Gabrielle BCT

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Sem 2 2019 Blog Index

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187107297735/week-1 https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187315898045/week-2

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187315964995/week-3

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187316102730/week-4

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187316214975/week-5

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187316317730/week-6

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187316408135/meeting-with-glen

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/187870593580/mid-sem-break

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188160465910/mid-sem-break-continued

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188164028250/week-8

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188414319380/week-9

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188414330290/week-10

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188651344735/week-10-continued

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188651643960/art-style

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188625097520/week-12

https://gabriellebct.tumblr.com/post/188651130060/we-entered-the-equity-and-innovation-competition

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We entered the Equity and Innovation competition here at AUT, and we won! Here’s our submission, it provides a good overview of the project.

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Digi Fab Assignment 2

Blog 1:

For this assignment I would like to make something that is both aesthetically pleasing and functional. I’d ideally like to make something that I can laser cut some of my artwork onto. I’ve decided to make a box with artwork on the lid that I can store my jewellery in. I’ve been looking at finger joints.

Blog 2: I have drawn some sketches of the box and picked a design for the lid. I’ve looked at some images of laser cut boxes to get some ideas for the joints. One interesting technique I saw was scoring along mdf so that it’s bendable and this acts as a hinge. After some thought I decided not to do this as I don’t think this would count as a moving joint.

Blog 3: I’ve redesigned the box and started some prototypes in fusion. I’ve also drawn out how the lid will work and the hinge mechanism.

Blog 4: I’ve now completed the design and I’m looking forward to laser cutting it. I would like to cut it out of clear acrylic so that I can see what’s in the box. If using acrylic is unsuccessful I would like to use mdf.

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Week 12:

I have been working hard animating, and it is proving to be a lengthy process. Basically each frame has to be drawn separately and then organised along the timeline, it can get very tedious. Since Horotiu is a shapeshifter, incorporating adds another layer of difficulty. We have been working from the storyboard and my animatic reel to stay organised. I am not sure how much we will have completed by submission. Hannah Rogers from BNZ is interested in our project so I think I will continue to refine the project after submission so that it is good for Open Studio, I would prefer for it to look good and not to rush it. 

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Art Style

I have been working on refining the art style, and it is something that I would love to explore more but with the limited time we have I think it’s best to just find a style that works and stick to it. I’ve found that the traditional art style I’ve gone for actually has a really nice organic feel to it, and this lends itself nicely to the ‘spiritual’ feel we would like to come across. I experimented with water colours quite a bit to find some nice textures for the background of the animation that represent water. I’ve scanned them into photoshop and have been playing around with them a bit, here’s some examples:

Here’s a concept of how a still frame of the animation may look:

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Week 10 Continued

The animation is proving to be a bigger job than we anticipated, and Erin is now helping me do them. I have had to teach her how to do it, and this has been quite useful to my own learning as I am reinforcing the skills I have just learnt myself. The role of audio has been handed over to Matt Newick. We have been each picking a segment we would like to work on, using the animatic reel and the storyboard for reference. Here is the animatic reel I created. The ideas behind the narrative: - Horotiu shapeshifts between his different forms throughout the animation, moves through the waters - Māori art will be used on Horotiu’s body and perhaps in the background as well, these will have different meanings. - keep it quite abstract, this will contribute to the spiritual feel - Horotiu will not move in a linear way, it will be non linear so as to represent the Māori concept of time - I would like to bring in some other imagery/symbols in the background to add some secondary themes -Horotiu’s face is not seen until the final few frames so as to have some mystery throughout the animation, and to create a build up at the end.

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Week 10:

This week I have been focussing on figuring out a work flow for the animation and creating the base of it. Getting the movements of the taniwha has proved quite difficult and time consuming. I’ve also been trying to finalise the art style. I want to ensure that I keep to my own art style, so I’ve been experimenting with watercolour and line drawings.

On Friday we visited Angus Muir’s studio to look at different lighting ideas. This was a very cool experience and he gave us lots of ideas we hadn’t thought of. He advised us to play around with the application Madmapper and and once we know what we want to do we can talk to him again.

I went back home for the weekend and I was able to discuss the project with my mum (who is an illustrator/artist)  and my Aunty Vicky (who is a music teacher) and my Uncle Matthew (who is an art teacher/artist). They gave me valuable advice, especially about the art style. Matthew told me that in his experience students that do the best work are able to develop a good style that is relatively quick to do, as this enables you to meet your deadline. I had been going in the direction of a very detailed pointillism style which in hindsight is going to take too much time to animate frame by frame. He advised me to go for a looser more abstract style, saying that the abstraction requires the viewer to use more of their imagination. Also to make it less literal and to more so have the suggestion of the taniwha. Because of this advice and similar advice from my mum, I decided to come at it from a different approach. I had been looking at videos of eels and lizards etc to use as reference videos for the movement but this was quite time consuming searching for a video that could work and then manipulating it so it would work. I felt it would be much easier if I filmed my own reference videos. I went to Kmart and found a robotic snake that I then could film moving how I’d like, and this has been very helpful.

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Week 9:

Last week I talked to two digital design lecturers for some animation advice. Due to our past animation experience and limited time we will be doing frame by frame animation on Photoshop. This seems to be fairly straight forward as I have lots of photoshop experience but it will be time consuming. I created a more in depth storyboard and I have been focussing on creating an animatic reel of the animation. I will use these to guide me while I animate.

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Week 8

Today we had a meeting with Valence Smith who is a something lecturer at AUT. This meeting was super helpful and he is going to help us liaise with his close friend from Ngāti Whatua, which we are very grateful for.  We have been working on our entry to the Equity Innovation contest. We did the pitching workshop with Hannah Rogers to get some feedback on our entry, which was very useful.

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Mid Sem break continued:

The first storyboard I came up with + some concept art for some single still frames.

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Mid Sem Break

Over the break I focussed on getting an art style down and creating a basic storyboard for the animation.  I personally would like to go with an illustrative 2D animation style, partially because that’s the style I like to do, and also because it seems more achievable with our lack of animation experience. Although we do have some experience using Maya with our motion capture minor, it seems it would be a lot of work learning the modeling side of it, therefore I am leaning towards a 2D animation rather than 3D. I am going to look into some other applications such as Adobe Animate and Toon Boom, but if these will also be too much of a learning curve I assume we will just use PhotoShop and After Effects.

Creating the storyboard proved to be more timely than I thought it would be. This was because I really had to think about the different possibilities for the camera positioning, the motion and timing of the taniwha, and how to include all the different themes that we want to portray in the animation. I also drew out some still frames with more detail to get a better idea of the art style I’d like and how the taniwha would look. My next step is to talk to some animation lectures from Digital Design to get their opinions and advice.

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Meeting with Glen

Fortunately Glenn replied to us and was willing to meet with us. We met with him on Tuesday and he shared some stories of Horotiu with us and presented some interesting points about Maori culture that we had not considered. We are still in the process of collating the information we gained from him with the research we already have. This was a very valuable meeting as it highlighted some of our misunderstandings about Maori culture and the areas that we were lacking knowledge of.

Below are the notes I took:

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Week 6

19/08 - 23/08

We are starting to struggle with our project as no one we have contacted has been able to help us. We really want a strong contextual background and to ensure that we portray accurate and respectful information so it is essential that we can be in contact with someone. We have managed to find the Independent Maori Statutory board member Glenn Wilcox’s contact details so we are going to contact him.  We have continued our own research and have started audio and visual designs. 

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Week 5

12/08 - 16/08

We had our proposal on Tuesday, unfortunately I was unable to be there for it as I was unwell so Erin did the presentation. We had mostly positive feedback and some really good questions were raised from some of the third years.

We have not yet heard back from anyone we have contacted, so we have reached out to more people. I have contacted a different branch of Ngati Whatua, and we have visited the Maori faculty at AUT. Unfortunately the receptionist just told us to go to the library or to the Marae. We went to the marae and there was noone there, so instead we emailed the coordinator Michelle, and unfortunately she said that they were very busy and unable to meet with us. She did however give us the name of a lecturer who might be able to help us so we have emailed him. Despite our difficulties so far with getting information, we did find a pdf booklet online about Nga Wai o Horotiu Marae (the AUT marae) that has a lot of information in it. This will be very useful.

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Week 4

05/08 - 09/08

We have been struggling to find further information about the taniwha Horotiu, however we are still really interested in it. We have gathered a list of people we can contact to ask for some information about this, and in the mean time we have done some research on taniwhas. Here’s a brief summary :

Ngati Whatua are our local Auckland iwi so I have tried to contact them and am currently awaiting a response. I’ve also contacted the Maori faculty here at AUT, Te Ara Poutama, and one of their lecturers.

Unfortunately we were unable to present our proposal this week as I was quite sick.

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Week 3

29/07 - 02/08

We found out about the existence of the Waihorotiu Stream, a stream that previously ran down the Queen Street gully. It has since been bricked over in the form of a sewer due to the urbanisation of the city. It runs under Aotea Square and Auckland Town Hall. (See the picture below to see this.)  We also learnt about the taniwha Horotiu that resides in the Waihorotiu stream. While reading about this we discovered a controversy that occurred in 2011 regarding the AKL city councils plans to build the railway loop.

Glenn Wilcox, a member of the Maori Statutory Board was opposed to the idea of building the railway loop and pointed out that the proposed loop would trespass the territory of Horotiu. The following conversations that ensued with different council members and politicians were quite interesting, and ended up with people arguing over the existence of taniwhas. This is something we want to look into more.

We also started to look into the history of the Auckland waterways. There has been a focus on Auckland waterways in the past, I.e. loading docs documentary waihorotiu, and the Auckland Council Heritage festival 2017  with the theme Waterways to Motorways - the heritage of transport and travel in Tāmaki Makaurau. Since there has already been alot of public coverage on this topic I don’t think we will continue with this specific topic.

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Week 2

22/07 - 26/07

We have decided to design for the Auckland Live digital stage. We have chosen this because of its wider audience and it seems more of a challenge.

This week we have been thinking about the different ways we could bring some motion capture into our Studio project. Previously in Motion Capture we have focussed on body capture but this semester our focus will be facial capture. The following is a summary of what we will be learning:

“This project focuses on producing performance using the Faceware hardware and software systems, as well as retargeting that performance onto a head rig in Maya. The finished result will be the head rig animated so that it preserves all of the essential large-scale and small-scale performance details of the original human performer.”

In our MoCap lesson in Week 1 our lecturer talked to us about the Uncanny Valley. We thought this could be an interesting context  However, before we got too into it we had a small chat to Charles about it. Although he really liked the idea, he made a good point in saying that the content for Auckland Live has to be G rated. The uncanny valley is quite a creepy concept so it does not seem suitable. Charles mentioned some of the history behind Aotea Square and we realised that we weren’t actually familiar with any of it. This inspired us to go have a deeper look at the square and really assess the area. We have started to consider things like the size of the space, the different artefacts in the square (seats, trees, steps, the archway etc) and we also found that we could not see much history about the square there. This has inspired us to do some deeper research into it.