Melon Cheesecake

Carvanha

2010-02-25T14:29:00.005Z

A personal project of mine, working on some stuff Rare said at the career fair, making a character from a piece of concept art. Here is the concept art, a Pokemon called Carvanha. I chose this because I liked the simple shape and the fact that it had a really angry looking face! I wanted to go with more detail than the normal Pokemon style, which tends to be flat colours and cartoonish, so I added detail ideas from real fish. Might make it a fish tank/ bowl to display nicely in.

Texture is 1024 x 1024, tri count just under 1,700 (I was thinking Wii spec).

Concept:
Renders:

.

Life Drawing

2010-01-20T17:41:00.019Z

Last year I went to a life drawing session on Monday nights. I feel it was really good for me and I produced a lot of work. It was also really interesting getting to see the work of a wide variety of artists with their own personal styles and preferences, and I hope I can find some classes out in Canada.

So anyway, here's some of the stuff I did. A lot of the parcel paper ones didn't photograph very well, the colours came out very weirdly, but you get the idea.

This model was great, she was really angular and could hold some really great poses:

This is probably my favourite piece, I achieved what I try to go for, where you fill in a lot of the information yourself:

This one came out bright yellow when I tried to photograph it, so I've had to turn it dark to have it make any sense. It was going to be black and white, but after I did the white I found it made enough sense anyway and left it:

The guy actually fell asleep during this pose, but barely moved!

Roll

2010-01-12T01:29:00.002Z

Speedpaint, 45 minutes.

The snow roll actually exists!

Case

2010-01-10T22:54:00.005Z

Speedpaint. 45 minutes, although a lot of that was spent pursuing a different idea

Speedpaint Lock/ loch

2010-01-05T00:01:00.003Z

About an hour, the word was supplied by Tim and was either loch or lock, so I decided to combine the two

Great Tits

2009-11-15T18:32:00.003Z

Finally finished Woooo! *prepares herself for barrage of terrible jokes and comments*

Life drawing

2009-10-27T21:56:00.004Z

I've found a life drawing class near me and I went last night. It was a bit weird and frustrating at first, but then it was almost like I hadn't been away from it. Here's my piece from the 50 minute pose at the end.

I've even drawn the face! I've always had a weird mental block about drawing faces - I've always been paranoid I'll get it wrong or offend people or something, so I just haven't done it. And that in turn makes me think I can't do it and feel horribly self conscious and it becomes a vicious cycle. But weirdly I'm starting to get over that, without really having done anything about it.

When I progress in art, it seems to feel like the knowledge or ability of how to do that thing has always been there and that the walls are just falling away rather than learning a new block of information. Almost like there's more space in my head for stuff rather than less. Does anybody else get that?

XSS Poster

2009-10-03T20:50:00.002Z

I thought I'd put this up on here, it was a pretty fun project and got lots of good responses. It's a poster for XSS (Extreme Street Sports), a Southampton university club which Tim co-founded. The poster was for their fresher's fair, and Tim went around wearing the featured top hat recruiting people.

Dragon!

2009-07-06T21:21:00.002Z

Crossposting this from facebook. This is a dragon I painted for my Mum to go up in the local library. I normally end up painting something at least once a year to do with the summer reading scheme. A year or two ago it was nature and I made loads of googley eyed bugs and painted lots of animals. Recently I ended up painting up a wooden Pterodactyl, I wonder where that's gone...

But anyway! This is bigger than A0 and painted entirely with poster/ powder paint! Who needs photoshop when you have the primary colours, black, white and green?

New Website

2009-06-05T20:28:00.001Z

My new site is now live!

Queen of Arts

Penguin

2009-04-18T11:15:00.002Z

From photo reference. About 10 - 15 hours

Export to reality!

2009-04-15T11:32:00.009Z

Run through export to reality program:

I suppose technically it is some kind of exporting to reality... even if it is just papercraft.
Well, here's my tester, and it definitely worked! Only unforseen problem was that because the model had an open base, the papercraft wasn't particularly stable and the edges were wibbling everywhere, so I made a rough base for it.
Here's the net, it's 3 A4 pages:

So the plan is now to do a few more things, I was thinking of doing this lot as a group, lots of nice boxy shapes:If anyone wants, I can run their models through pepakura and try to make the unfold as user friendly as possible, but I will NOT test build anyone's models for them. Also if anyone does want to do this, the lower poly the model, the easier everyone's life will be.

Deer Full painting

2009-04-01T09:55:00.002Z

There we go. I've decided I do quite like it now, painting it has just been a very frustrating process at times.

Deer

2009-03-31T21:30:00.004Z

I'm doing a proper version with a full background, but it's not coming out the way I want it, so I've done a 'illustration in the corner of a book or something' version. I will post up the full background one once I've finished it, but I just don't think I'm ever going to be happy with it, whereas this I quite like.

Other sideline activities

2009-03-26T23:47:00.005Z

I've been busy with the final project lately, but I did find time to make this monstrosity for Tom O' Brien's birthday (it was only a little bit late)

And here he is in the lab, waiting for his new owner to arrive

Finally painted something

2009-02-09T23:01:00.000Z

Took about 5 or 6 hours

I did a paint

2009-01-21T21:53:00.003Z

Speedpaint: Can. Took an hour and a half as I was just doing it on my own. Yay Stoppit and Tidyup!

Gameartisans

2008-12-29T12:45:00.005Z

Well, I've entered my first Gameartisans minicomp, the sackboy mini! The brief was to create a new costume for sackboy, either based on an existing character or an original idea. The limit was 2000 tris and one 512x 512 diffuse map, with any other maps being optional. I thought it'd be nice to have sackboy in some kind vehicle, thinking about the way vehicles are often represented in children's plays. I settled on a plane, seeing as cars pop up now and then in LittleBig Planet anyway, and then decided to kit out the sackboy appropriately as Biggles, the fictional World War 1 and 2 pilot. The background is taken from one of the Biggles books.

I think I did OK for my first entry, and I certainly had fun with it.
Blogger seems to be misbehaving and not linking to the full sized image of my submission, so I will do it manually:

Woo! Van Finished!

2008-12-09T13:41:00.007Z

Hooray! It's all done! Although I do have a couple of shader issues to sort out.

Damage state:

Update

2008-12-04T17:22:00.000Z

I don't really have anything amazing to report, I just thought I should update. Both the van and the pony are getting there. For the van I've almost finished the diffuse, then it's normals and specular. Then I can start the damage state, but at this point I don't think I'll make it anything that affects the entire mesh.
Low poly pony is pretty much done, I just need to clean up my texture seams and fiddle around with my alpha channels. I've also done most of the high LOD body mesh, just hooves and facial features to tweak, then I get the fun of trying to make it fit my existing texture page. This screenshot doesn't show the alphas that go over the hooves.

Pika!

2008-11-15T01:55:00.004Z

Oh yeah, I forgot to post this up...
I custom crafted the GAGGALS myself :D. Apologies for dodgy photos.

H Van

2008-11-15T01:46:00.002Z

Well, in the end I did do what I said I wasn't going to do, and I started making the van. The mesh is pretty much finished now, the only things I have to add are windscreen wipers and seats. I've modelled an interior as well, but I'll leave shots of that for when it's all actually finished.
I have no idea what to do for the damage state, I want to do something really dramatic!

Pony

2008-11-04T12:47:00.004Z

I haven't posted anything in a shamefully long time, and I have been working, I promise! I basically got bored of the garden, it was progressing but I felt I had little to show for the effort I'd put in, and it was feeling slightly bitty. I decided to switch to a nice lumpy thing, so I started on the pony.

As it stands I've done my low poly (under 2k tris) and unwrapped it. I've got some cones and extra bits for alphas as well but they're hidden in that screenshot. I also started to rig but got frustrated and left it...
I've started texturing but nothing's really happening with it yet. On the plus side, Hopefully I'll only have to do it once and it can serve for all 3 model iterations. I'm also finding I really want to start modelling the van now that I have loads of photos. I think I'm going to have to force myself to stick to one thing at a time!

Progress

2008-10-08T23:38:00.003Z

I've started work on the environment brief, I'm doing the corner of a domestic garden. I took lots of reference photos while I was at home over the weekend, and have begun to build. I started on Monday after working at Outso, after the frustrations of starting out with Maya it was really relaxing to come back and work in Max!
Here's my reference material:
And here's how mine looks so far:

It's a small area so my plan is to model and texture the big boundary areas, the soil and fences. Once those are in I can model and texture all the fiddly little things and just spend my polys making some nice plants.

Mod Stuff

2008-09-30T13:43:00.010Z

I've finished all my units! Yaaaaaaay!
The last three were practically the same mesh, the only difference is in their weapons and accessories. This made things pretty easy for me and meant I only had to really worry about the texturing. There were some really nice sword and sheath designs saved up for the important members of the army, so I had some fun with those.

Family member bodyguards:

Bactrian General:

Bactrian King:

Summary of the Beeb: Part 3

2008-09-28T17:44:00.009Z

As mentioned before, in the third week we decided to focus on a sitcom format. Dean and Alex chose to do part of an episode of the Mighty Boosh to see how the two remaining engines fared.
Meanwhile, I didn't really have much to do, so was glad when Rupert Harris from the Bamzooki team got in touch with us.

Bamzooki is a CBBC show where kids can download a kit, create their own Zook, an insect-like creature, and give it different skills. Some will be fast, some strong etc. They then submit their Zooks to the CBBC website, and some are contacted to be on the the show. The contests are rendered in 3d and superimposed onto the show to make it seem as though the kids can interact in real life with their creations and watch the competitions on a table in front of them.
The idea was for small segments of the show to have the Zooks out in the real world, creating mischief. Rupert was wondering if any of this could be achieved with machinima, so I had a play in the Bamzooki engine and with some video editing software and came up with this:

I also explored ways to personalise the Zooks a bit more and give them character, so I created a dummy Zook in Max and made it some features. It was good fun but unfortunately the Bamzooki engine doesn't support alpha channels, so that was a bit of a dead end.

This time round, Alex had the most success. His Mighty Boosh machinima came out really well and although there are limitations and things Moviestorm can't do that the script required, you can't tell too much. Moviestorm was very strong with regards to set creation and character customisation, as soon as the video plays you can see that it looks like the Mighty Boosh.

Dean had a lot of problems with Source, his lip synchs refused to preview and his character refused to begin the machinima sitting down. His choice of characters was also very limited by the way the Source engine works. Each character comes with their own set of embedded animations, and you can only choose from these when you are making a machinima. Unless you want to edit an existing model and re-export it, or make a whole new character and add in the animations, you're quite limited. The default textures weren't really ideal either, and make the shop seem a little bit creepy!

Jappet was unsure if I should upload these as they're based on existing works, but there are a lot of machinimas that use film and TV soundtracks, especially ones done with Moviestorm. I did e-mail the production company behind the Mighty Boosh asking for advice about it but unfortunately didn't get any reply. I think we should be fine as they are mostly our own work and they should fall under fair use with regards to copyright. That being said if I do recieve any e-mails or comments from official channels telling me to take these down I shall do.

Papercraft!

2008-09-24T13:23:00.000Z

Yes it's even more papercraft. I really love doing these, I just enjoy the process itself, looking forward to getting the next bit done. Once they're finished I feel slightly disappointed!

Clank:
This little guy was very simple, probably took only an hour or two to make.

Falco:
This one was complicated, but a very well designed papercraft. The arms were pretty fiddly but satisfying as they were only one piece each.
The headset was incredibly fiddly and frustrating. I also compounded my problems by choosing to do the lineless version. This meant it look a lot longer but looks a lot better as you don't have random dotted lines all over the place.
TF2 dispenser:
Tim and I made this together. It was quite a refreshing change to have a nice boxy papercraft. It reminded me of making nets for paper objects in primary school, all simple shapes and sharp corners. As you can see, we added some metal for it to dispense.

Mod Stuff 2

2008-09-05T15:58:00.008Z

Finished a couple more units for the mod.

Nomadic Light Cavalry:

This one was horrible to me. Getting it so that the open bit of the jacket was textured properly without the back being weird was a nightmare. It didn't help that I had a few files wiped, so after I'd done it once, I had to do it again.

Nomadic Heavy Cavalry.

This one wasn't too bad as I had the scale armour from before. The pattern on his shirt I actually nicked from a Persian rug!

Just three to go now. Busy busy!

Smash Brothers Brawl Papercraft

2008-08-31T13:03:00.004Z

I've recently got back into papercrafting, I find it nice to have something physical to get my hands on, rather than just digital modelling and texturing. I've just finished making Clank and posed the question of who I should make next, Wall-E or Falco. Tom replied that I should make Falco, and then follow on to make the entire cast of Smash Brothers Brawl! A daunting task indeed, and I don't think there's any way I could do it without help, but just for curiosity's sake, I'm going to find out how many Brawl papercrafts are actually out there.

Successes

This page has:
Samus/ Zero Suit Samus
Lucas
Kirby
Mr Game and Watch
Falco
Ness
Ike
Ice Climbers

This page has:
Mario
Peach
Wario
Luigi
Bowser
Yoshi

Here's a nice, official looking
Pikachu

Snake in a box (one of the simplest papercrafts there is, a nice beginner's one)
Part 1
Part 2

Link

Toon Link

Meta Knight (this one isn't great. There's an amazing one out there somewhere but everything I find on it leads me to Japanese sites)

Jigglypuff

Donkey Kong

Lucario and instructions

Sonic

Half successes

Pokemon trainer (Squirtle, Ivysaur, Charizard) Here's a Bulbasaur that could possibly be photoshopped to become an Ivysaur
I couldn't find an Olimar, but I did find Pikmin
No King Dedede but there are Waddle Dee and Waddle Doo

No Shows

Zelda/ Sheik
Ganondorf
Fox
Wolf
Pit (although there is one in the process of being designed)
Captain Falcon
Marth
Diddy Kong
R.O.B.

If anybody finds one of the ones I couldn't, let me know. There's a lot of internet out there to look through, I'm sure I missed something.

Summary of the Beeb: Part 2

2008-08-21T20:39:00.003Z

In the second week we began work in earnest. We were given a script to Dinosapien – a CBBC show about some kids camping in Canada who encounter intelligent dinosaurs. I will give you a brief synopsis of what's happening in our videos. Eno (a dinosaur) comes into the camp and spots a picture of himself. He examines it, but gets scared away by Lauren when she comes in, carrying hot dogs. She sees that the drawing of Eno has been moved and wonders if he's been here. She calls to him, and offers him food. He shows up, but is wary and on the offensive, and ends up scaring Lauren away by hissing at her.

I probably spent about two days just acquainting myself with Second Life and earning Linden dollars so that I could buy props. The female outfit I managed to cobble together for free, but the dinosaur costume cost me 75 Lindens, so I had to fill out a load of stupid online surveys to earn some cash. I’m still getting spam to this day.

Surprisingly, I probably got the most done out of the three of us. I didn’t get round to dialogue, but that could have been done reasonably quickly as I had a script to hand. The framerates and resolution of the video are absolutely appalling. My laptop was definitely not up to scratch, but Second Life looks quite dodgy anyway. I got really tired of staring at all the terrible models in Second Life, if you want to make anything, you have to make it out of primitives distorted and sort of mashed together, it's horrific!

Alex had an even harder time of it than me, seeing as he had to use Moviestorm. Moviestorm cannot do dinosaurs, cannot do people holding things apart from a few specific props, and can’t really do outdoor locations very well.

Dean had the best result, using Source. His was far more cinematic and just looked a lot nicer. He did, however, struggle with the AI. At the end of the video you can just see the AI override failing on the dinosaur and it rushing in to kill Alyx.

At the end of the week we decided to drop Second Life as it really has no redeeming features whatsoever, but to try out a sitcom format for Source and Moviestorm. Source had done well at this test, but drama or sitcom style shows would give Moviestorm an opportunity to prove itself.

Mod Stuff

2008-08-21T17:27:00.011Z

I've been helping Rez, one of Tim's friends, with a Rome: Total War mod. Now shamefully I've never actually played the game, but I've been helping out all the same. It's mostly been altering existing models and then texturing. It's been good practice for me and it's nice to have an external project set, I find it motivates me far more. It's also been really good to have a strict guideline for what each character needs, the mod is striving to be very historically accurate.

I know these aren't great but I'm not really very experienced at painting textures from scratch, so it's good to practice. I think the main problem I'm having is the folds in the fabric, I'm finding it tough to make my brushstrokes actually describe something, rather than just looking like random lines.

Bactrian Spearman:
(the screenshot is a little bit old, I dulled the colours down a bit because the yellow was a bit neon. The TP is current though)
Archer of Bactra:
Cavalry of Bactra:
I like this one, I think the colours came together really nicely.

Summary of the Beeb: Part 1

2008-08-12T22:20:00.004Z

Well, I finished my BBC placement the other week and I haven't really said that much about what I was really doing so I thought I'd better write it down before I forget. I have a posh shiny presentation somewhere on my hard drive, but it doesn't really give the full experience.

For accomodation, the three of us - me, Dean from the Game Programming course and Alex who'd just finished his IT computing course - were put up in the BBC hostel in Queensway, West London. The BBC hostel is nice, but has a few drawbacks. Firstly, it had no internet. Secondly, the kitchens were pretty unusable. We managed to cook a few meals in them, but you certainly had to struggle, either to find the right equipment or just to find a hob or oven that actually worked. But other than that it was nice.
It was certainly nice to live in central London, although I feel like I didn't really take advantage of my situation fully. In the last week I had my longboard and did some skating in Kensington Gardens and Hyde park, and I really should have done that from the outset.

We turned up at the BBC on Monday morning and were first sent on the tour to let us get to know the Television Centre building. It's suprising how little the studios are actually used at TVC, you can understand why they want to sell the building. We also learnt that the BBC rents out its studios to other channels like Channel 4 to earn itself more money. While we were on placement they were filming the Charlotte Church show in the studio opposite our building, so we saw the sparkly set in various states of completion. We were working in the East Tower, which you can just see in this photo:

After spending a few weeks working in a TV environment, I've found out that it's very unglam. We didn't really see any celebrities - we saw some kids TV presenters and the people off of Eggheads. We did see some rehearsals and sets for shows like Mock the Week, and lunch hour could be very interesting if you just went exploring and poked your nose in all the studio viewing galleries, but Television Centre is really very functional and boring. It's also a lot smaller than it looks on TV and in photos, the massive wall you see with 'BBC Television Centre' written on it is the side wall of studio one - the biggest studio in TVC. It looks HUGE but it's only about 4 stories high.

After our tour on the first day we were given our brief. What the CBBC production team wanted us to do was to generally research machinima and do some test projects to see how viable it would be as a way to produce animation sequences. We would each have an engine and work on laptops to escape the restricted BBC network. However, before any of that could take place, we had to complete a load of BBC training modules as we were classes as employees. These included: law, health and safety, competition fairness, child protection and editorial policy. All of these were extremely irrelevant to us seeing as we wouldn't even be touching a camera, but it did make you think about how things were produced behind the scenes and all the thought that has to go into a programme.

More to come!

Second Life Analysis

2008-07-22T15:46:00.002Z

We're finished with the initial game engine explorations, so here are my findings on Second Life, which we've thankfully decided to abandon.

Second Life is a popular game engine to use for machinima, and this is encouraged by the Second life creators, Linden Labs.
However, second life is not very easy to use for machinima purposes. A lot of the problems reflect the problems of a real world film project. You must find an in world location, as building one yourself is out of the question unless you want to pay for land. You then have to buy or find props. Building within Second life is possible, but the controls are horrible and my existing modelling skills become useless. It is possible to import textures into second life (which you have to pay to do) but not existing models. This seems like a huge waste of potential. Searching for props is not easy to do and was very time consuming. I had to spend time earning Linden dollars before I could even get started.
The other problem is that you need actors. As Second Life is an MMO of sorts, you require one person to puppet every avatar in the scene. Controlling an avatar and a camera at once is very tricky, so ideally the director would want to be apart from the scene. This means you’d need a person for every actor on screen at once, plus a director, making this a very inefficient option in terms of manpower.
The lack of scripting in Second Life means that for every take you do, the whole sequence must be acted again. This can be a disadvantage if you had everything going just right and just wanted to alter a camera angle- something that wouldn’t be a problem in an engine such as source.
Second Life also doesn’t look that great as a filming location. The residents have horrible modelling habits due to the weird builder, the textures all tile noticeably, and it’s rare to find a build with an overall art style behind it.
The main use of machinima within Second Life seems to be filming personally important events, such as in-game weddings, rather than any particularly creative endeavours. The only people I can see really wanting to pursue machinima within Second Life are the residents themselves.

I'll have to find out if I'm allowed to post up the video of the work I did as it's the BBC's intellectual property.

More SL Info dropping

2008-07-16T15:06:00.004Z

Nice filming location

Woodbridge

Kowloon Walled City

2008-07-16T10:32:00.003Z

I found this knocking about on my portable hard drive last night. I started it before I left uni at the end of the year, and it was going pretty well. It's still very much in progress, the main issue being the pile of rubbish in the foreground needs working into.

This is from a book about Kowloon Walled City, which was incredibly interesting. When the British took control of Hong Kong, it was never certain who exactly had control over Kowloon city, so it basically became a lawless society. Despite any official laws or government controls, the city survived, and did well for itself in many ways. Although there was widespread drug use and crime, the residents also took it upon themselves to set up schools and old people's clubs. There were many successful businesses, and practicing dentists and doctors who couldn't work in mainland Hong Kong due to not having the correct paperwork. The complete lack of planning regulations led to buildings being set up wherever they would fit, and almost leaning against each other like dominoes. Utilities were haphazard, and the alleys at the base of the buildings were dark and constantly damp from the dripping pipes.

Second Life Machinima

2008-07-15T15:01:00.003Z

Well, I've taken my first steps towards making a machinima, by testing out some lip sync technology.

To make this video (please try to ignore the watermark) I simply went into Second Life and found somewhere I thought looked nice. I positioned the camera so it was facing my avatar and took a screenshot.

I then opened up Crazytalk and pasted in the image. Crazytalk lets you define certain key features of the 2D image, namely the edges of the lips and eyes. You can then record an audio track and the image will automatically lip sync. The results look pretty good, however it does limit you quite a lot by using a flat image as a base. You'd have to be careful not to overuse it and to cut it in with different shots where it wouldn't matter so much that a character wasn't obviously lip synced.

This is the BBC

2008-07-09T14:33:00.012Z

As some people may be aware, I'm currently on a machinima placement with the BBC. The last couple of days have just been introduction and completing training courses, but soon we start actually getting down to business. Tomorrow we'll hopefully be given a script and then we'll each have a week or so to create a machinima of it using different engines. One of us will be on Moviestorm, one on Source, and me on Second Life. At the moment Source is looking like the most promising and flexible option for future use, but we'll have a go at everything and see what issues come up.

So for now I'll be using this blog as a drop off point for any reference I find useful in creating my Second Life machinima.

How to Alt-Zoom Camera - Camera controlling

Lip sync - Second Life Wiki - Rudimentary Lip Sync for SL

Machinima in Second Life - A tutorial of the whole machinima process

Thinkerer Studios - Step by step video recording and editing for SL

Noob Be Gone - Camera controls and an example of lipsynced SL machinima

Lip sync tools

Flycam - camera tool

CTRL + DEL + F1 Get rid of HUD

CTRL + DEL + D - opens up debug menu, allowing for unrestricted camera controls and some lip syncing

ALT + left click - follow a specific object or player with the camera

List of resources

List of places to get animations

Facial animation HUD

Animated Speech

Animation shop - inc some free ones

Crazy Talk - a lipsyncing program

Third Year Project Idea

2008-06-25T21:38:00.002Z

Some of you may know that I've recently come back from my holiday in Marmaris, Turkey, and while I was there I had a rather interesting idea for my final project. To be fair, it's not really my idea, it's Tim's, but I think he's more than happy for me to steal it from him.

The basic idea is to model an area of Leicester, but as if the predicted effects of global warming had been affecting it for quite a period of time. So, Leicester, but with a Meditteranean climate. I think this would be quite a nice idea because I'd have direct information from Leicester itself, whilst having to apply an art style, say from photos I took in Turkey.

The climate in Turkey affects far more than just the weather. Plants are different, with palm trees all over the place and the trunks of regular trees painted white, perhaps to protect them from the sun? We couldn't really work that one out. The forests are far less lush and green, and more scrubby, with trees and grasses clinging to rocks. Pavements and road surfaces in the town were always tiled brick, presumably because tarmac would melt. Buildings tended to be pastel shades, and were quite bleached by the sun. Balconies were present on pretty much every residential building in order for people to take advantage of the pleasant weather. Daily routines were also very different, with the working day starting late and finishing late, some shops staying open to about 10pm when in this country you'd expect them to close at 5.

I think this could be quite a good challenge. It would take a lot of concept art to narrow down what makes Leicester Leicester, and what makes Marmaris Marmaris. The issue then would be to combine them in a way that means Leicester is immediately recognisable, but also makes the viewer see that something isn't quite as it normally is.

I'll probably post some photos up later to illustrate some of my points a bit better.

Painting

2008-06-02T16:20:00.001Z

Continuing in the same vein as before: Solitary

Deep Sea Discovery

2008-05-31T17:15:00.003Z

This is for a speedpaint-like thing going on on a forum I visit, so I thought I'd repost it here. It didn't take very long, only an hour or two, but it doesn't technically count as a speedpaint.

The boat is finished!

2008-05-19T16:51:00.006Z

I decided as I suddenly find myself with lots of free time that I would resurrect my interest in papercraft! Having built Link and lots of Spiky Babies last year, I decided to ramp up the difficulty, and built the King of Red Lions from Wind Waker.

It took me just under two weeks to build, and I'm very happy with how it came out.

End of the Group Project

2008-04-16T15:13:00.003Z

I think it's time to write about my experience with the group project. I was hesistant about accepting a leader position as I knew it would probably involve stress and consantly wondering why I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I decided to go for it anyway. I was quite interested in being a leader purely on the organisation side, and I do seem to find myself in positions of responsibility outside of uni reasonably often. In my house I seem to organise pretty much everything money related - I don't do this because I want to boss people about but simply because I feel like if I didn't do it, nobody would.

I'm going to attempt to go through things chronologically with the aid of my Pig folder, where I basically documented every Team Pig and every Leader meeting there was. It might be interesting to type the leader meeting one up to chronicle our gradual descent into madness.

I did worry quite a bit initially for several reasons.
One: nobody really knew what they were doing. As soon as one leader had an idea, the rest of us rushed to copy them because it seemed like something we should be doing. We all had a meeting as soon as the brief was given out, we all set our blogs up and we all toured the Queen's building looking for inspiration. It took a little while to properly settle into the project and have our own ways of doing things
Two: I don't know very much. I freely admit that I am not the strongest in pretty much any discipline out there, and being faced with such a strong team was daunting. Would anyone respect my suggestions when I don't know as much as they do? Fortunately it because quickly apparent that all the leads were more than happy to explain things, and even go back to square one if necessary. It was easy to ask people for advice or explanations.
Three: As I have mentioned previously, I worry about things anyway, it tends to give me motivation to work.

Luckily for us, pretty much the first idea we thought of we decided to stick with. Our first idea was people holed up in the Queen's building, using it as a fort. Some kind of terrible circumstance had occurred, forcing people out of situations they usually controlled, and being penned into small areas, allowing nature to take over the outside world. Flooding compounds the problems faced by people in the building.
We started by researching, and producing concept art. A lot of our immediate ideas can be found in the final level. The idea of people trying to keep the trees at bay is reflected in Tom's graffiti. Jesus's idea of having the player on the walkway so they could look up and down but access neither direction is the core feature of the final level. It seems like the start of the project was years ago, and it's a nice surprise to check back and know that so many ideas were realised. Sadly though, Tom's bat people were never fully explored, maybe the world is just not ready for them.
I think researching things was one of our strong points. We chose a very accessible theme - flooding, plant life and abandoned buildings. Scott and Alex provided photos of abandoned buildings, the canal is just around the corner for things relating to slow moving water and the Bradgate park trip gave people lots of plant information. My significant other being an engineer helped no end, allowing me to provide accurate information on what would actually happen to the building should it flood, and to design a drawbridge for the inhabitants that would theoretically work.

We sat down and planned out the entire level once we had a clear idea of what we wanted. It would have been great to have made the whole thing, because it would just have expanded what we have now, but sadly we didn't have the manpower. Kitto used the plan to create a fantastic art style guide for each area, which was then used to produce concept art. Each person was assigned an area or two to concept and we starting producing asset lists based on these. I think having only a small amount of concept art really helped us, because each area had one solid vision behind it. Having too much might have made things too complicated.

I think it was around this stage in the project that I started to worry about my abilities as a leader. In my mind I didn't seem to actually be doing anything. Other leaders were managing conflicts, giving other team members a kick up the arse and generally keeping a tight grip on things. I wasn't doing any of that, the project just seemed to flow, mostly driven by the team leads, with me picking up the pieces and generally being administrative. Eventually I realised that this was what I wanted to be happening. I wasn't having to manage conflicts because there weren't any. I wasn't kicking people up the arse because everybody was getting on with it. I was quite happy to join in discussions, have everyone come up with ideas and then me write it all down and do the boring things like produce charts. This was what I'd had in mind as being leader's duties anyway, the stuff that no one really wants to do but someone has to.

With all the initial planning done, we set people test assets to check modelling skills. Once they were Ok'd, the hard bit began - the production line. For the next few weeks I felt like I had assets coming out of my ears. Everything seemed to take me far longer than it should have done and things would seem to be almost finished for ages. I think I got a bit hung up on texturing things perfectly, but I gradually got over it and got faster at producing assets. My prime time for asset production seemed to be late on Sunday nights, when my self-inflicted deadline of 'The End of the Week' loomed. As things started to appear in the blockout though, the project became more inspiring.

As Easter approched and another asset list came out, I decided to set myself the lecture theatre. It was another of those 'this will probably cause me stress and frustration, but if it works it'll be worth it' moments. Because it was so intrinsically linked to the shape of the blockout, I had to consult with Jesus in the labs a lot more. It was nice to have such communication, I could see how the level was progressing and also check that my asset fitted correctly. If we did this all again I'd encourage far more team use of the lab, as it allows everyone to give help and suggestions far more quickly and easily.

During Easter there was some drama. Alex's walkway had not fitted the blockout, so Tom had, at the request of the team as a whole, produced another one. Alex took offence and a feud broke out, which was thankfully resolved by Jesus. I felt pretty guilty that as team leader I wasn't there to deal with the issue, although I think the fact that the only real problem we had happened at a time when we had the least communication between the entire team is a testament to how well we managed generally.

And so we're almost at the current point. After Easter was the most pleasant time for me, everything was essentially finished, it just needed to be collected and polished. I could texture my infernal lecture theatre with relatively little stress, and also produce any odd assets that might be needed.

So, have I been a good leader? I'm putting myself on not sure bordering on yes. To be honest I think the group would probably have worked fine without a leader at all. We made all the big decisions together and the process flowed very nicely with input from everyone. It has been nice to be able to say 'we are doing it this way' when it comes to some things and know I'll get my way, but I definitely feel like I would describe my role as more team secretary than team leader. I tell everyone what they're doing, when they're doing it and shuffle papers afterwards, but they make the decisions about the how, why and what next. I think I've been able to adapt well to what my team needed from me, and at the end of the day we've got something to show, so I guess I must have done something right.

As a final note, a bit thank you to everyone in Team Pig for all the hard work you've put in over the last few weeks. It's been fun.
Matt: Your assets are really nice, and you were fantastic and did everything asked of you. You just need to speak up a bit more!
Scott: You weren't around all the time, but I knew you were still getting on with stuff. Your early ideas were great, and your random singing is always entertaining!
Alex: We had problems with the walkway, but you got a new lease of determination from the competition, and managed to get it to completion.
Caz: You are an asset making machine! You've improved tons and I hope you feel a lot more confident with max after all this, even if it does still misbehave.
Tom: You made a great 3d lead, you were happy to explain things and you were a fair critic, pointing out both the good and the bad in everyone's stuff.
Kitto: Your happy enthusiasm made the tough times a lot easier, and you really know your stuff when it comes to art. You were a great 2D lead.
Jesus: You have worked incredibly hard for this team. I certainly appreciate it, and I'm sure the rest of the team does too. We couldn't have done it without you.

Boss Hogg out.

Digital Masterpiece

2008-04-14T23:20:00.004Z

Woohoo! Finished. This was quite fun to do, apart from the wheat, which was a pain.

Wheatfield with Cypresses, by Van Gogh.
Original:

Mine:

God this task is hard

2008-04-05T12:01:00.003Z

I stated earlier that art is successful if it provokes a reaction in people. But what if you have a piece of tat that simply provokes a reaction of horror at its complete lack of skill, instead of evoking the emotion it was supposed to? Look at this... thing, dredged up from the wonderful place that is deviantart.

It's clearly trying to portray some kind of melancholy, but instead all you see is the flaws. The background perspective is strange to say the least. There seems to be some kind of vanishing point going on with the trees but the water just spreads up the page instead of vanishing anywhere. There is no interaction between the character and the water she is standing in - the character herself seems to have a spine like a poker and only possesses one finger. I could go on. But is my distaste the same as that against works of modern art?

I think the severe backlash against work such as Hirst and Emin's is because people are feeling the emotions they are meant to be feeling when they experience the work, and they don't like what they feel. A lot of modern art does not adhere to typical 'right and wrong' rules like perspective because they may be exploring a different area, so they cannot be assessed on the same criteria.

The criteria for good and bad art needs to depend on what the work was trying to achieve. If it achieves the mood and evokes the feeling it was meant to, then it is a success. You can then go on to examine other points such as following rules of perspective and colour theory. Judging art by set rules is impossible, both because art constantly challenges rules themselves and because criteria that apply to one piece will not apply to another. How can you mark a sculpture to the same set of rules as a 2D sketch? They require completely different levels of viewer interaction.

It is at this point where the 'it' factor comes in again, as mentioned previously. So I suppose a lot of things come into play when assessing whether something is good or bad.

Does it achieve the mood/ portray the thing it was meant to?

Does it adhere to rules of art?

Does it have the 'it' factor?

Do I like it?

All these things must contribute, but it is hard to say how much emphasis should be put on each point. "Do I like it?" is perhaps the least important point for neutrally judging a piece of art, but it is a diffcult question to avoid. The 'it' factor should perhaps not come into play, but inevitably does in giving a piece impact. The implementation of the rules of art and the achievement of the mood the piece was supposed to portray are probably the most important factors. They also intertwine with each other. A piece like the one above can have a mood it is trying to convey, but may be let down its adherance to artistic rules. On the other hand, a piece may be technically very good, but lack any particular mood direction.

Ultimately a piece needs to do what it's supposed to, which is where yet another problem comes in, because who gets to decide that?

Bradgate Park Painting

2008-03-31T21:51:00.004Z

I just finished this, and I'm pretty darn happy with it!
It's interesting to compare this to the previous photoshop picture I put on here. I colour picked on this one, whereas I didn't on the previous one. Looking back, the burnt house picture seems pretty cartoonish with its colour usage.
Photoshop is still relatively new to me in terms of my whole artistic education, and I'm still finding it tricky to translate some of my skills into a new medium. I feel like you don't really get much feedback from digital painting, and strange as it sounds, it bugs me a little that it does whatever you tell it.

Good and Bad

2008-03-26T00:27:00.003Z

OK, I'm going to start tackling this one. I didn't want to start this as I felt a lot of it had been said in the initial talk we were given about it. Unlike creativity, good and bad can't really be researched very easily, so this is going to have to mostly be my own thoughts. I'm ususally pretty wary of writing down purely my own thoughts with no backup when it comes to factual matters, a mindset impressed on me by taking history A level I fear.

The first thing I think I should tackle is what good and bad even mean. I looked both up and they each have about 30 different uses each, amusingly the first definition for bad was 'not good in any manner or degree'- very helpful. But it basically breaks down to good always meaning positive and bad always meaning negative.
These words express the way humans feel the need to simplify the world around them. Right and wrong. Heaven and Hell. But it is important to keep in mind that these are entirely false constructs. All ideas of good and bad are learnt. Growing up, we rely on others to teach us what is right and what is wrong, and we absorb this information instinctively because it makes evolutionary sense to learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before us.

When you think about it, we take a lot of what we are told for granted. We simply don't have the time to test everything we are told for ourselves, so we weigh it up with what we know from our own personal experiences, and make a judgement on how likely it is to be correct. As Newton put it "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Do you know from your own personal experience that the Earth revolves around the Sun? I highly doubt it. But you have heard from enough reputable sources that it does, and so far no one has come to you with any evidence saying otherwise.

So, back to good and bad. We are learning all the time, and our collective idea of what is good and what is bad in terms of anything must be changing all the time as human knowledge and experimentation changes. The impressionists were widely slated when they first exhibited their work - a clear sign that the wider world thought of them as "bad". But in the present day their work is highly respected and seen as aesthetically pleasing, signs of it being thought of as "good". So good and bad are transient concepts, and we can only really assess anything as being good or bad in relation to today's current values of them.

Game Design and Social Networking

2008-03-24T21:55:00.005Z

I thought I'd write up the lecture we had the Wednesday we broke up, seeing as I took plenty of notes, and as it was cool and interesting.
The lecture was given by Guy Parsons, who currently develops online communities and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). More on those later.

At university, we have the time and freedom to create new things. We can take risks that we might not be able to take were we in employment, and we can create small games that might be a commercial flop, because it doesn't matter.
Guy gave a few examples of small games that push the boundaries like this. There are some links in his corresponding blog post.
A lot of them looked pretty cool. Toblo was designed by students and has a physics engine that allows players to use the environment as weapons. One multiplayer game let users create maps in MS paint and then import them into the game world. There was even a way to use Excel spreadsheets as a game engine.

Building up a community around your game was a factor that Guy mentioned several times. If you have a loyal following, albeit a small one, it bring a lot of benefits. You keep your game new and interesting, both from your fans bringing in new players and from user generated content. You have an eager audience for anything new you might produce, and you can also use the visitors to generate income, either through charging for the game itself or through advertising.

Games should draw inspiration from anything and everything. Start with something you perhaps wouldn't associate with games, like a fine artist. An Escher inspired game called Echochrome is currently in development for the PSP and PS3, with the environment changing shape as you rotate the camera, allowing you to continue across the terrain. It's crazy stuff.
The bold and memorable art style of Team Fortress 2 is a good example of casting a wider net for inspiration. The Valve team were influenced by 1920s illustrations: here are some of their reference images with notations from their slide deck about the design process behind TF2. The slide show itself is a really interesting read, and goes into loads of mathematical shader detail. The 'fan reaction' section is quite fun, with loads of different game dev teams cosplaying as the TF2 classes.
These weren't actually in the lecture as Guy hadn't managed to find the images, but he later put them up on his blog:

An important thing to remember when coming up with a new idea for a game is that EVERYTHING is a game. This is nicely illustrated by Chore Wars, an online game where you compete against your housemates to see who can do the most chores and therefore earn the most points. If you can attach a score to it, anything becomes a game. Another example given was a website where you could download goals to aim for when running.
More examples of cool little games:
squidi.net - currently has 300 different types of game mechanics
Defcon - those who were at Gamecity will have probably seen this one. Basically it's the doom screen from every movie where there's a terrible war and the nukes are going off and everybody dies. You can't really win
Desktop tower defence - the popular Tower Defence custom game from Warcraft 3, but in flash game format set on a desktop
Kingdom of Loathing- An RPG that takes nothing about itself seriously. I saw some Kingdom of Loathing graffiti once in a toilet in Camden. A good example of the hardcore nature of KoL fans.
Bejewelled - A casual game where you have to line up 3 or more gemstones of the same type to get them to disappear. Casual games are tipped to be the next big thing, and this is a very popular one
Peggle - Another popular casual game
Scrabulous - Facebook application which is a Scrabble clone. Scrabble are sueing the creators for copyright infringement
Line Rider - The little dude will ski down the line you draw
Audiosurf - If you've been anywhere near Joel in the last couple of weeks you'll know about this game. It's like a cross between Guitar Hero and a racing game, and it can use any song in your library to generate a race track. It's available to buy on Steam.

A relatively new and immersive type of game is the ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. ARGs present a game scenario which ties in closely with real life. There may be blogs, social networking profiles for characters, coded websites, real world location drops, and even interactions with actors posing as characters within the game scenario. The players of the ARG must work together to solve what is going on in the scenario, so the sense of community is strong.
Guy described it as for people who like stalking other people on the internet, only not as sinister.

The conclusions from the lecture were these:

University is a time where you have 3 years with no commercial constraints, and is a perfect time for experimentalism, innovation and creativity. If you come up with an idea, prototype it.

Inspiration comes from everywhere - life is a game. Pay attention to everyday life and draw inspiration from it. Because you're pretending, that makes it fun.

Oh, and here's Guy's Blog.

Keyboards and RPGS

2008-03-14T11:00:00.001Z

I have decided I want a Dvorak keyboard. Here is the wikipedia on it, for those who are not in the know. Basically, the current Qwerty keyboard is intentionally the worst possibly layout for a keyoboard you can have. It was introduced when typewriters jamming was a common problem. By spreading the most commonly typed letters around the keyboard, typing becomes slower and the keys are less likely to jam.
I am quite proud of the speed I can type at, it probably stems from the amount of time I used to spend in internet chat rooms in my mid teens. But if I could become even faster, and have a keyboard which confuses other people to boot? Well that sound awesome!

This does bring up a serious point to do with stuff being good and bad. Sometimes things are the accepted norm, but they're not actually good, they're just so ingrained that people think they're good. How many people think about their keyboards? It's just a tool you use to get words on a screen, most people would probably assume that the current design is the best one possible.

Another example relating back to games that I can think of off the top of my head is the traditional RPG setting. If it's an RPG, it has to be set in Europe, in the middle ages, with Orcs and Elves and Dwarves and magic. WHY? There are infinite places/ eras/ situations that an RPG could be set, but it always comes back to this. I suspect that Dungeons and Dragons is to blame for this, with many a game designer enjoying a game of D&D either in the past or currently. Does everyone simply want to try to create the situations they were imagining in their roleplay sessions in immersive 3D?
Perhaps this is it, but why not create a new universe where you can tell your own stories? Have fun designing your own races? Make people see ordinary everyday things in a new light? But I suppose that involves effort and risk...

So I suppose the small conclusion I can get from this is that when you're doing something, don't assume that the way it's done now is the right way to do it. It might be just the opposite.

Grading Art

2008-02-18T19:24:00.004Z

Is there actually any point in grading art?

art [ahrt] –noun

1.	the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

I have a feeling my art foundation is going to show through on this one and I may end up using stupid flowery terms, so be prepared.
Art is as hard to nail down as creativity, but I would say essentially that art is about provoking a reaction in people. A lot of people get angry that things like this:are considered art, but by getting angry at it they're proving the work a success, even if it wasn't in quite the way it wanted to be.

On my art foundation, art was primarily about raw power, and not really about technical skill at all. There is a technical right and a wrong to art, but I guess they thought if you were that bothered about it, you could go figure it out yourself.
I was frustrated at the time because I'm someone that does value technical skill, and had been training it up throughout GCSE and A level, I suppose because the system had told me to. Technical skill is very easily gradeable, which is probably why it's pushed so much. You can dock marks for perspective or lighting being wrong, or give marks for good use of media.

Art Foundation was a shock because suddenly the goalposts had been moved. Who cares that you can paint a lemon in perfect photorealistic detail? Someone has vacuum formed a mould of it, shoved the lemon in a blender with half a newspaper and some dirt, shoved it all back into a lemon shape and explored something completely different to what you have. And at the end of the day, it's just as right as what you've done.

My Art Foundation seemed to be graded simply by whether you had the 'it' factor or not. Some people produced bugger all but got fantastic grades, and some people slaved away and had little to show for it. The frustrating thing was, you could see when people did have the 'it' factor, and when pieces of art had it too. The hard bit was getting it yourself, and I still have no idea how people managed it. Picking something to explore and chipping away at it constantly until it produced something interesting seemed to be one way of doing it, but some people seemed able to just pull it out of a hat.

Yes, my Art Foundation was frustrating, but it also taught me a lot about life and the art world. Nobody cares how long you spent on something or how you got there, it's simply about whether it's good and whether it has impact.

So that being said, why would anyone care what mark you got for your art degree? If you're going into the commercial art world, people are going to look at your portfolio and judge for themselves whether or not you have the 'it' factor they are looking for. If they decide not to hire you, you whingeing that you got a first won't change their minds.
Conversely, if you have completed your art degree but aren't going into the art world, no one is going to care about your portfolio, they'll only care about your grade. Your abstract representation of the war in Iraq using toothpaste and a piece of old tyre will probably not aid you in your interview for the position of regional manager at Generic Offices.

So in an ideal world, people would just be given whatever degree mark they felt like having at the end of it. Everyone could be given a first, and the commercial arts could simply not even look at the piece of paper with a grade on it, and go purely on portfolio like they do anyway.
And if people didn't feel like going into the games industry, or the art world in general, they could sashay off into a nice job with their shiny first. Everybody wins.

Yes I can see the millions of flaws in this plan, but if we just did it and didn't tell anyone, i'm sure it'd be fine.

Poor Blog

2008-01-21T01:51:00.001Z

Poor blog, I feel I have been neglecting you in the excitement of the group project beginning.

Luckily I have something I want to talk about.
As I'm sure everybody knows, being an artist is hard sometimes. We've all had the 'Emo days' where you can't bear to look at your own work because you're convinced everyone in the world is better than you. It doesn't help when you're living with people who are on the same course as you either, as you have a direct comparison.
But you also have the days where you are so full of yourself you almost can't believe it. You've just finished something, it's awesome, everybody loves it, you're an art GOD.
But most of the time you have to live somewhere in the middle, caught between putting yourself down and bigging yourself up. You have to have some sort of ego going on, otherwise you'd never produce anything, but you also have to be self critical so you don't get complacent.

I can't seem to find a middle ground very easily. It's so easy to yo-yo between the two extremes and I doubt it's particularly healthy. My up days are pretty rare anyway. Pretty much as soon as I finish a project I worry I won't be able to do anything that interesting ever again. I have no idea where my creativity comes from and my method seems to simply be to work like blazes, which surely anyone could do?

But I seem to need to stress to drive myself onwards, and I am constantly striving to do better. We'll see how this translates into the group project work.

Some attempt at wrapping things up

2008-01-12T20:18:00.000Z

So what have I learned about creativity? While perhaps not directly related to the blog tasks, I've learned that creativity requires hard work. Both Jolyon Webb and Ben Mathis demonstrated their knowledge of pretty much everything, with special focus on anatomy and traditional drawing techniques. While being good at the area you're being creative in isn't strictly a requirement, having a broad base knowledge can make combinational creativity easier, and is essential for explorational creativity.

At least at the end of all this, I have found a definition of creativity that I agree with.
'Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable'
Although most of these words need to be further defined, it at least does make immediate sense. It can also be further broken down into types of creativity: combinational, explorational and transformational as explained in my post about the lectures.

I've had a scan back and it seems that a lot of my blog posts end up looking at the idea of process behind creativity. Whether a process is creative or not, (eg cooking) what steps you can add to a process to enhance creativity (like limitations) or even where creativity occurs in a process as mentioned in the lectures.

I do feel like I understand my own creativity a little better. Everything is a process, beginning with a brief with contrainsts.
I don't think creativity is easy, it's something you have to work at. When I do a project for drawing, I don't go with my first idea. For the one day projects and the speed paints I've had to, and I think some of them have been pretty good, but I think they lack the depth of my formal projects. With both the mechanical and the organic projects I had an idea about mid way through which I could have gone with as my final concept. But in both cases either I decided it wasn't good enough, or was frankly told by Chris that it wasn't good enough, so I returned to the drawing board.

I often think about the process of coming up with a character or making your way towards a final outcome. So many ideas are rejected along the way, and a lot of them aren't actually bad, it's just that I decide to go with a different one. How many outcomes would I end up with if I actually went back over a project and followed every variation through?

I think my creativity works because I constantly churn out work. Even if most of it is useless, by the law of averages I'm still likely to find something worth using. Looking back on things, all I seem to do is go one way, find something I like, then go another way, find something else I like, and simply splice the two things together. Unfortunately this process can be a little frustrating while in the midst of it, because it feels like I'm wandering aimlessly until I find the elements I want to staple together.

2007-12-27T16:37:00.001Z

For once in my life I have actually produced something purely in photoshop that I'm happy with. I think having a tablet has made a lot of difference.
And as an added bonus, here's an animated gif of me painting it, although you'll have to click on it to get it display.

2007-12-23T18:32:00.000Z

Pop Art Portraits

I'd known about the Pop Art Portraits exhibition since the end of Summer, and was gutted that I'd have to go away to university again just before it opened. As such, I made getting into town and seeing it one of my priorities of the Christmas holidays.
Pop Art has always interested me. It combines bold and exploratory styles with a probing insight into popular culture.
The exhibition was very good, although I felt some of the subject divisions were a lot stronger than others. The Marilyn section was very thought provoking, with many pieces exploring the price of fame, and the person behind the image. By contrast, the Experience and Innocence sections seemed slightly contrived. How can you define a point in history at which the public suddenly loses hope and becomes jaded, never mind having artists reflecting that? Why is Elvis being portrayed with a gun instead of a guitar an example of Innocence rather than Experience? Surely the manipulation of image and celebrities' experiences with this would suggest the latter.

The opportunity to see some celebrated pop art images such as the Warhol Marilyn prints and "What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton is always a welcome one. When you see artists' work in the flesh it is always such a different experience to seeing them in art books. Something is always inevitably lost in the translation from real world to print, even if the piece was print to begin with. Standing in front of Lichtenstein's "In the Car" is an experience beyond the image itself. You are slightly dwarfed by the scale of the piece. The car's inhabitants tower impassively over you. And yet, you feel like you are getting let in on a secret. Up close, the brush strokes can be seen, the bleeding of the Ben Day dots, an area where the edge did not mask properly.I should really get myself to some more exhibitions, I forget how much I enjoy them.

2007-12-10T00:53:00.000Z

Creativity Conference

On Thursday morning I went to the Creativity and Innovation conference at the City Rooms. It was pretty interesting, and I definitely learnt some useful stuff, both about defining creativity and about where it occurs in our work.
The first speaker was Margaret Boden, attempting to answer the question 'What is creativity?'. She gave the definition of creativity as "Ideas that are new, surprising and valuable."
Many of the words in that sentence need to be further defined, however. New can mean either new in terms of all human history (H-creative), or simply new to the person themselves (P-creative). Although H-creativity may seem far more important, it must still begin with P-creativity. When teaching children, they may be encouraged to come up with their own ideas about how something works. The answer may be already known, but they are still being encouraged to be P-creative.
Value of a creative idea can change depending on the situation. An idea which may be great for an advertising campaign will probably not be as valuable for an art exhibition. When people are discussing whether or not something is creative, they are often not debating the core creativity at all, but differing about the creative value.
Surprise at a creative idea can occur in different ways, depending on what type of creativity produced the idea.

Combinational creativity:
is making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas

Exploratory creativity:
is working within a structure or style, and working to find the limits of a creative space

Transformational creativity:
is a new structure or style. The creator has learnt how to explore the space, and then changed the space itself.

Transformational creativity is rare and often only occurs after the creator has first mastered the existing creative space through many years of exploratory creativity. The backlash against transformational creativity can often be great, as they are challenging the current accepted system. An example of transformational creativity is the development of pointillism.

These definitions are theoretical distinctions between types of creativity. Creativity does not need to occur in one or other category, it can be a mixture.

Creativity can be discouraged by punishing new ideas, especially for being 'wrong'. Combinational creativity can be encouraged by having lots of ideas from different subjects readily available. Doing exercises such as making up a sentence or story to do with two random things can also encourage combinational creativity by getting the creator to think about the process itself. For successful exploratory creativity, the person needs prolonged experience in the area they are exploring. For successful transformational creativity, the creator should first examine other examples of transformational creativity and evaluate what they changed and how. They also need to learn to evaluate their own ideas. For all styles of creativity, the person's motivation needs to be encouraged.

The second lecture, by Claudia Eckert, was about analysing where creativity occurs in the processes of both artistic design and technical design.
Artistic design is design fields where visual or tactile appearance is key to the design and sale of the product, whereas in technical design the function of the product is more important.
I might skip to the conclusion for this one, as the main portion of the lecture compared different design processes in some detail. The main conclusion of the lecture was that creativity in technical industries such as engineering is seen as a necessary evil. It leads to uncertainties in the design process, which can mean increased production time and costs. Things are done sticking as strictly to the design process and brief as possible, and creativity occurs when a problem arises.
However, in artistic design, the process is almost approached from the other way. Creativity is factored in from the beginning, and through the design process itself the technical restraints are realised and decided upon.

It's interesting to think about where we fall in the processes. We're probably somewhere in the middle, we have a large amount of artistic freedom but we also have to stick to strict criteria.

2007-12-07T12:19:00.000Z

Gender and creativity

I thought it would be an interesting idea to examine whether there are any links between creativity and gender. I did find a few papers online, most of which seemed to reach the conclusion that there isn't really any difference in creative ability based on gender alone. However, one paper did make an interesting point.
Girls in their early teens are more easily discouraged from being creative by a reward or assessment based system than boys of the same age group.

This is worrying. As creativity is inherent in pretty much every subject to varying degrees, does this mean that the discouragement of creativity is making girls less ambitious? If you are afraid to experiment, you will probably stick with what is safe and known to you. This article states that although girls are doing better and better at GCSE level compared to boys, they are still taking stereotypical subject choices.
This is a tough thing to think about. When you make decisions about what you want out of life, how often do you think of yourself as an ambassador for your gender? When I consider what I want to do, should I be considering working in the city as a high flying banker just because it's a male dominated arena?

This wasn't really as focused an exploration as I was hoping it would be, but it is at least an interesting aside.

It's review O' clock!

2007-11-28T18:13:00.002Z

Since I've bought my Wii, I've felt like I haven't really been getting the most use out of the thing. I've got Wario Ware and Twilight Princess but for some reason I never really play them. Wario Ware is for a more party situation and Twilight Princess has annoyed me within the first few minutes, both with the art style and the gameplay (although I've since got over that). The Miis are hilarious but all the fun seemed to get milked out of that in the first few weeks. It seemed like my Wii was destined to be nothing more than a shiny Gamecube which we all only used to play Super Smash Bros Melee until Brawl comes out.

But then I bought Mario Galaxy, and realised that there was a sound reasoning behind me buying this console. Mario Galaxy is a wonderful game. It's not graphically impressive, it's nothing groundbreaking in the engine, but it is pure fun.
The hub world is a really nice environment that improves as you progress through the game. More and more areas light up and the whole place fills with Lumas, little star things that dance around looking cute. Other characters like toads and Luigi wander around, and the whole place feels very vibrant. The orchestra playing the background music also grows, making the music much more epic. From the hub world you can access the galaxies, or levels. The galaxies vary greatly, but most consist of separate planets with their own gravity fields.
The way gravity is used in this game is really inspiring. Like Braid uses time, Mario Galaxy uses gravity. Gravity can change in different areas, leading to platforming puzzles. The gravity gives a great twist to the gameplay. You get on a platform, it starts to move and dangerous objects are hurled at you for you to dodge. So far, so standard. But it's when you remember, hang on, i can stand on the underneath of this that it starts to get interesting.
The controls are pretty good too, given the constant changes in camera angles and directions Mario is actually facing. You simply press the way you want to be going, and ignore wherever might have been forwards beforehand.

Mario Galaxy is frankly inspiring in its gameplay and I'm hoping for more fun innovations from Nintendo in the future.

2007-11-20T23:26:00.000Z

Limitations on creativity

It's strange to think that sometimes having limitations can open up more ways to be creative. I started thinking about this after Gamecity. Having helped out in the Indiecade for a couple of days, I was struck by what some of the games managed to achieve by actually have less going on that most mainstream games. The Indiecade, for those of you who may have missed out, was an arcade showcasing games made by tiny development teams or students. Some had been created entirely by a single person.

The fact that many of these games could not compete with the technological achievements of mainstream games actually seemed to free up the creative aspect of many of them. One of my favourites which I've actually downloaded and have been playing at home is Endless Forest.

In Endless Forest you play as a deer with a human face. You can communicate with other players simply through gestures and occasional mooing. There isn't really much of an aim either. You can explore, there are random events triggered by the game's creators, and you can collect different items to change the appearance of other deer from around the environment. It's easy to see why this could quickly become boring, but I find it quite liberating.
There's no pressure to do anything, and the fact that no one can type means you don't think of the other players as people sitting at their keyboards, but rather just as the deer they are presented as. It's very absorbing, and the fact that there aren't really goals makes it easy to dip in and out of.

Another game that was interesting was Braid. Braid is a 2D sidescrolling platformer. The main idea of the game is that we should learn from our mistakes, but not have to suffer the consequences of them. So in the game, you can rewind time at any point, for as long as you like. This way, if you are killed by an enemy, you can rewind time and revive yourself. You have now learned something about how or why the enemy attacked you, and can change tactics accordingly. The real puzzles begin when some items are not affected by time, or behave differently when exposed to time reversal. It leads to puzzles where you are forced to fling yourself onto spikes or drop to a place you have no way of escaping from in order to grab items such as keys which you can drag backwards through time with you.

While games such as Prince of Persia have the time rewind element, the fact that Braid has no limits on its rewind system makes you play completely differently. Prince of Persia still forces you to be cautious, whereas in Braid you can fling yourself into a situation just to see what will happen, and then reverse it if it wasn't the outcome you wanted.

So that's how it applies to games, but what about art? Forcing yourself into a limited artistic situation can lead to interesting results. It seems though, that you need to push it away from the familiar to really get deeper. Everyone uses pen and pencil, limiting yourself to just one of those doesn't cause any difficulties or present you with problems you have to solve.
However, if you only allow yourself to use tin foil and glue, or paint and a piece of card with no paintbrush to draw with, you start to open up more interesting things in what you are producing. The fact that you have having to fight your choice of media in order to show what you want makes you think differently than if you had chosen something you can use with ease, and this shows in the piece.

You get unexpected outcomes, things you didn't mean to put there simply because you're not good at using the media. Rips in the paper with the craft knife that actually look really good, mistake lumps of paint that show contours. Sure, it might look terrible, but that's the risk you take. And the best part is that you can give people the same media to use and everyone will use them differently, there is still personal style even in such an unfamiliar thing.

So what's my conclusion? A selling point for most games is going to be having the latest graphics and engine technologies. But sometimes the games without those things have got something more interesting to say than those with them.
If we can just learn to take risks with the small creative things we do, maybe it will feed into everything else.

2007-11-09T12:50:00.000Z

Cooking

I thought I'd make a post about cooking. Cooking is one of my hobbies which has only really started once I got to uni. I think of cooking as being a very creative process, although it isn't normally mentioned in the list of creative things everyone has been making in these blog posts.
Having had a trawl around the internet, there's not that much about cooking in terms of the creative benefits it brings. It seems to be assumed that you're cooking to produce the end result, rather than enjoying the process itself.
I don't like this idea. Cooking can be as much fun as any other creative activity. My favourite thing about cooking is mixing stuff together. It's like making mud pies in the garden when I was a kid... only hopefully without the horrendous food poisoning which would inevitably result from actually eating mud pies.
Throwing in loads of things which on their own are rather unremarkable and turning them into something that tastes good is one of the most satisfying things for me. It reminds me a lot of painting - paints on their own are nice, but you have to put them together to really achieve something worthwhile. My rapidly expanding collection of herbs and spices reminds me of my mostly useless collection of art junk in my room. Sure, I don't have a use for tons of different types of wool right now, but one day I'm sure I will.

I think perhaps cooking isn't seen as being creative because you're following a recipe. When you have strict instructions, is there room to be creative? Of course there is. You have to exercise personal judgement in when stuff is done, when to move to the next step. You can do things differently to how the recipe says. You can add, substitute, take away, present differently. Or of course, you can always do things wrong. Sometimes you'll have a happy accident, other times you will do something monumentally dumb like burning rice and stinking out the entire downstairs of our house.

Of course, there is the theory that cooking is actually some elaborate form of procrastination, and that the whole process, creative or not, is simply an excuse for me to avoid doing my actual work. I'll let you be the judge.

2007-11-06T17:28:00.000Z

Creativity continued

For my mechanical project I've been researching Leonardo Da Vinci, and one of the most interesting things I've found about him is how he managed to combine so many different skills and areas of interest.
Da Vinci was "an artist, architect, musician, scientist, geologist, physicist, designer, mechanic and inventor" as it says in the book I borrowed from the library. In the 1400s, artists weren't mainly hired for their artistic skills alone, but for their knowledge of engineering, which they acquired during their apprenticeship. In an age of changing warfare, new inventions and reworked traditional weapons were the key to success.
Learning about everything makes complete sense. It's what I thought my art foundation would be, being taught as many different ways of creating as possible, so you have more tools at your disposal. Unfortunately it didn't really work like that, which I think is a shame. For all I know, I could have some secret metalsmithing talent which will now forever lie dormant.

Things are split up far too much, especially when it comes to school subjects. History links to geography, which links to the sciences, and then maths, and then music and so on. Separating things so much makes sense from a teaching perspective, but also forces people to drive a wedge between their interests.

Is it wise to specialise? Does focusing on one subject specifically give you a deeper understanding, or should you widen your horizons and have a larger understanding of everything?

I've often wondered if it's best to train for something completely different to what you actually want for a career in life. That way when you do work your way there, you'll have a completely different outlook and set of skills to everybody else, and will maybe think in a more creative way about the tasks in hand. Having come from a wider employment circle, you'd also have more objectivity.

Perhaps we should all have an Ancient Greek style education, where we are apprenticed into as many different jobs as possible.

2007-10-22T17:49:00.000Z

Hooray for the Tate

I ended up at home this weekend, and therefore ended up London town. After watching Have I Got News For You the week before and finding out that several people had fallen down into the current exhibition in the Tate Modern, consisting of a crack in the floor, I decided to go, and dragged Tim along with me. The piece is called Shibboleth and it's by Doris Salcedo.
Looks impressive doesn't it? It's really not as vast as it seems in that picture. The crack is only about as wide as a person's leg in the widest sections, so to fall down it you'd have to be pretty determined.
I've seen some really amazing exhibitions in the Turbine Hall, and a piece has to be incredibly powerful to hold its own in the space there. I don't think Shibboleth really did it for me. The crack seems very unnatural, it has regular spacing and you can see the chicken wire holding the two sections apart. It does make sense as the piece is about separation in society, and therefore man made divisions, but it seems to distract from what should be a powerful reflection about nature. Tim spent the whole time trying to figure out how it had been created.

But even though Shibboleth was not all I was expecting, there was another nice surprise. This monstrosity, sitting outside the Tate Modern. Maman, by Louise Bourgeois. It's an amazing sculpture, alien yet so very rooted in the familiar. Kids were saying to their parents that they wished it were real while Tim and I just widened our eyes in horror at each other.
We also saw some people having to shield their view as they walked past along the river, probably due to arachnaphobia. It seems almost insensitive to have a sculpture which for some people is horrific, out in full view in a popular area. Even worse is the face that there are posters all over the London Underground with the spider on, advertising the full Louise Bourgeois exhibition.
Art is supposed to provoke a response, but if it is involuntary, and people don't want to be exposed to the art in the first place, is that fair? Should art be concerned with what is fair anyway? It's certainly not concerned with what is legal in many cases.
But anyway, the sculpture was certainly unexpected, and even helped me out with my drawing project a little bit.

2007-10-13T19:10:00.000Z

Creativity

OK, so this is the start of us revisiting the issue of creativity. After the interesting video shown to us by Mr P about creativity being stifled by the school environment, I decided to look into that a bit more. I work with kids in the summer so I feel like I have some vague connection to the issue.

I found this on the National Assosciation of School Psychologists website, which was very interesting to me:

The personality traits which some creative children develop are often viewed by others as strange or unproductive:
(a) Free Thinking. Toying with ideas may appear undisciplined and lacking in goal orientation;
(b) Gullibility. Creative children get excited about "half-baked" ideas and may not see the drawbacks or flaws that an adult would easily see;
(c) Humor. Creative children find humor in ideas which adults consider to be very serious. This ability to question and see other perspectives may be interpreted as mocking and obnoxious;
(d) Daydreaming. Creative children learn through fantasy and solve many of their problems through its use. Letting one's mind wander can help imagination to form new connections but may be seen as being inattentive or spacey;
(e) Aloneness. Creative thinking develops from delicate, unformed ideas. Children need to be alone while their ideas emerge, but society's emphasis on togetherness makes this difficult; and
(f) Activity. Ideas often come at times of "doing nothing." But once the idea comes, the creative child will become absorbed in the activity. This fluctuation, from what may seem to be laziness to over commitment to only one thing, is confusing and frustrating to others.

I wonder how many of those are familiar childhood traits of people on this course, and how of us didn't even realise what they were indicative of? Thinking back, I was certainly gullible in many situations because I wanted to believe in things that I thought were exciting.

I also found a few lists with Do's and Don'ts for encouraging creativity when planning activities with children.
Don't: Constantly watch over them, evaluate their work, offer rewards, over control, encourage competition, restrict choice, give examples.
Do: praise work, remember that the creative process is more important than the final product.
OK, most of those make sense but some of them are just impractical. Restricting choice is often a necessary evil, especially with things like equipment. If you get all the art equipment out for every session, you'll spend half your day getting it out and putting it away and all the kids' work will be coated in an inch thick layer of glitter which will never dry. And glitter gets everywhere. For their choice of what to do with their own work, sure they can do whatever they like.

The one I did really take issue with was 'Don't give examples'. Kids copy stuff, it's what they have always done. I drew a dinosaur on a whiteboard once just to make the art room a bit more interesting. There was extra time at the end of the activity so we let the children draw stuff. At the end I collect up 12 drawn copies of my dinosaur from the board.

When we offer a choice of activity, being able to say 'you can make a hat like this one' and demonstrate the hat, is far better than just saying 'you can make a hat', it captures their imagination more and gives them more ideas. Children do have brilliant imaginations, but they also draw a blank on so many occassions it makes you wonder.

In the morning on playschemes, we have a big roll of wallpaper for the kids to draw on. They're meant to draw stuff to do with the theme of the week, things like Summer, around the world, history, but they can do whatever they like really. A lot of times you would tell them what the theme was, and encourage them to draw things and they would have no ideas or enthusiasm at all. Around the world especially stumped them completely.
So I guess my main point from all that was that children are unpredictable and you can do everything articles tell you to and still get it wrong.

I also found this poem, called The Little Boy by Helen Buckley. It illustrates brilliantly the problems stifling creativity creates. And the sad thing is, this was written in the 1960s and not much has changed.

On an entirely different note, I found an article about how the height of ceilings affects creativity. The article is here, but the basic summary is that people think in more abstract terms when in a room with a higher ceiling. However, this does not extend to being outside, without a ceiling. Perhaps we should see if we can apply to have the graphics floor removed entirely so we could have a nice high ceiling in the lab? Maybe that storm last year was trying to tell us something.

2007-08-30T21:48:00.000Z

Crying for fun and profit!

If you don't get your way, cry and throw a wobbly. This seems to be the common mode of attack for many kids at work. However, what they don't know is that all the staff have absolutely no tolerance for this, as when you let one kid get away with it, they'll all start to do it.

Allow me to provide examples. One merry Tuesday we were working in a village which is barely in the district the playschemes serves. The main road is actually called The Street, as it's the only flipping road there. We all have a theory at playschemes that every kid in the village is related to one another, with their collective father being Mr *villagename*. Some of the kids are Odd.

But anyway, we only have 12 kids so we decide not to offer separate sport and art activities like we usually do but to lump them all together. It sounds a bit mean but when you have 4 kids decide they want to do sport and the rest want to do art, the sport kids are going to struggle to have a decent game of anything.
So we start playing uni-hoc (kids are given numbers, when their number is called out they play one on one hockey with the corresponding number from the other team). Great fun, everyone loves this game! Except we have two sulkers in the corner. One is just sulking, the other one is full blown crying.
They don't want to play this. In fact, they want to go home. They haven't even given it a go. As it's the start of the day and some kids get a bit homesick, they're found another activity, but the cycle starts to repeat itself and our patience wears thin.

The cryer proceeded to throw several strops, each with different excuses as to why she wanted to go home. She was ill, she had a headache. She came up to me at lunchtime and told me that her dog was at the vets and she needed to phone home to check if he was alright. It was clearly an excuse to phone home and whine about how she didn't want to be here.

Even in the art activities she threw strops when things didn't go her way. When her clay didn't turn out right, she started to cry.
At the end of the day the deputy leader told her mum that if she didn't want to be here, it was pointless bringing her.

At another site we had a girl who cried in order to spite other people. Some girls were playing a game and then suddenly one leaves the group and sits down in a corner, crying. I ask her what's wrong and she says the other girls stole the ball off her. I ask the other girls and they seem genuinely confused, saying that was part of the game they were playing. I ask if they'll apologise anyway as the other girl seems upset. They do so and the girl continues to be in a huff.

She later asks me when one of the other playworkers will be coming back off her lunch break (she'd grown attached to her), and threw a strop when I told her it would be 15 minutes or so.
"But she said she'd be back in a MINUTE"
"It's a figure of speech. She didn't literally mean one minute. One minute to have your lunch in is a bit harsh"
"But she said in a MINUTE!"
"Have you never heard someone use the phrase in a minute? It just means an amount of time!"
A pout, followed by her storming off.

I caught her later trying to land some other girls in trouble. When I was talking to them she had a massive grin on her face, thinking I was telling them off. I confronted her about it.
"I'm just a happy person!"
"If you're such a happy person, why were you sulking earlier?"
"I wasn't sulking. I was having a tantrum!"

Sigh

2007-08-14T21:25:00.000Z

I hate children

And my job has only confirmed that.
OK, that comment was a little sensationalist. I don't hate all children. On an individual basis I quite like many of the kids at work. But as a whole, children are awful. Children are like humanity filtered down to it's basic elements.
Children are curious, and they are innocent. But they are also cruel, selfish and ignorant. They are also incredibly prejudiced without even realising what a terrible thing it is.
I suppose you want some examples.

Gender values are hammered into children as soon as they can start absorbing information. Girls like Bratz, Barbie, Dora the Explorer, etc. Boys like Transformers, Star Wars, etc. There is no middle ground for a lot of them.
"You can't play football, you're a girl!" This statement, and many others like it, have made my blood boil these past few weeks. Where are they getting these ideas from?! Yes, a lot of the girls are not as interested in football as the boys, and therefore are not as good at it. But to say they CAN NOT play is just unreasonable to me.
"Euuuuuurgh, you like girls' stuff!" When said to a boy this is for some reason one of the most cutting insults there is. I have tried explaining that even though so-and-so might not actually like Barbie, there is nothing wrong with him liking it if he wants to.
*Cue puzzled look* "But he's a boy!" It went round and round like that.

You also really see the differences between the genders at this age. Young boys are awful. They won't sit still until they have run out all their energy, they play up and refuse to listen, they fight. And if there's a creative activity of any kind it always comes back round to ways of killing things. Or creatures that kill things. Or just killing. It actually seems to be an inherent male thing.
Conversely, young girls are also awful. The trick with girls is that they never SEEM to be awful. They are a lot better at the creative activities than a lot of the boys and they join in with the sports. But when it gets to play times they get nasty.
"SHE did this to me!" "So-and-so's being mean!"
They will gather in groups and giggle about each other. They will cajole others into doing their dirty work for them and send their lackeys to say things to people or attack them with play equipment. They lie to you about what others have done. They enjoy getting others into trouble. They sulk, they cry, they get in a huff about nothing.

So, summary: Boys are into causing physical pain, girls causing emotional pain

It really makes you think. If it weren't for hormones that kick in at puberty, I honestly think men and women would continue having little or nothing to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

That post seemed very negative, but I've had a terrible day today. We only had 6 kids (all boys) and they managed to drive us all absolutely crazy.

So that was gender values, next update, I shall write about crying for fun and profit!

2007-07-08T12:35:00.000Z

City of Heroes

Alex tries to kickstart his modelling career

2007-06-14T18:30:00.000Z

In other news....

I made a 3D graphic for one of my website designer mates. Check out the rotating Z at the top of this page. Uh huh, that was me. Pretty happy with it, and it gave me good experience of working on something that didn't really have a final outcome planned out from the start.

I wonder if saying 'Hey I designed your website banner logo' will get me in for free?

2007-06-03T23:07:00.000Z

Goodbye Bede Hall

Well, I am currently at home as I'm typing this post, although I'm heading back to uni tomorrow so I can go to the GameCity meeting. I just thought as I started this year's blog with antics of me living in halls, it would be fitting to post something about moving out.
Halls has been a positive experience for me on the whole. I got on with pretty much everyone in my flat, which I know is a pretty rare thing. I aim to keep in contact with several of my flatmates next year and continue our girlie nights out. Dancing to cheesy music and drinking strange alcoholic cocktails made of whatever was on offer from Nat's, does it get any better?
However, life was not all sunshine and roses. Things I will not miss:

The guys downstairs with their infernal music travelling up through the floor
The constant stench of weed throughout D block
The hall manager who hates all of humanity, with special wrath saved up for students
People rolling in at 2 in the morning screaming/ singing 'Oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi' in the courtyard
Fire alarms at 3am
The piles of bins in the kitchen (which actually spawned maggots at one point, thanks everyone!)
Becki with her cooking that splashes everywhere, thieving of cheese graters to grind weed, and screeching arguments with her boyfriend at midnight - complete with slamming doors and sobbing in the toilets. When asked to be quiet the response was 'I'M HAVING AN ARGUMENT!'

So I'm glad that chapter of life is closed and next year I will be in a house. With 3 guys. Everyone has told me I'm crazy and to be honest I don't doubt it. Alex is already threatening to limit my time in the bathroom. He shall be pranked, and pranked severely.

2007-05-12T19:57:00.000Z

Everything I cook is orange.

I discovered this when I decided to defrost something I'd previously cooked from the freezer. Only problem was, I - in all my infinite wisdom - had not labelled it.
"Well," I thought. "It's orange, so it must be spaghetti sauce or bean chilli." Easy.
Six hours later and said object is defrosted. And is in fact chicken tikka. Good job I like chicken tikka.

I had a sitdown and a think about these events and I came to the conclusion that EVERYTHING I cook is in fact orange. Or at least turns orange when you freeze it. I shall dazzle you with a list:

Bean chilli
Chicken tikka
Spaghetti bolognese sauce
Bacon pasta sauce
Chicken fajita mix
Sweet and sour anything
Sausages in barbeque sauce

The one exception to this rule was when i tried to make a stew of my own invention and it froze grey. Which is really not a very appetising colour, and just goes to show that I should not try to be creative in the kitchen ever.

What is it? Nobody knows.

2007-04-26T19:25:00.000Z

OK, I felt I should blog about something, simply because I haven't done so in over a week.
I achieved some, but not all of my holiday objectives. I did work at playschemes and earnt myself some cash by playing in glue and dealing with children on a sugar high. I also went round London a lot and returned to some of my favourite places. Canary Wharf, the Natural History museum and Covent Garden.
I didn't quite make it to Turkey. The flight costs went up too much so we went on a day trip to France and Belgium instead. It was lots of fun and I returned with crateloads of cheap alcohol. All the bottles are currently lined up on top of my shelves like an identity parade.
Welcome to sunny Belgium!

It's nice to be back, it seems like I've been here weeks I've already done so much. Night out at Liquid sporting a top hat, surprise birthday party for Alex round Caz's (a big surprise as it was 3 weeks after his actual birthday), lots and lots of Lord of the Rings and two house viewings. Phew!
And I have actually done some work. I should really get over to the library and try to scan all my sketchbooks in, but I might give up and just take photos.

2007-04-15T12:01:00.000Z

Being ill is really quite pants.

I have grossly swollen tonsils which makes swallowing food and drink very painful, achy ears which has also thrown off my balance, achy joints, a raging headache and when it gets towards evening time I go very hot and cold and need 2 blankets and a jumper.
Needless to say I'm not particularly thrilled about the situation. It's always my luck that I fall ill at the start of a weekend so it's impossible for me to get to a doctor's and get any medicine, so I've had to make do with homeopathic remedies which one of my mum's friends does. To be honest, I'm not sure if I even believe it works but I have no better options right now.
I was warned that it might make me feel worse before it makes me feel better, but this morning I have woken up feeling just the same, although the headache seems to have got a bit worse. Fantastic.
Mum's friend is making me another remedy at the moment but I'm not sure if I want to take it. The other one didn't exactly do any good, who's to say this one will?

It's not like anyone I know even has a nasty cold thing! Where has this come from!? I seem to have a magical ability to pick up slight traces of an illness and magnify it, causing myself misery. I managed to do it last year by catching shingles, although having read that article it seems it just comes from dormant chicken pox. Surprisingly, that doesn't make me feel much better.

2007-04-07T15:28:00.000Z

So, what's going down in Louiseworld?

Right this second I am listening to all my utterly terrible cheese music that I found on all my CDs at home. You know the ones. You buy them when you're about twelve and S Club 7 ARE the best thing ever. You discover them a few years later, feel disgusted with yourself and bury them under a pile of Basement Jaxx and Artful Dodger (or bands of choice). Then you rediscover them a few more years later and accept that yes dammit, S Club 7 WERE the best thing ever and rip them all to your PC.
I don't care what you all say about it, I am going to be happy in my little pop bubble.

So, what's been happening? Well, I dragged Alex, Tim and my friend Chris to the Tate with the plan of hurling ourselves down the slides, but it didn't really happen because of the queues. So we went round the Tate and chilled out in the park in Canary Wharf instead. I may also be furthering the 'London Ducks' series of photos. Yes it's now a series.

I have also been working at playschemes, where I get paid to eat chips and make mess. Well, it's not quite like that. I also have to help manage a load of kids, endure a lot of humiliation from doing stupid dances and get sat on by small children at high speed. Small kids are boney.

I am also practically exploding with delight at the sight of this marvelous trailer. Yes it's the new Ratchet and Clank, Tools of Destruction. It looks like Insomniac is having a true return to form. No more generic dark and grungy FPS, no more stupid arena combat, trying too hard to be badass Ratchet and Clank. A fun, brightly coloured, humour-filled, lovingly crafted Ratchet and Clank.It has crazy enemies, it has grindrails, it has boss fights, it has Ratchet's poofy tail. What more do I need? I cannot wait for this. The only problem will be finding a PS3 to play it on. I don't even want one, I just want to borrow one so I can play this game.

2007-03-29T20:33:00.000Z

Well, I'm home again now. Been up to London today and eaten sushi, yum! I am definitely planning on going on the slides at the Tate modern before this holiday is done.

We also had assessments Tuesday and Wednesday which went very well for me. I got an A- for the van which I am very pleased with, and if I fix the errors I identified with it (namely the shape of the bumper and the amount of polys on the roof) then I could make it an A.

The art assessment was interesting for me to say the least. I was really happy that all the tutors were so positive about my work, and it's really inspired me to crack on and keep doing crazy stuff like embossing and ink blowing and stuffing things in packets full of hair gel. I'm happy that I got some positive reaction from people in the class who didn't even realise that we could do stuff like that, and I hope that a lot more people do go and just have a play with different materials. The worst thing that can happen is that it goes wrong and even then you've learnt something.

In a way, I'm also pretty happy I got some negative reactions. People don't see the point, people think I'll get laughed at, but I don't really mind. It shows that I'm doing something different, and (to quote Cool Runnings) "People are always afraid of what's different." I also got defended by all four tutors, which was pretty cool.

I think the crowning glory for me was Mr P's comment (paraphrased)." I told you all to do a blog task about the definition of creativity. This is creativity. "
I think it's possibly the most huge compliment I've ever recieved about my work. Let's hope I can keep this up.

2007-03-25T17:53:00.000Z

The Final Blog task

I came to this course from an illustration focused art foundation, which turned out to be nothing like I was expecting. I was expecting to be taught different skills in different media to help me establish what I wanted to do in my art based future. Before about year 12 I wasn't even sure I wanted to do art. Art was just something that happened in my spare time and in art classes. It was part of me, but not necessarily who I was. As I specialised further and further in my school career, dropping things for GCSE, dropping things for A level, I began to realise that I couldn't just let art go.

I'd had the idea of drawing concept art for games for quite a while, I think since Ratchet and Clank 1 where one of the secrets you could unlock was the concept art for the game. I was inspired and the idea lodged in the back of my head along with my other vague plan - illustrating books.

So I moved on to the art foundation, where I was given vague ideas and comments. 'Produce a final piece on the idea of a votive object.' 'Draw without drawing' 'This is wrong but we will not tell you why'. When we came back after the Christmas break and were told we had better be damned confident in ourselves if we were going to be illustrators because we would have to sell ourselves every second of every day I broke down. I knew I couldn't do it. Couldn't compete with the egos and strange dress sense and overwhelming confidence in something I didn't even understand.

So I explained to my Mum what had happened and I bunked the next day and spent the entire time trawling UCAS searching for my two ambitions: Game Design and Book Illustration. I hadn't even realised you could do Game Art as a degree! I'd been planning on trying to get my foot in the door after finishing an illustration degree. I phoned round for some open days and suddenly life seemed a lot better.
As you can guess, I had an open day and interview at DMU and got on the course.

So why did I write all that? I don't think I've forgotten since I've been here that I have battled through a course that I truly didn't enjoy, and where I didn't learn what I wanted. Here I have felt settled and like I belong on the course, something I never felt on my foundation. I've also learned a lot, and it was stuff I was expecting and hoping to learn. So basically I am grateful for what I have here, which is something to keep in mind when reading my whiny complaints!

So do I have any suggestions for next year? Well I felt that the first project really flung us in at the deep end. While it did make us learn quickly, it was also pretty stressful. I know that Joel did his best with so many people who had no idea what they were doing, but I think we could have done with more one on one help. So for the sake of the next first years, I'm going to suggest a buddy system. Teaching other people how to do things that we already know how to do will ease the stress on Joel, help the first years feel more accepted and also re-enforce what we know.
Also having PCs that don't die every few minutes would be wonderful. We were all so impressed with their shiny newness at the start of the year but now you're lucky if half of them will run Max.
Other than that I feel like the 3DS Max stuff has been going well. I've really enjoyed making the street furniture and trees because you can see how it's directly relevant and ready for a game environment. There have been grumbles that it isn't interesting enough but we have to be able to walk before we can run. Group work should be interesting for next year, and maybe for after Easter if people still want to model animals from the zoo.

As I said before I've been really enjoying the drawing module. I surprised myself at the tutorial with just how much I've done. 3 full sketchbooks, one A5 sketchbook from the zoo and a big fat texture book. As well as a hand, wire man, chimney and arcade cabinets.
The formal drawing lessons have been really useful and not something that I've really had before. I had picked up various rules and tricks but the perspective stuff really helped. Shame we didn't get round to colour theory. That would be nice for next year.
I'd love for there to be more focus on the hand made 3D stuff next year, I've felt like it's been really beneficial. More time with Chris in classes would also be really good. I know he wants to be a full time tutor and I think it'd be really useful for us to have his direct input on our 3DS Max work.
I'd love if we could have our own studio space where we could work. I'm running out of space for all my 3D junk and my room is littered with the results of my artistic experiments.

The blogs have become a lot more fun for me, and I think I'll do my best to keep them up. God knows what Mr P thinks of all my days/ nights out but I like posting about them. It's a fun way to communicate with everyone and it's far better than essays would be. It would be nice if the blog tasks would link more closely with the lectures we have but I know that's not always possible because people are unpredictable.

The lectures have been really interesting and have provoked a lot of discussion. I think the inclusive gaming was probably the most hard hitting one for me because it made me analyse my own habits and preferences and examine what they're affected by.

I think I'd like to comment on the amount of notice we get for some stuff. In my experience Art departments are always slightly shaky on the organisation front. Deadlines and criteria changing, sudden field trips, unexpected tutorials, and timetable mess ups have all been annoying simply because they are all so preventable. Notices on the VLE would solve most of it.

Finally, the VLE itself. Could be a very useful tool but people just don't really check it now apart from for briefs and project deadlines. At the start of the year it had a bustling forum which has now sadly stagnated. Perhaps having a link to a separate Vbulletin messageboard or similar might be better?

2007-03-24T18:30:00.000Z

Wow, the final blog task is pretty hard.

I've had a pretty cool week this week, Tim's been down, we've all finally viewed a house, played drunken guitar hero, saw 300, had a smoothie from the nice milkshake place in town and eaten chinese food. It seems far too early for the term to be over.

Plans for easter:

Catch up with all my friends from home.
Dress up like a pirate and go boating on a lake with my friends. Did this last year and it was brilliant.
Work for playschemes. It's basically a day camp for kids during the holidays. We do stuff like ourdoor sports, art and craft, drama, whatever. It makes you never want to have kids. EVER. Ah but the money is good.
Go round London lots and lots. Enjoy the extortionate prices, stupid tourists and tube bogies.
Go to Turkey. Oh god I need a holiday this will be sooooo nice if it happens.
Maybe some work will fit in there somewhere.

2007-03-12T14:48:00.000Z

Have you ever wondered what would happen if your life took another direction? If at some point in your life you made a decision that changed how you are today? This may sound like it's going to become all philosophical and deep, but it really isn't. It's just an excuse to post pictures of me dressed as a chav.
For those of you who don't know what I look like or need reminding here is a photo of me and Tim, who for some reason looks like a ska musician:

And here is a photo of our bizarro universe chav counterparts. We were actually very scared of one another for a while that night, especially when Tim decided to name himself Darren, or 'Daz' and continually ask people 'if they were startin'?!' .Someone actually told us that we were so convincing that if they saw us in the street they would cross the road. High praise indeed.
So in conclusion I'm glad I'm not a chav.

2007-03-08T21:43:00.000Z

All Hail the Zoo!

I went to the zoo today along with Caz, Alex, Nikki, James and Joel. Getting there and back was quite an effort as we had to get a train to Nuneaton and then a bus which only came once an hour and took an hour to wind its way through the countryside to the zoo. But it was definitely worth it. We got the bus fare and zoo ticket together for just £6.50 which was a nice surprise, and we all took tons of photos and did loads of drawing.
Quote of the day:
Alex: 'I only eat solid waste.'

The whole idea of this is to model loads of fun animals and make a first person mauler, where they all run around slicing/ goring/ trampling each other to pieces. Should be fun!

2007-03-05T20:11:00.000Z

Week 22: Games Design Conference

I had free rein on this one so I just decided to look around the site until I found something that sparked my interest. This lecture looks really interesting, about knowing your target demographic and knowing who plays games. It seems similar to the lecture we had about inclusive gaming, if you make a game more inclusive, it will appeal to more people and therefore have more potential sales. This part in the description especially interested me:
"Analyze This! - Players Live On Stage" a live player study on the Wii provides insights into players' minds.

It's incredible when you think about it how many different ways people will come up with to play the same game. This is especially apparent in multiplayer versus modes, where different tactics will have different advantages. When we play Lord of the Rings in the lab, we all seem to have settled in to our chosen races. If there is a choice, I am usually Goblins, Tom the Elves, Sophia the Men, Alex the Dwarves and Darsh Mordor.
I prefer the Goblins because I can make lots of mountain giants, big rock throwers, and then spam cheap basic units to act as a meat shield for them. But why do I like to play like this? I could easily go a different route, but yet I don't. Why do I play the way I do?

What kind of factors most affect how we play games? Is it to do with our personalities? How we solve problems in real life situations? How we've played games before? I'm not offering any answers because I can't go to the lecture but it's interesting to think about.

Another slight tangent I went on from the lecture description was here. Facts and statistics about computer games and who buys and plays them. The pie charts for the best selling genres really surprised me. Action and sports games had the highest percentages for console games and strategy and children's games for PC games. If you'd asked me what I thought sold most I probably would have said shooters and maybe racing. But is that because I'm currently in an environment where those genres are more popular? Lots of people play CoD and Gears of War in the lab and any adverts on TV tend to be more shooter and racing game orientated, although I have seen some for Final Fantasty XII and Wario Ware.

2007-03-04T00:43:00.000Z

Let's draw retarded Pokemon

So I did.
Ah how I love somethingawful.com :)

2007-02-28T00:43:00.000Z

Week 21: Where do you want to go and how do you want to get there?

OK, so it's time to reflect on the course so far and then think about what I want from it in the future. Let's break it down into modules for what I've done so far.

Drawing: I would say drawing is my strongest area. I do work hard at it, but I also really enjoy being able to just play and know that it's helping me get somewhere. I've ventured into photoshop for colouring things which I was hesitant to do before. My media usage has become a lot wider because I'm not hampered by project deadlines like I was in art college.
Hopefully in the future I'll go more into the sculpture and plastics side of things and try making some 3D characters. I think it'd help me a lot and show potential employers that I'm pretty versatile.

3D Studio Max: I've found Max pretty tricky to get to grips with, but I am learning something with every project we do. I get a little worried sometimes because it doesn't come as easily to me as it does to others in the class and because I'm not as enthusiastic about it as I could be. I think I'm afraid that I'm not good enough when really I've been progressing a lot and have a lot to show for the past year.
I think my personal confidence is what's holding me back in this module, so I need to sit down and do some tutorials on the K drive as well as some from my 3D Studio Max Bible. Quite looking forward to the group projects to see how well co-operation and management works out, as they will be important skills for the future.

Art Style Guide: I'm going to lump the schedules and specifications in here too, as it's all document management. Although a bit tedious I can see the need for these documents in the industry. I don't feel like I've had a proper crack at the specifications having seen a second year example, but I'm going to try and do them in an instructional style for the van and resubmission of the tree. Timetables I feel have gone well and I have stuck to reasonably.
Obviously there will be a lot more focus on this area next year and I feel I do need a few more goes at it before I can really say whether I know what I'm doing or not, but I don't think I have any specific problems so far.

Blogs: Some of the blog topics I have loved, some of them I have found confusing and/or hard to write about. I don't think I have trouble with the blogs, but I wouldn't say I excel at them either. I like the way that I've started using it as a more social and fun thing by posting whatever pops into my head and by adding the blog to my facebook. It makes it easier to write in.

So there we go. I'd say I'm doing pretty well, although I need to give myself a kick up the bum with regards to using Max more. Now for the future:

When I leave here I want to have a strong set of valuable skills appropriate for the games industry. I'm currently really happy that if I keep working hard in all aspects of the course that I can achieve this. I'm happy on the course and feel like I know what is expected of me and that there are achievable goals I can work towards. The only thing I would say I want from the course is more focus on 3D sculpture in the drawing classes as I feel that this could help broaden my portfolio and provide more research for the Max work. But Chris has already mentioned all this so hopefully it will be in the pipeline for next year.

2007-02-27T09:05:00.000Z

I went to see Hot Fuzz at the weekend!

Truly cinema cannot get any better than Simon Pegg drop kicking an old woman.

Brilliant film with some great references to Shaun of the Dead. Everyone go see it now!

2007-02-18T20:06:00.000Z

Week 20: Creativity

What is creativity? Creativity is the ability to think of new and different ideas that are also useful and applicable to something. For me creativity always seems to manifest itself at about 2 in the morning when I am trying to go to sleep. My mind wanders as I fall asleep and stumbles on things that I always need to get drawn pretty immediately or I forget them.

Creativity is all around us. Every man made object we see was designed or planned by somebody at some point. It's easy to forget about.

I don't think creativity is necessarily hindered by technical constraints, it just helps to shape it. In the sound lecture Pip mentioned that it was a pity in a way that games now had a more wide ranging musical voice as they had lost the identity the music had in the NES era. Limits can force you to a conclusion you might not have otherwise reached, and doesn't always mean the work has to suffer.

I think everybody in a game 'does' creativity, although some may be more limited in how they can express it. A good portion of creativity for the game has already been done in the design document and it's up to artists and programmers to interpret their individual briefs as creatively as they can while staying within its boundaries and making sure it achieves what it needs to.

As an artist I'd think that most of my creative exploration would take place before drawing or modelling anything. I've been having a lot of fun in the plastics lab and print room lately so perhaps I might have a play with ideas in different media before properly beginning a project. In drawing I could use different types of media to convey an idea or be creative with the ideas themselves. At the moment I'm pretty fond of mashing together two different project ideas like hands and bits of heated up foil and seeing what comes out.

What does creativity look like? This is such a tricky question because as I said earlier absolutely anything produced involves creativity. However the quality and breadth of creativity is a varied thing. Creativity can be housed in a brand identity as it encompasses the setting, characters and art style of a game. It can also be found in the art style, programming and the gameplay.

I really like the creativity found in the Sly Cooper series by Sucker Punch. The characters are anthropomorphic animals, using the idea of familiar attributes that can be easily related to by a wide audience. Animal characters are often found in fairy tales or fables. The idea of playing as a thief is also creative and makes a change from the fairly standard fighter character.
Creative programming can be found in FarCry, where enemies use military tactics to surround the player and try to kill them.
For creative graphics and visual style I would give the example of Psychonauts. Wacky character designs with definite shapes and also a very lateral way of representing abstract concepts (actual baggage for emotional baggage and small men screaming "NO!" at you to destroy errant thoughts) make this a very unique game to play.
Finally for gameplay I would give the example of Guitar hero. Being creative in taking the idea of rhythm games and the secret dream of just about everyone to be a rock star, and combining them to make a great game. Games which come with their own standard control system like Eyetoy or Donkey Konga always seem that little bit more novel.

2007-02-15T12:35:00.000Z

I feel like some of my posts lately have been slightly controversial and have made people disagree with me. Which is fine really, a debate is a good thing to have. But to counteract this argumentative tone, I have decided to post pictures of kittens!

Awwwww

2007-02-11T15:01:00.000Z

Week 19: Life changing or career building?

This week's task is a pretty tough one to get info on. The main questions is whether games companies want fresh arts graduates with open minds who can be taught things or whether they want graduates who have taken games orientated courses and have learnt modelling, texturing, animating or concept drawing skills.

I've searched through the jobs postings on gamasutra and all of the arts ones are asking for experience in max and photoshop, as you would expect, but they do also want traditional art skills.

I found a pretty good interview on gamasutra with Doug Tennapel, the creator of Earthworm Jim.
Tennapel says he likes everything Insomniac does, as well as the game Psychonauts which I am inclined to agree with. I liked the way Psychonauts was pushing the exaggeration of the characters, but I did feel that this meant that some looked like they were in a different style to others. Some of the campsite kids have a wildly different look to other ones, but on the whole the designs are brave and work well.

One of the main messages from the interview was that videogames companies need to be hiring artists who have more of a broad art background with experience in skills like colour theory and anatomy. He claims that instead many are being blinded by the details that artists can achieve

"Like for instance, if a guy maybe renders with his pencil really well, puts good shading on a creature, but his anatomy is completely wrong…they hire him because he tricked them with his cool detail, even though the foundation of his drawing is weak."

It's good to see that a message like this is coming from someone within the industry, asking for all round applicable art skills. I feel that the balance between art and modelling is a delicate one, and one that this course handles well. The art skills we get taught by Chris in the drawing module are applicable to all types of art. Perspective, colour theory and anatomy are universal skills which perhaps are not as prevalent in the games industry as they should be.

But perhaps neither is original and creative thinking, which would be more likely to come from art course graduates. My art foundation certainly taught me how to think outside the box and redefine words like 'drawing'. A drawing is not pencil lines on a piece of paper, it is any type of information about anything presented in any kind of way. So if I were studying oranges for example then yes I might do a traditional drawing but I might try cutting it up and printing with it, rolling it in paint and then on paper, casting it, trying to replicate its colour, warping its shape, measuring it and writing down its stats, rolling it and recording how it moves or smashing it on a canvas.

All these are legitimate drawing techniques, which I don't think some people on this course really understand, perhaps because they weren't expecting to have to address them. It would explain the slighty underwhelmed response to the exhibition the other week, which was full of interesting abstract work.

So I've basically come the long way round to saying I think this course has it right. The industry is asking for specific skills like 3D Studio Max and Photoshop which we can deliver but hopefully with some prodding we can deliver a more broad understanding of artistic techniques and skills which can help expand the horizons of the games industry as well as providing the more immediate benefit of accuracy and understanding.

2007-02-05T12:31:00.000Z

I have a new hobby. It's called papercraft.

Expect to see my print budget disappear very rapidly

2007-02-02T13:25:00.000Z

Week 18 Sound for Games

I thought it was a bit of a random addition to the bottom of the list of questions to get you started, but it seems that 'Good Times' by Nile Rodgers/Bernard Edwards could actually be one of the most influential pieces of music from the 20th century. Wikipedia informs me that it is one of the most sampled tracks in musical history, and gives a long list of artists who used it, including Queen, Blondie, The Clash, the Beastie Boys, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul and of course DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince (hee hee). The song is also ranked #224 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. So there you have it. So it is of course very important that someone as influential as Nile Rodgers says:
'That's when I got hooked, and then I got involved in some other titles and the next think you know, I decided one day that I was taking all the things I had on my walls in my office down and replacing it with all the video game media that I had.' That's some pretty heavy stuff. One of the musicians who produced one of the most sampled tracks in music is giving a big thumbs up to video games and all media assosciated with them.

So, game music. I have the odd game song on my playlist, and I also have the entire soundtrack to Final Fantasy 9, by Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu is a very important game music composer, and has worked on many of the Final Fantasy games ranging from 4 to the latest one, 13, although his work on 9 was the last soundtrack he did alone. The music for 9 is fantastic, the musical styles and feels change depending on where you are and what you're doing in the game. One of the most satisfying sonic moments for me was when you first get the airship in FF9, and you are suddenly free to explore the entire map, no longer hindered by sea or mountain ranges. The music that starts up as you begin to fly your airship is fun and uplifting, with lots of guitar riffs to remind you just how cool this is.

Another notable game musician is Martin Galway, who began his career in 1983 making music for his friends' games. They approached Ocean Software who liked the game and were also impressed by Galway's music. Galway was lent a state of the art composition unit and proceeded to work for the company. His work spanned many games and genres and was pushing the boundaries of technology wherever it could, using multiple instruments in themes for examples. Galway remained on top of new technology for the rest of his career, introducing sampled sounds on the Commodore.

I found a great article on Gamasutra about the music composition for Myst III: Exile, done by Jack Wall. The article is a reflective diary about the production, and how the composer immerses himself in the atmosphere and music of the previous two games before attempting his own version. It really made me think about how much work goes into game music and how similar it is to art design. You have to have a united, yet varied sound which enhances the game experience without distracting the player.

I also have some music directly influenced by games, be it fan music or a band's tribute to certain games, such as the Legend of Zelda theme by System of a Down. I also can't remember where I read this, but artists are also starting to make music using old gameboys and old video game sound chips to produce tracks, as well as manipulating the chips to produce sound they normally wouldn't be able to. It's called Bitpop.

2007-01-30T10:58:00.000Z

The Game

I have decided that it is time to explain The Game. I have already begun spreading it around uni teaching it as it was taught to me by Chris and as was taught to him and so on and so on.

The aim of The Game is to forget you are playing The Game. If you remember you are playing The Game, you have lost The Game. You cannot win The Game. No one can. Everyone in the world is playing The Game, just that some of them might not know yet. If you remember you are playing The Game, and lose The Game, it is your duty to inform everyone around you, and irritate them by making them lose too. There is a five minute grace period after someone loses in which no one else is allowed to lose, in order to let everyone fully forget about The Game.

You will find after a while playing The Game that certain things will trigger losing. These can include: seeing the person who taught you The Game, certain objects - for me bananas, melons or cheesecake, seeing Lost on TV, hearing a song by rapper The Game or talking about any kind of game.

Enjoy :)

2007-01-28T14:47:00.000Z

Week 17: Game Engines

A game engine is the core software of a game with real time graphics. They will control tasks such as rendering the graphics, physics, animation, scripting and networking, and can help make game construction easier, faster and cheaper.

Developers can choose to construct their own game engine to suit their needs or can purchase an existing engine such as the Unreal engine. Developers can also purchase 'middleware', engines which can be tacked on to an existing engine to provide a different function. Examples of these are the Havok physics engine, which can be used to control ragdoll physics, and SpeedTree, which can procedurally generate trees once given examples or specifications. Both of these examples of middleware can save developers time.
Developers can also develop their own middleware and swap and share amongst each other. I seem to remember Naughty Dog and Insomniac sharing their weapon engine and environment creation engine.

Subtractive and Additive are terms used to describe the way a level is created within the game engine. The Unreal Editor for example uses subtractive creation. The game level begins as a solid block and the user uses brushes to carve away shapes. The brushes have many different qualities, and can add solid, semisolid or nonsolid objects to the game level. However this method can cause problems and lead to crashes in the editor due to the way the brush effects are memorised. Using mesh objects such as those created in 3D studio max can help to solve the problem as they are easier to process.
An additive level editor begins as a blank space and is then built up rather than being carved out.

The advantages of using an existing engine are that you know it works, it's ready to go and only needs minor adjustments, and you can focus on the artistic elements of your game. However, the engine may not do exactly what you want it to and your game will have to work around the limits of the engine with its gameplay. If you build your own engine, you can focus on exactly what you want your game to achieve, can make the code as complex or simple as you want and have the option of selling the engine later, ensuring more money from the game.

The key issues for next gen engines appear to be based around light and shadow. New dynamic shadow and light mapping is being developed for the Source engine, and the Unreal 3 engine site boasts of its support for four methods of shadowing techniques .

2007-01-23T11:21:00.000Z

I was thinking earlier about how you get a lot of film to video game conversions, and a lot of book to film conversions, but not a lot of book to video game conversions. The only ones I can really think of are the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy text adventure game, and a couple of Discworld games. But then again, Hitchhikers was never really one format to begin with, and Terry Pratchett is notoriously picky about who can do what with his books.
I say this because I was thinking about how the Hungry Cities series of books would work as a game.

I've just finished reading them, and they honestly blew me away. They're about a post-apocolyptic world where leaders have decided to move their cities around to keep them from being attacked. The cities have huge jaws on the front to devour smaller towns or static settlements. The materials they gather are then sorted by people in the gut and used to extend or maintain the city. Due to the movement of the cities, the earth is constantly churned up, and no vegetation grows. A group called the anti-traction league have settlements in the Himalayas, and want to restore the Earth to its green state.

There is a lot of scope for a game here, either sim city style, managing your moving city: Where do I use the new materials? Where should I hunt next? Who should I trade with?
Or perhaps as an adventure with the two main characters, Hester and Tom. Between the first and second books they go adventuring on the Bird Roads - paths taken by trading airships. This leaves a lot of scope for players to visit all the cities they could wish to without upsetting any plot balance. You could play through the first book and then adventure in the Bird Roads.

This sounds so fun. I'd play it! Fortunately, Wikipedia says that "It's rumoured that Peter Jackson has displayed an interest in making the Hungry City Chronicles into an episodic video game for Xbox 360." But then again you can't trust everything on Wikipedia.

2007-01-21T13:26:00.000Z

Week 16: Game Cultures

This one is really interesting for me because it's only when I sit down and think about it that I realise how much of my life revolves around game cultures. In 2000 I joined a chatroom called pokemasters on mIRC, a chat program. The chatroom was obviously dedicated to the topic of Pokemon, it being the height of the craze. The chatroom was the child of a larger site, which is still here, although missing a lot of the content that used to be there
My handle was Pikachuinapeartree as it was festive and I stayed a member of that chatroom for many years, long after the chat about pokemon had died off and the room had dwindled to a few hardcore members.
I met many friends in that channel. Some of them very close real life friends, some of them I never actually met up with. Me and my friend acquired boyfriends from the channel who we went out with in real life.

That in itself is another game culture influence. My friend's boyfriend, who we shall call wormania for now as that was his handle for a while, was a very hardcore gamer. He played for high scores in a lot of different games. At one point he was seventh in the world or something for the high score in the home run contest in Super Smash Bros Melee. Number one in the UK I think. He also played a lot of Halo. As my friend was not a gamer at all, it was hard for them to relate sometimes. They did find a way of gaming together eventually through Runescape, a terrible free MMORPG.

I've just had a big discussion with the boyfriend (who I coincidentally met through the internet) about high scores. My gut reaction with high scores is to consider them a bit sad and a waste of time, but why? Athletes who train all their lives just to shave a couple of milliseconds off a world record time are just the same. They are dedicating themselves to something that, in the great scheme of things, is really not that important. I suppose on a primal level we recognise physical achievements as a desirable trait, whereas virtual achievements aren't quite there yet.

What cultures am I part of? Well not many at the moment, seeing as I have no internet gaming in halls (Grrr!). However the one I miss the most and really enjoyed for a long time was the Wacraft 3 custom game scene. It's pretty similar to mods, you have a game editor where you can come up with your own games. It's how the legendary tower defence games were born, using the different defensive towers from the game and customising them further.
Here is a flash version of the Element TD. Imagine it with better graphics and played against lots of people all talking to each other and calling each other noobs and you basically have the warcraft version.

I suppose I was also part of the fanart culture for some games. For Pokemon certainly, although I'm not showing any of my embarrassing art. Some things I would just copy the artwork for practice, I found a lot of Golden Sun, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter copy stuff in a folder when I had a clearout. And also some more original stuff for Ratchet and Clank. Thankfully I don't get obsessed with it like some people. They call themselves 'fuzztakus' and basically fawn over Ratchet because he is fuzzy. They scare me a lot.
Go here if you dare.
This one is by me and I'd like to think is semi-decent:

2007-01-15T14:34:00.000Z

It's kind of disappointing how few people on my course know how to use a library. Or actually want to use a library at all. People would rather 'own' book than 'hire' them which I can kind of understand. But I like having so many things in one place that I might never think of buying, or might never consider reading unless I'd seen it on a library shelf. Plus why would I buy something if I wasn't sure I'd like it? I've read plenty of books that I've felt were terrible, but because it's borrowed I haven't really lost anything.
Plus the fact that my Mum works at a library so I can get all the great stuff like DVD rental for free...

2007-01-14T18:27:00.000Z

Week 15 The Games Industry

How is the games industry doing? Well, in financial terms, pretty well. Gamesindustry.biz reports that the Japanese games industry is up by 125 percent, and also that sales of games are driving up sales of hardware in the US. The games industry also has a higher annual growth of wages than the film industry, at 17.4%.

For some employee views on the industry, I went to Gamasutra's blog section. Here we find industry employees discussing the advantages of procedurally generating in game objects as opposed to modelling them, how to report in Second Life for Reuters, use of technology for dramatic effect and discussion of how to incorporate plot into MMORPGS or whether it should even be done at all. Employees within the industry all seem passionate about making better games as well as games that make money.

Challenges facing the industry at the moment include producing and marketing games effectively for women and use of the new motion sensor technology brought in by the Wii and to a lesser extent by the PS3. David Gardner from EA commented on the BBC website that the games industry is still not reaching its full audience, but that producing games like The Sims or MMOs where players can focus on relationships can help to overcome this. The presence of women within the games industry is gradually increasing and is now up to 10%, but it may be a while before this filters down fully to the games themselves.

It is still early days yet for the technological possibilities brought in by the Wii, but it has inspired many within the industry to look to the future. I can't remember who it was said by, but someone from the Sony team said in Edge magazine that perhaps by the PS7 they would be looking at biotechnology for a fully immersive experience.

Another challenge faced by the games industry is that of continuing negative press. On East Midlands news earlier in the week there was an incident where a boy killed another boy with a hammer in a Manhunt copycat style killing. The boy was known to be obsessed with the game and the parents of the boy who was killed were calling for all violent videogames to be banned. Thankfully the Leicester MP responding by calling for age restrictions to be better enforced rather than calling for a blanket ban. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3936237.stm

There is unfortunately little educational mainstream coverage of games or the games industry. I went to the Game On exhibition at the science museum over the holidays and rather than seeking to educate people about the creative and technological processes behind games, the exhibit was more like 'Here are some random consoles and games we dug up... now go play!'
However, there are examples of the industry and games themselves being taken seriously. The BBC has run articles on Second Life, and as previously mentioned, Reuters have a station there monitoring the in-game economy.

2006-12-21T12:41:00.000Z

It's Christmas Time...

Well I was expecting some work to be posted up today but discovered to my pleasant surprise that there wasn't any! So I am going to post about my Christmas Holidays so far.
I have been ice skating at the Tower of London and would highly recommend it. I'm rubbish at ice skating but thanks to nice shiny new skates and a nice ice surface I managed to survive without falling over. I also went shopping in Covent Garden and Tim bought me an awesome little ink stamp of an owl. Expect to see that randomly appearing in my sketch book.
Went to Wetherspoons where we were all disappointed by the price of a round but discovered Bailey's cups. Little shot glasses made out of chocolate with Bailey's inside. Mmmmmm

2006-12-20T09:32:00.000Z

Oblivion is beginning to annoy me. It does not stick to its own rules, an idea I read about in a game book, probably Trigger Happy. If I have a fireball spell and I find a camp fire that is not alight, it should not be unreasonable for me to set the bloody thing alight.

Who cares that the game has endlessly accurate physics of throwing a dead rat over a cliff, I want to set things on fire!!

2006-12-14T13:04:00.000Z

Oh god I want to buy so many things right now it's insane. I bought myself a copy of Psychonauts the other day, mostly due to the interview about it. I also really really want a copy of Okami, women gamers gave it an absolutely rave review and it had looked good anyway. What with all this and Christmas shopping still to finish I think my bank account is soon going to start crying.

Aaanyway:

Week 11: Gameplay

I don't think gameplay is a set of solid rules, I think it's the interaction between different elements of a game like controls, plot and immediate goals. The only thing that doesn't really come into it is graphics and art style, in theory you could play a game with only stickmen and the gameplay would be the same. That's not to say that the gaming experience as a whole would be the same, just the gameplay.

The article referring to different levels of gameplay was really interesting, and it applies to many different games I've played. In final fantasy games there is the world map level of play where you can see your location in relation to towns, fields and whatever else. There are then two levels within this, towns and encounters. During encounters, the control system changes from one of navigation to one of battle. In towns, the navigation controls tend to be more restrictive, but the options of talking to people and accepting quests is opened up.

Similarly in Super Mario Brothers 3 there are two levels of gameplay, the map screen and the levels themselves. Although limiting, the map area does require interaction. The player can choose which levels to complete and tactically decide where to go depending on where the Hammer Brothers or the Coin Ship or whatever else is.
Levels of gameplay can serve to add depth to a game and to prevent the game seeming repetitive.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop was also really cool. I think it's fantastic that new and exciting methods of play are being recognised for their merits, and I think that they are the games which will help move the industry forward. I so want to play Katamari Damacy, but the last I heard we only had the second game over here, which apparently has a slightly different feel to it. Experimental gameplay seems to be about the same kind of thinking they taught us in art college - think away from what you have, and then come back again. Figure out some crazy, non related thing and then relate it back to how you can structure your game.

I don't think gameplay can be entirely designed into a game as different factors affect it. If you had the gameplay as you wanted it but suddenly had to change an element of the control system because it was causing problems then the gameplay would inevitably be affected. I think the gameplay element would be similar to a final piece of an art project - you would have an idea of what you wanted it to be like but different factors you explored along the way would eventually shape it.

2006-12-13T00:34:00.000Z

Blogger

Why do they have to do this damn Blogger Beta thing to me? It's enough trying to remember eleventy billion passwords across the internet without having to create a google account just so I can forget another one!

My boyfriend Tim is currently signing up for Blogger. I dread to think what he's going to do with his account. The world will probably be treated to blueprints, videos, photos and crime scene evidence of every new explosive device he creates. To my knowledge, he has so far single handedly built out of readily available household material:

A gas powered tennis ball launcher which can shoot over a house.

A bicycle pump powered water cannon backpack which managed to shoot a jam jar higher than the height of his house when the pressure became too much.

a K'nex crossbow which fires bits of K'nex at people.

A 3 wheeled go kart.

A secret underground lair which was basically a big hole underground with a shed constructed inside it once it was finished, complete with Batman style ramp to the surface world.

A wooden crossbow.

A sword. As in like proper metal, cut you up sword.

Not to mention various adventures with explosives. Needless to say, I will feel safe with him when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives.

2006-12-10T15:45:00.000Z

Week 10: Story and Character

A few of the articles for this week's task really made me annoyed. The design and purpose for the characters in Ninety Nine Nights seemed really thought out and meaningful and then they hit you with this: 'When I was Inphyy, I liked her, she's cute and has a nice body. She has good cleavage, I threw that in for the player's sake.' You have got to be kidding me! You went to all this trouble to design a deep, well rounded, interesting woman and then decided that you know what, she still needs big tits. Because who's going to buy it if it doesn't have big tits in it?! This idea of the player is also slightly strange. It should say the male player. Or the player who is attracted to breasts. To be honest a character with boobs spilling out of her armour does not appeal to me whatsoever. It says lazy design and lack of practicality.

Anyway. I will stop being hrr arrgh feminist now and return to the task in hand. What characters do I respond to? This is an incredibly broad question so I'm going to try to break it down a bit.

Appearance
In live action filming, the way a character looks is predetermined by the actor. They can be changed through makeup and costume but each actor will bring certain preconceived ideas with them to a character.
By constrast in animation and games the character's whole appearance needs to be designed and there is no base to work from. At the moment I think animation deals with this more enthusiastically than games do. Animation seeks to create exaggerated characters and worlds with unrealisitic proportions. Just look at Corpse Bride, The Incredibles or anime in general for strange proportions. Games seem to be stuck in a rut of trying to emulate reality when they have far more freedom than they give themselves credit for. Why have photorealistic humans or foliage? If we want that we can just go outside. Some games do well at breaking away from this. Timesplitters, Sam n Max and Windwaker managed to use chariacatures to great effect without making you feel as if it was outside of the game's reality.
So I respond to characters who look good, who have a certain spark about them. Captain Jack Sparrow with his planned out costume, Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc with their contrasting body shapes and sizes.

Script:
I'm going to talk about the podcast by Tim Schafer for a little bit now. I found it a really interesting talk, and the ideas of drawing inspiration from real life and that there can be different fantasies people want to fulfil seemed very important. Basically to summarise the second idea was in regards to playing as Guybrush Threepwood in Monkey Island. Tim said that someone had remarked to him that they enjoyed playing as Guybrush because they always had a witty comeback, something a lot of people struggle with in real life. There is more to games than just being a powerful warrior.
Writing for a character is about making them believable. I read somewhere that you shouldn't have a character who is 100% what you expect them to be. I think it was in Trigger Happy, I can't remember. Basically, if you have a good guy, make him 3/4 good characteristics and 1/4 bad. Like noble, witty, compassionate but ugly. I think this is well illustrated by Bender from Futurama. Bender doesn't care about anybody but himself. He is selfish, lazy, lies and steals but when you get a rare moment of positive emotion from him it means so much more. Like when he actually becomes friends with Fry or when he falls in love.
Character writing I like includes stuff by Pratchett, Shaun of the Dead and Sly Raccoon 3.

Acting
Acting can change everything about a character. You learn this when you study different versions of Shakespeare plays put on by different companies. In one version of the Merchant of Venice, Shylock is the evil, vicious Jew who wants nothing but mindless vengeance. In another, he is the poor victim of circumstance who wants only what is due to him. These are the same lines in each case but acted differently. Actors can bring new life to a character. The character of Hades in the Disney film Hercules was changed entirely when James Woods auditioned for the part. Instead of being slow and lumbering, Hades became quick witted and cynical.
An actor who seems to turn up again and again in games I play is James Arnold Taylor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Arnold_Taylor . He played both Tidus and Ratchet and pops up in lots of other cartoons and voiceovers. I think he's a good actor and the cast interviews with him about Final Fantasy X were really interesting, he really knew what he was trying to convey with Tidus.

2006-12-03T16:43:00.000Z

Week 9: Game Technology

Personally, I don't think that consoles and controllers becoming more aesthetically pleasing is a terrible thing. It can of course be argued as being 'style over substance' but I think it's nice that video games are considering their image and are changing it to reflect their audience.

The PS3 controller is slightly disappointing. It has barely changed despite Sony's ten years of console experience. The only way it seems to be different to a PS2 controller is a single button in the middle. Sony seems to be a rather avid borrower of ideas from other consoles when it comes to design. The XBox 360 controller has at least been tidied up a bit. Smoothed out, rounded and slick looking, it's a nice improvement but nothing shocking. The middle button allows easy menu access, important to a console which prides itself on its online capabilities.
The Wii controller however, seems to be going in a completely new direction. The smooth whiteness is there like the XBox controller, but the remote is basically a rectangle. What are Nintendo doing? The thing is a slightly elongated, sideways NES controller!
But here is the beauty of the thing. When you played NES games, you never forgot what the controls were, because there were only 2 buttons and a D-pad. Nintendo has stripped its controller down to the basic essentials and made it easy to just pick up and use.

Controllers are often a barrier between the user and the game for inexperienced gamers. Watching my mum or my flatmates try to play on a console is amusing but also interesting because they don't understand what the controller can do, they don't intuitively know where the buttons are and how you use them. Instead of being absorbed in the experience, they are sitting there going 'Oh god how do I jump?!'

Let's find a control menu for something. Ah yes, Shadow of the Colossus. That will do:

Left Analog stick: Used for movement.
Right Analog Stick: Moves the camera about freely.
Directional Pad: Use the left and right arrows to change your weapons.
X-button: Summon your horse.
Square-button: Attack button. Use it to slash your sword or fire your arrows.When equipped with your sword, use the square button to charge up for a strongstab (used in combination with R1).
Triangle-button: The jump button. Also used to mount your horse when you are standing next to him. Used to jump out of water as well.
Circle-button: Used to reflect the sunlight off your sword. You can also use Circle to pray at the save alters.
R1-button: Used to grab climbable surfaces, walls, ledges, etc. Hold this and use triangle and left stick to jump/roll when you aren't climbing. You can also use this to dive underwater a short distance.
R2-button: Zooms in.
L1-button: Look about at your surroundings and focus on the colossus (when incombat).
L2-button: Re-positions the camera behind you.
START-button: Pause/Displays your map. The arrow is your current position andthe direction you are facing.--On Agro--Left Analog stick: Used to change his direction.
Triangle-button: Mount/Dismount.
Triangle + R1: Used to fast-mount the horse when you leap from the ground.
X-button: Kick the horse to make him go faster. You can hold it down to keep him at his maximum speed.
Down on L-stick + X: When standing still, you can rear-up and take off atmaximum speed really quick. When moving fast, this will put you back at zero-movement (skid stop and all). Also you can hit X twice from a gallop and downto do an instant 180.
R1 + Up on L-stick: Stand on the horse. From here you can jump off ontosomething else.
R1 + any button + left/right on L-stick: hang off the side of the saddle.
Circle-button: Raises sword when equipped, pets Agro when the hand icon is shown.

I'm not being funny I love this game but there are so many button combinations and different things a button can do depending on the circumstances. I'd nearly completed the game before I found out you could actually pet Agro. This is not pick up and play material and I think that this is the thing games should be trying to be right now.

So basically I think my point after all this is that consoles need to be appealing to more people. Sony and Microsoft have done that with their console designs but Nintendo have gone the extra mile with a controller that will mean eveyone in your family can play, not just the gamers.

2006-11-27T15:37:00.000Z

Memory Loss

I seem to have little luck with memory devices recently. My trusty 256 meg MP3 player/ storage device has finally gone up to that computer shop in the sky after having broken. It now will not switch on and play any music, nor will my computer recognise it.

I also managed to break a 2 gig memory stick a few months ago that a friend gave to me to transport my flash game to and from college. It corrupted itself and managed to mangle half of the files on it.
Not to mention that around the same time when I was transferring stuff onto this PC from the home PC half of it managed to disappear despite me KNOWING I transferred it. *sigh*

Perhaps I have a terrible power over memory sticks that I can't yet control. I fear for my shiny new digital camera's life.

2006-11-22T14:34:00.000Z

Week 8: Storytelling in Games

Plot to me is pretty important in games that seem like they should have them. Obviously many games just dump you in a situation and expect you to go for it, but games which attempt a plot I think should strive to do it well.
Emotional engagement in a story can be a powerful tool. I really loved Final Fantasy 10 because I got so attached to the characters. I almost felt like I was playing a soap opera, with snippets of cut scenes and information emerging at different points of the story. When I got to the end game content I really missed the cutscenes and felt like I didn't know my party as well as I did before.
I don't think that all games have a story. I think some games have a setting, or a backstory and the player is then left to their own devices. Call of Duty is not a war story, in my opinion, it is a war setting. Capturing a flag is hardly relevant to the course of a war and has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Of course I may be biased as I haven't played the single player mode.

Unless there is true choice and alternate paths in a game, I believe story happens to a player. In Ratchet and Clank 2, a linear plot game, the characters mock the player's inability to control the action when yet again they arrive at an area too late and the person they are chasing has got away.
Ratchet: Damn! He got away again! We always seem to be too late.
Clank: Why is that?
*Both characters stare directly at the screen*

I know that putting variable narratives in a plot is difficult, I looked at this for my final project at art college. I basically made a book starring Mark the office worker who gets to make choices on what he does during the course of a day. By creating 15 pages I was able to generate something like 32 different courses that the story could follow.
I also tried to get away from the idea of 'good' and 'bad' endings. There are positive and negative endings, but it ultimately depends on how much you like Mark as to whether these are good or bad. In a game it's a different situation as the main character is an avatar of yourself, and so affects you more.
Maintaining continuity in a story which twists around itself is a tricky thing, and you also have to have consequences for every action or the entire thing becomes sheer randomness. Plotholes in games with multiple paths are a problem, and I've heard stories from people who've played Baldur's Gate 2 where they've walked into a room and had people simply explode because they were supposed to have died in an alternate pathway and the game didn't know what to do with them.

2006-11-18T12:29:00.000Z

Art Direction.

The closest experience I have to an art director style role is being head of scenery in a drama contest at school. The year after I was head of scenery I became head of the entire production and I found that hugely stressful and full of politics.

As head of scenery I was responsible for identifying props and scenery needed for the play, similar to identifying all assets that need to be created for a game. I also had to either delegate the creation of these things to other people or do them myself. I had to remain in constant contact with both the heads of production and the other departments, for example choreography, to make sure people didn't want to dance through a huge piece of scenery.

Whilst obviously on a far smaller scale than that of an art director, I feel that the role has a lot of parallels. I enjoyed feeling that I was contributing important aspects to the play and also getting other people involved in the artwork, and I imagine these feelings would be magnified for a professional art director.

The role seems to be extremely creative. Art directors get to manage the look of a game and provide guidelines to help the rest of the team achieve their vision. They need to be good, clear communicators and have good people skills to get their ideas across and also to encourage and help the rest of the art team.
Art directors have great responsibility in that they are responsible for the performance of their team and keeping them to deadlines. They are answerable to the producers and any delays coming from the art side of the game can have knock-on effects on other areas such as programming. Therefore the art director has to be able to manage time effectively.

Art director seems to be the highest you can reach in the industry whilst still being a hands on artist. It does involve a lot of responsibility and management skills but it seems like it would be a very rewarding area to work in.

Melon Cheesecake

Carvanha

Life Drawing

Roll

Case

Speedpaint Lock/ loch

Great Tits

Life drawing

XSS Poster

Dragon!

New Website

Penguin

Export to reality!

Deer Full painting

Deer

Other sideline activities

Finally painted something

I did a paint

Gameartisans

Woo! Van Finished!

Update

Pika!

H Van

Pony

Progress

Mod Stuff

Summary of the Beeb: Part 3

Papercraft!

Mod Stuff 2

Smash Brothers Brawl Papercraft

Summary of the Beeb: Part 2

Mod Stuff

Summary of the Beeb: Part 1

More Tutorial dropping

Second Life Analysis

More SL Info dropping

Kowloon Walled City

Second Life Machinima

This is the BBC

Third Year Project Idea

Painting

Deep Sea Discovery

The boat is finished!

End of the Group Project

Digital Masterpiece

God this task is hard

Bradgate Park Painting

Good and Bad

Game Design and Social Networking

Keyboards and RPGS

Grading Art

Poor Blog

Some attempt at wrapping things up

It's review O' clock!