07/09/2015 - Fist Impressions

Week 01

First Impressions

My thoughts after first lecture and practical for Creative Research:

This is an open module based on the lecture of today. I have to pick an area of passion for myself to create a project. This project can be as simple as wanting to improve my digital painting skills therefore creating a digital painting at the start of this semester and analyse my weaknesses and hopefully have an improved version at the end of the first semester that is greatly improved. It could however be more complex and I could want to look into different styles of animation and therefore I could end up with a variety of different animation tests using 2D, 3D, stop motion, flip book etc. All this I have gathered from the information in the lecture today. I also have to look where I am right now in my creative field and think about where I would like to go after university and it has been highly recommended that we choose a project that will benefit us in that chosen area.

My initial idea for this project is something along the lines of building up a fictitious world and creating a story within this world and also doing development for the characters and environments for the story. All this would be the research and development side of an animation (which would not be created for this project). This idea has stemmed from my dissatisfaction of my drawing/sketching abilities and my passion of storytelling, this idea will therefore allow me to develop my drawings in the development of the characters and environments and also allow me to pursue my interests in narrative and plot and step up my understanding of this field to give myself a better foundation of which to explore further. Another note to make is my desire to be able to sketch characters that I have in my head, but at the moment, I don't have the ability to make them reality on paper. I believe that being able to bring characters and environments to life on paper is essential for creating a convincing narrative and is a core aspect of the animation process to then create final characters in what ever medium is chosen.

The sort of pieces I would create is development sketches for a number of characters and environments and also various documents relating to the narrative, these include character sheets detailing character traits, story beats that will be re-iterated through out and also a premise. I also believe that scene layout/composition is a key story telling device and I should look into this if this idea is favoured as it would allow me to really immerse myself in film studies.