Intro to Creative Play - Week 11

After finalising our ideas last week, we have been since been creating all the assets needed for our final product. At home I managed to finish my modern city scape, and I am pleased with how it looks. I used a digital illustrating software to ensure a modern-looking design, relating to the time period itself, and kept to a blue colour scheme so that each segment has its own unique colour scheme, as the forest consisted of mainly vivid greens, whereas the traditional segment had greys and blacks. I tried to give each building a quirky and cartoonish design, which not only creates a juxtaposition between the other styles, but also makes the piece look more interesting, as if I gave all the buildings a realistic square geometric based design, the final piece I feel would look uninspired and bland, when compared to the interesting ideas and art styles of the previous two. Many of these buildings were my own interpretations of famous buildings, most notably The Gherkin from London, but the majority were fabricated out of my own imagination with help from a mood board that I created, using both real world images, and from futuristic cartoons such as Futurama, in order to really push the modern theme. I made these three A3 sheets long, in accordance to the other time periods.

One of my other team members produced the artwork of her chosen time period of traditional/Victorian, and she produced them suitably using traditional methods, and I think that the outcome was very appealing.

These are the final collages that we used for the jungle segment.

Now that we had all the artwork ready, our team started to experiment the best ways to make the stand that we mocked up last week, making boxes out of various materials to find the sturdiest. Eventually we found the ideal paper, which had gloss which made the boxes look more polished, and held up very well. Unfortunately, there this type of paper wasn’t available in the size that we required to make the stand, however we overcame this by producing six separate 42cm x 9cm x 7cm boxes and stacking them on top of each other to make the different levels. Below are the box mock ups, the net for the final box and what the final base came out like.

After we got that out of the way, it was then time to present the final pieces on them. This is where we came into some trouble, as printing these designs on one A3 piece of card and placing them across the 42cm long base, caused the designs to be very small, and there is no way that they would stand out at that size. We resolved this issue by only using two of the three designs for each setting, which enabled us the print them at a larger scale, and therefore be more noticeable. We cut around each of the cityscapes so that you can clearly see behind them.

I am pleased with how this has turned out, though the only thing I was uncertain about was the lack of each layer overlapping the one behind it, in order to get more of a sense for three dimensions and making the very different designs blend together more, and make the observer feel as though they are a singular piece. This was only a minor issue however, as there is a slight overlap, and overall I think the piece looks very presentable and is a unique way of attacking the brief. At first we were disappointed that not all of our artwork was going to be on show, but then we realised that all of the left over pieces would be shown on the video, which will be projected above our display. The video was also made by one of our team members during this week’s session, and though we managed to accomplished what we set off to do (which was a pan through all our artwork), we realised that the final result was bland, and the different art styles didn’t blend well and the change from forest/traditional, traditional/modern was too abrupt. Because of this, during this weekend I will experiment with alternate ways of making the pieces blend better together on my video editing software. This will be a good way to experiment further with digital design, and take more risks by playing creatively with the effects on offer. The soundscapes were also created this week. I will post the final video here when it is complete

Again, I feel like our team have made good progress, and all now that is left to do is tidy up our display a bit, and put the video together. I am highly anticipating the final result.