a friendly giant and have the different parts upon his body be situated amongst the poor and rich living within the world. If you were a rich character that would mean you lived upon the more sought after part of the giants body such as their head, ears or shoulders and you were presented tall and powerful. However if you were a poor character you would be faced with living on the tougher, more treacherous part of the body like the legs or feet and the poor would have to hang on for their life onto the lower part of the body or they would risk loosing their home and family. Our now chosen main world ‘Snail Dynasty’ was also brainstormed onto the white board and this is were everyone had fun exploring the world of snails and were really creatively excited and challenged and had all agreed this was our favourite world. Some of the ideas which we started to brain storm upon was having a royal family of snails who ruled snail world with the leader being ‘Emperor Slime’, he would grow to rule snail world with his brother and his princess and have the common snails follow him, with their less fortunate cousins the slugs. This however was to cause a rivalry amongst the snails and slugs and cause the slugs to rise up and prepare for a slug rebellion. Snail world would become our main chosen world just because we already had so many ideas coming naturally to us rather than the others and some of the ideas we had thought of were allowing everybody to be loose with their creativity and enjoy the designing process.

Within our Thursday lectures Alec had begun a weekly class that would teach us different parts within animation and drawing and then would assign us with different tasks that were to help us to further understand and practice the lesson we had just received and how we could apply this to creating our chosen worlds. The first lesson we received was the basic of drawing in general and helpful techniques such as how to hold your pencil so that you could draw comfortably, for a prolonged amount of time and not end up with aches within our wrists. He should us how to do this with different drawing techniques and tasks us to draw some straight lines, curved lines, movement lines and circles to get to feeling of holding our pencil a different way. These small but helpful techniques were things I wouldn’t have ever known about drawing but were really helpful and helped develop our professional drawing styles. These drawings are some practice lines and circles I had drawn using the different way to hold my pencil and applying pressure.

The next drawing technique was to break down any characters you see or wish to create into simple shapes such as triangles, squares, rectangles and circles and it shows a much more simplistic view on the characters we know within cartoons. This is a beneficial technique if you are having to re-draw a character for repetitive work or for reference and wanted to find a more simple way of viewing the character and having a quicker and more basic method to draw. This technique was also helpful if you are in need of creating a original character design but are finding it difficult and have a creative block. Going back to basic shapes and creating characters by using the shape continuously or introducing a combination of shapes. This photo is a quick example of me trying out the technique of combining a array of shapes to create different characters and how they developed and can become so simple and fun to draw.

This photo is a example of when we create our characters with simple shapes and lines, but want to further develop our characters into possible and more 3D shapes or forms, we can add depth and dimension by adding in some shading or extra lines. I have always found 3D work quite difficult to draw and being able to draw shapes or characters that look realistic or 3D was something that I needed to practice. However the stripped back and simple approach of how to draw the shapes just on their own and the different ways, views and processes was a easier start to developing my ability within 3D animation.

Once we had finished our lesson on the simple shapes and lines within animation and how to draw depth and dimensions. We then gathered back into our groups to begin again in brainstorming some further ideas and work on snail world and our character approach. Our groups within the class had been mixed around just in order to get people to know one another and to also put you in a new situation with people. The groups mixing up was to give everyone a chance to explain your idea or to change you within a new group of people and bring fourth your ideas to their world, so me and orla’s two new members of the group were Adrian and Caoimhe. They had came from moth world but were eager to know what we were up to within snail world so we explained to them the story and then, using the techniques we had learned today we began designing the expressions the snails may make in different scenarios and how shapes and lines could be connected within our work.

On this page I began with designing the royals who would be ruling snail world and what different characteristics they might have. The difficult yet interesting thing about snail world is the general looks and expressions of the snails, as they wouldn’t change much as snails are all quite similar in design and don’t have eyes, eyebrows or a mouth to produce dialect or a wide range of emotion. This meant that our designs challenged us to think outside the box in how we were going to show differences between our snails. How we were to show the royals and just common people, how we were to show emotion and maybe how we could use their antennas to cover their eyes to show when they are scared, sad or maybe straight or erect antennas to show happiness or excitement. We also had the idea of really focusing in on the snail shells and using it as a staple characteristic that could be designed and changed depending on who we were creating.