Influence Map  

Posted by Aj

I had the theme of Mythic/Musketeer, it is a interesting combination. For the mythic part of things i was looking along the Greek mythology side of things and for the musketeer was just following the classic path. If we look at the what each of these stand for Mythic brings Imaginary and fictitious to mind. When you look at Musketeers some of the words that comes to my mind are french, muskets, swords, guards and armies.

The definition for the word is "A musketeer (French: mousquetaire) was an early modern type of infantry soldier equipped with a musket. Musketeers were an important part of early modern armies, particularly in Europe."

Now here is the Influence Map made up of the different ideas and thoughts i had while i referred to the two main themes.


 So far i intend to keep all my characters expect the sidekick to be humanoid. I will be trying to get a blend of Mythic and Musketeer, which always seems to bring to mind the image of a musketeer riding a Pegasus. Looking forward to the designing stage of things and to see how the character will turn out in the end.

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Lost in La Mancha (2002)  

Posted by Aj

This was a very informative documentary about the the truth of movie making process and shows you how sometimes things just don't work out.


The main story is based around Terry Gilliam and his attempt to make the movie Lost in LA Mancha. However when the production starts things start to take a turn for the worst, everything that could possibly go wrong seems to go wrong. There were many problems like actors falling ill, adverse weather conditions and many more. While watching the documentary i felt a deep sense of sympathy for the director, he was just trying to get his dream of a movie into production. 

There were problems initially as well, were the investors of the movie wouldn't invest into it properly so the budget had to be cut down by a considerable amount. This caused further problems as they had to make tighter schedules and budgets.


The saddest part of it all was that we could see how Terry's dreams were just crashing, everything about the production was slowly falling apart and folding in on itself. There were times when even the crew would doubt if production was ever going to work.  Towards the end we can see that the assistant director even pulls out and the whole production had to be cancelled. Once a production has been canceled the shots taken cannot be used and everything has to be done from scratch again.

Nevertheless the documentary was an insight into true courage and  passion of someone who wanted things to work badly. The documentary just makes it clear that any project has to be done via extensive planning and project management or things can get out of hand easily.

Since the last failure to produce the movie, its been nearly 10 years since Terry started trying to make Lost in La Mancha (2002), let hope we can see the movie being produced in the future as it had amazing potential.

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Character Design Class - 1  

Posted by Aj

We started of our Character Design class by looking through prime examples of hero's, villains and sidekicks from the past. I found the lessons to be very informative as we began to notice the  typical ways in which the characters are portrayed.

Some of the examples we watched included classic examples such as Hercules, Mulan, Monster Inc and Aladdin.



What we gathered from watching all the different character designs was that they were all portrayed using a particular style to make them look appealing to the audiences. This went back to basic principles of using certain shapes to portray humanoid features.

Colours played a big part as you could notice that the main hero's would normally tend to have bright or attractive colours. As opposed to the villains having darker colour, elogated and a  thin look. Also in the actions and roles these characters play are very typical, were villains tend to exaggerate there action to show that they are evil. Heros would do obvious heroic poses and actions throughout the story.

We also learned a lot about sidekicks and how they are used mainly for the purpose of comic relief. What you can notice about the sidekicks is that majority of them aren't humanoid. They also tend to have a good sense of humor and are a bit crazy in there acting.

Afterwords we were given random combinations of words to start drawing characters from and the ones i received were Aquatic Model and Vampire Clown.


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Unit 2 - Character Design  

Posted by Aj

The second project we have running alongside the other project is Character Design, the duration of the project is 10 weeks. Throughout this period we have to come up with a Hero, Villain and Sidekick. The project is based on an eighties cartoon project being rebooted and we are asked to design the characters.
The theme of the character were select by two random card which then corresponded to a list. I got the 4 of Hearts and 10 of Diamond, this gave me the theme Mythic Musketeers.



The randomness was quite effective at creating a mix of genre's for us to work with, the main focus will be to the character design, which will include many different aspects of judging. Looking forward to the hand drawing tasks and interesting mix of genres.

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Maya Tech Class - Lip Synicng  

Posted by Aj

Jaw Bounce

Greatly annoying while doing it due to hearing the same soound over and over again. However it looks very interesting once finished. I beileve i got the Jaw bounce quite realistic and smooth.

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Second Year And Narrative  

Posted by Aj

The second year of university is here and i have to say its very exciting to be doing the current project. I have to admit that i had a rather slow and discourging first year but now its time for change. Looking forward to bloging a lot more and sharing my thoughts with my peers and tutors. Also with the new year I thought I would go for a different look for the blog too as its a nice contrasting theme.

Narrative


We are being entered into the competition called Retro Fest, where we are put into groups and given a topic from which we have to make a trailer. Its a very exciting project as we will be working in a team this time and it will be interesting to see how we face the different tasks as a team. Its also a great opurtunity to learn from each team other and to grow as individuals.

Aims

To promote an awareness and understanding of the integration and synthesis of audio and visual elements in the construction of narrative, its reception and an aesthetic engagement with the language of film


To promote the skills of research and critical enquiry focussed on the investigation of narrative and filmic devices

To foster the skills associated with the sustained development of complex projects and the self management required to successfully accomplish challenging tasks in team working situations
 
The topic Studio E received was : Revenge of the Radioactive Rabbit from Hell!


Studio E : Jack, Laura, Alex and Aj 

Already have tons of ideas and thoughts, expect a lot of ideas and thoughts coming up onto the group blog. The initial task would be designing and getting the ideas onto paper and just right for the trailer before we start on anything. So the first task is to work out the basic storyline for the trailer and then decide on which direction to take in the coming weeks.

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