WARBOSSES - Game Poster and Trailer

For this assignment we had to create a promotional poster and trailer for a game. We were given a list of game titles and styles from which we could only pick one. These included a new Mario game in which the objective was to surf the universe, a new Gears of War styled game called WarBosses made by Epic Games and a murder mystery game called Ladykills in which you play a detective on the hunt for a female killing murderer.

Originally i chose LadyKills as the idea appealed to me and i thought it would give me a lot of freedom in designing the characters and story. However, i soon found out that the whole story had already been designed for the game and there were just too many elements that needed to be covered and incorporated in the trailer.

After deciding against LadyKills,I started to look at the other options, the Mario and Warbosses games particularly appealed to me. I decided not to go for the Mario option though as i was worried Nintendo would sue my ass if i ever exhibited my work which would be designed around Mario. So Warbosses it was. Now, i have a confession to make: I've never played Gears of War, the game that WarBosses is supposed to resemble and after doing some research it seemed to be just a simple shooter set on another planet with men in over sized armour suits and gigantic weapons.

After attempting to draw several men and women in this style i got bored. I was uninspired and wanted to quit, but after finding out the brief was just a starting point and that we could expand on it as much as we wanted, i suddenly started enjoying the assignment again. Instead of having huge hulking men in the game, i included two women, who are always grossly underrepresented in these games and a relatively slim but physically fit male.

Ideas for characters

Communications/ Sniper

Old Medic design with new design next to feet

French Engineer

Developing the medic

Miss Medic

Her hair didn't match her strict personality so i put her hair up
This shows she is more in control.

Final design

I decided relatively early on that the game would include and engineer and a communications type character. I did more research and discovered Brink, a newly released game in which the player gets to choose a class, this seemed similar to the direction in which my design was going. I researched brink and discovered there was a medic class available. A medic class would fit well into my design alongside the engineer and tech girl and so she joined the group.
.Here are the character bios with information about their past and personality:

Frenchie

Communications- i messed up her head, the bottom head is correct

Miss Medic

Coming up with a story for the trailer didn't take too long. Research indicated that most shooters had a short amount of story at the beginning of their trailer followed by a heavy action packed sequence. I decided to follow in my predecessor's footsteps. Here is what i came up with and how it looked when finished.

Initial plan, this was way too long

More of initial plan... plus the bad guy :D

Final Storyboard Part 1

Final Storyboard Part 2

Finally i did my poster, which i am really pleased with. This is the first proper project i have done in photoshop and i think it turned out very well! Originally i decided to do three posters, one poster focusing on each character's weapons and armour with different coloured squares in the background. The Engineer would have blue squares, the nurse would have purple and the sniper would have green. However, due to time constraints i decided it would be impossible and i should just focus on one character. I felt like my nurse was the strongest character, she was gritty, had an interesting back story, a bad-ass weapon and is generally the most appealing character to look at. Plus with her hair in pig tails she totally looks like a demented Nurse Joy from the Pokemon franchise, all the more reason for her to be my poster child!

Initial poster designs, i went for the one in the left corner

Sketched image

Here was the rough poster i sketched out, you can see my plans to include a square pattern in the background and the basic positioning of the nurse. Her proportions here are off by a lot but like i said, it was only a plan. Anyway, i scanned this in and started to add a background and colour it in... next time i looked at my clock it was bed time. This is what I'd produced at the end of day one:

After a day of work

I was really excited with how this poster was turning out, photoshop started to work with me instead of wanting to ruin my work and i actually started to enjoy using the programme. Lots of things still needed to be sorted though, her dress was a mess, one leg was in an awkward place her syringe and face weren't finished. So the next day i got to work and... Ta da!

After two days of work

This is my final image. Like i said I'm really happy with how it turned out. Although i need to practice shading and blending a little more, i think it looks pretty cool, it definitely turned out better than i expected. I think this is probably my one of my favourite assignments of the year, even if we only had a week to do it in it's been really fun and educational. If i was to do this assignment again, i think i would want more time so i could do all three posters, which i will probably do over summer instead and maybe do something else to the nurse's face... something is slightly off about it- but nothing major. Overall this was a very enjoyable task, i only wish we had had more like this during the first year instead of so many animation tasks, but hopefully next year we'll get more assignments like this! Anyway, off to practice even more over summer, SEE YA!

Stoke Your Fires!...Or don't. To be honest I wouldn't bother...

Do they realise this poster makes no sense?

Stoke Your Fires was the name of a pretty poorly put together festival that took place in Stoke on Trent. From the very beginning the festival felt unprofessional and thrown together. To begin with, we were ushered into a tiny café where we were told to buy some food if we wanted to, and since it was early and people hadn't eaten, we did. However, just as our orders had been taken we were told that the speakers were ready now... The kitchen staff had to rush everyone's orders and people had to swallow their burgers and sandwiches whole as you couldn't eat during the presentations. Shambles.

However, there were some interesting highlights to this festival, even if the rest of it was a disaster. One good part about Stoke Your Fires were the animations that were shown as they were winning animations from people around the world. Two in particular stuck out to me, an animation called Birdboy about a male drug addict in an incredibly grim world, dealing with the after effects of a nuclear meltdown. I liked how grim the animation was, it was dark and depressing and matched the colour of my soul. No, I'm only kidding, but i did like how gritty the animation was, the way these characters were living after such a disaster was believable and interesting.

The other was an animation about life and death called On the Water, and followed a character and his family. It started with a child being born from the water and being given a boat which he had to sail. His father taught him how to sail in harsh seas and overtime the boy became stronger than his father who grew grey and started to slow down, eventually falling out of shot. The boy, now a man, finds a female sailor and they sail together for a while until they too have a child. The animation almost starts again as now it shows them raising their child and teaching him how to sail and then you realise what's going to happen, they are going to start slowing down. Sure enough the coupled start to turn grey, the son sails out of shot though and instead we see what happens to the parents. After failing to sail against the tide they eventually reach a waterfall and fall into the waves below. This was a great animation as it touched so many people. There were a few people behind me who had started to cry and everyone else was silent. The animation had a happy ending though as the couple who had fallen into the waves appeared again but this time as a newborn baby, thus repeating the animation, showing the circle of life.


Later on in the day (after various technical problems, an hour or so of waiting around doing nothing), we were given a talk by the special effects company Double Negative who have worked on films such as Harry Potter, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and the newly released film, Paul (which i saw twice :D). The speaker was passionate and enthusiastic unlike previous speakers who seemed like they couldn't care less about their companies or occupations. He explained how the special effects in Paul, particularly on Paul himself were done. Paul is an alien by the way, in case you were wondering. Anyway, he told us how much work went into the eyes if the character, being as big as they were, they were very shiny and had to catch every bit of light that he walked past or turned to. This apparently took months and went over budget several times but the guy explained that it was money well spent because the little things make the movie.  He went on to say that the audience might not notice these things, but he does, and if he didn't put his all into the product then he wouldn't feel like it was a job well done.


That was about all i found interesting on the Stoke Your Fires trip, i wouldn't recommend going unless you like festivals that are almost completely empty and feel like they have been thrown together at the last minute. Even though the occasional talk was interesting and there were a couple of good animations it doesn't even come close to competing with BAF which was much better. Apparently though the festival only started a couple of years ago and is still trying to get noticed which gives them a mild excuse to why the speakers weren't very impressive, but if they are trying to gain funding or support then they need to improve their product.A lot.

3D Stop Motion Animation #2

Part 2 is here! Yes, yes i know, now calm yourself. So the last post ended with the set being pretty much finished and the armatures being finished and foamed up, but they still didn't have any clothes. Luckily Christina Chan, a member of our group, knew how to sew and was able to join all the bits of the outfit together, so all we had to do was cut out the right lengths of material and pass them to her. She did a very good job considering the quality of the material was terrible and the size of the clothes were so miniscule.

So the puppets and set were finally completed, and it felt great. Seeing a flat picture that you drew turn into a lump of metal and then turn into a 3D fully clothed puppet is quite amazing. However, it also felt like we had just climbed a mountain, to find yet another mountain in our way, making the last mountain look like a mole hill- although the set and puppets were completed, we still had all the animating and editing to do.

Our finished set and two of the three main characters

Scientist

Assistant

We decided that we would animate the characters we designed and that Lisa would help wherever she could as she did not have a character of her own. George animated the scientist, I animated the assistant and Christina animated the cat with help from Lisa in some tricky scenes.

We set out to have someone taking the frames (someone sat on the computer constantly pressing the same key, a pretty monotinous job) who wasn't animating so that the whole team was sharing the work load but in the end it was mainly myself and George who did this. This was mainly because our characters were on screen almost all the time and so we were around the pc the most, having a third person would have been very crowded, although Christina occasionally stepped in to give us a break and let us concentrate on just animating.

The animating went rather smoothly with very few hiccups, a camera nudge and a couple of table knocks were the only problems i can remember. The work was draining and slow but surprisingly fun and the outcomes looked great. Our lighting, which consisted of a normal light and a light with a green transparent material in front of it were particularly effetive in creating the mood of the labratory and gave it a creepy edge.

George animating the Scientist

Push the button!

And here is our finished assignment!

3D Stop Motion Animation

Our third animation assignment this semester, this time we had to produce a 3D stop motion animation. It had to be over one minute long, have a clear storyline, have a theme that was specified on the brief and said we would have to design and create the puppets ourselves. We decided to work with people we hadn't worked with very much before and so me and George said goodbye to Bas and Stuart, and said hello to Lisa and Christina.

Our group sat down for a couple of hours and attempted to come up with story lines that could fit the themes of particular interest which were 'Time', 'The Experiment', and 'The Illusion'. Here are a couple of very basic ideas i came up with.

Plans for a fountain of youth in 'The Illusion' theme

Plans for an environmental story for the theme of 'Time'

These stories were eventually scrapped as our group started to collaborate our ideas and realised that time would be the best theme as it included the possibilities of a time machine. However, we soon realised we still didn't have a story and instead decided to come up with some characters and then build a story around them. We knew we wanted a scientist as the main character but apart from that we were clueless. I proposed we had an assistant and kept pushing this idea as i felt it would be a good opportunity to animate characters interacting which one another. Soon the group warmed to the idea and designs for the eassistant started to appear. Here are the designs i came up with for the assistant.

My assistants, young rocker and thin female

 These designs included a female assistant who just wanted to please the scientist and was treated badly (bottom left) and Lisa came came up with the idea of a male assistant, perhaps his son, who i designed as a long haired rocker who didn't particularly care about the experiments and just wanted to get out of the lab. I particularly liked the female assistant as i thought she looked interesting and her personality could work well with a bossy scientist. Unfortunately no one else seemed to be very impressed with her and so she was rejected. After a little while George noticed the animal like doodle i drew on the left of the page and proposed i design a character similar to that- a pretty female assistant who might have been experimented on by the scientist. Jumping at the chance to include a character that followed my own style, i dug up an old character i designed a few months earlier and started to mold her into the assistant. Here are a few plans

Some designs from the character i dug up

After a couple pages of designs i remembered the assistants that had been rejected earlier, i liked the female's outfit, especially the long black boots and gloves and i liked the son's grumpy attitude and so incorporated these elements into the new assistant. She would be glamorous and attractive with a rabbit tail and ears, giving her a 'playboy bunny' look, but without the smile and charming personality. She didn't enjoy working for the scientist, but being his creation, had to help him with his experiments which makes her indifferent and placid in a lot of situations. Here is the final design that everyone was happy with.

Sorry for the poor quality photo

We storyboarded for a little while and managed to come up with a strong storyline. We realised something was missing though and so designed another character that would help bring more comedy to the animation and the cat was born! Originally the cat would be designed and animated by Lisa but due to illness, Christina took this role and instead Lisa provided us with a more in detail storyboard.

Next we moved onto creating our puppets and set, two things i was not looking forward to but ended up really enjoying. Firstly we got the bare walls of our set made and started to paint them, although it soon became apparent that some people can't paint to save their lives, I'll give you a hint who that was... me. However! My skills were needed elsewhere anyway as our armatures needed to be created and so myself and Christina went to the 3D studio to learn how to make them. We quickly picked it up and together we created the assistant, the cat and the scientist in a few days.

Our back wall

This is death, he was cold so we warmed him up

We sold this to a gallery for £1 mill afterwards

Bunny assistant turnaround with brass tubing plans

Armature at the end of the day

Getting ready to be foamed up

Bunny assistant foam body and ears!

Cat and Scientist foamed up and ready to go  (Hey Cassie)

 Next we designed some posters for the background of the set as the 3D studio was closed and the animation room where our set was had been locked. We decided to keep the posters humorous and so included re-designs of classic posters such as the kitten on a washing line and some just plain silly posters like a troll face. We also drew our characters for portraits that would hang on the east wall that George and Christina painted.

Posters

More posters

Assistant, Scientist and Cat portraits

 That's enough for this post, more 3D stop motion animation work will be posted soon!

Shield Your Eyes!

Just a short blog post to show some of my recent life drawing. Yvonne, our life drawing teacher asked us to draw John, our model, in several positions that would make up a walking cycle, two thirty minute in-detail sketches, a newspaper collage of him and finally a light and dark shading piece using charcoal and chalk pastels. Shield your eyes if you don't want to see any people bits!

John walking

...and walking

Walking some more

Love me some walking

I'll just keep walking

Mirror Image

He fell asleep doing this one, seriously.

Newspaper John

Chalk and Charcoal

Moving on...

Feet and shadow

Finished piece

You can look again now :P