#bctsignal

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Tuesday 18th June 2019

Reflection

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Outside The Box - Process Journal

This project was a collaboration between -  - Gohanne Turtal - Khai Gan - Anwell Siena - Belshazzar Mallari - Ethan Lin

Final Animation -

Process Blogs -

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/184864790528/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/184990331468/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/184990351038/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/184990397003/signal-wednesday-15th-may-2019-establishing-topic

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185050965518/signal-thursday-16th-may-2019-identifying-our

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185050972138/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185050985498/signal-monday-20th-may-2019-changing-our-idea

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185051015093/signal-monday-20th-may-2019-continuing-from-the

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185051042358/signal-tuesday-21st-may-2019-developing-on-the-art

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689179013/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689191793/signal-thursday-23rd-may-2019-so-after-actually

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689195428/signal-friday-24th-may-2019-continuing-on-from

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689213103/signal-tuesday-28th-may-2019-so-even-though-i

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689200943/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689217508/signal-wednesday-29th-may-2019-aaaaaand-were

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689223608/signal-thursday-30th-may-2019-so-today-we-started

Mid project reflection -https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689225583/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689228708/signal-saturday-1st-sunday-2nd-june-2019

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689233043/signal-monday-3rd-tuesday-4th-june-2019-so

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689237168/signal-wednesday-5th-june-2019-the-showcase-is

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689244938/signal-thursday-6th-june-2019-we-spent-majority-of

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689249723/signal-friday-7th-june-2019-the-group-spent-today

Showcase reflection -  https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689252258/signal

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689257668/signal-monday-10th-wednesday-12th-june-2019

https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185689260968/signal-thursday-13th-monday-17th-june-2019

Reflection -  https://bctgohanneturtal.tumblr.com/post/185926479498/signal-tuesday-18th-june-2019-reflection

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Thursday 13th - Monday 17th June 2019 

I spent the rest of the week working on the rotoscoping the edited footage we had. We split the edited videos into different parts this is just to keep the file from getting too big and lagging on Photoshop. I honestly did not do research on how to rotoscope before I started this. It seemed fairly straight forward to me, just trace over the video frame by frame (we decided animate at a low frame rate as we didn’t have enough time to do it at a higher rate). I did however watch a video on the principles of animating -- (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4) and learnt quite a few things that helped with process. I made sure to animate the parts with more motion and faster motion at a higher frame rate compared to parts with less motion. This was to make sure it was capturing the transition from each movement and keeping the animation less choppy. I made sure to keep the art style the same throughout to keep it more unified. We made the style simple with very little detail, mainly just capturing the subject’s figure. 

What I noticed during rotoscoping was that the lighting was way too dark which made the video quality bad. It also didn’t help that the subject was wearing all black. This made it very hard to make up the posture of the subject especially when pausing the video at parts where there are a lot of fast movements as it would cause the video to be blurry. We also though that it was a good idea to edit the video and make it low fps, this actually did not help and it anything made it more difficult to rotoscope over. Next time it definitely worth taking some time to sort out small details like these as it would help make the process a lot easier. The bad lighting made it hard to keep track of which leg was going forward during the running part. This made the overall running animation very sloppy and not flow very well, the fact that I wasn’t choosing the correct frame to trace over also made the animation worse. 

I mainly worked on the rotoscoping and tracing over the video footage with a little help from Bel doing one of the scenes. Khai’s role was to add in the additional effects.

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal 

Monday 10th - Wednesday 12th June 2019

Since the whole Scratch game clearly wasn’t gonna work out, we quickly whipped up a new idea that we wanted to fully commit to for the rest of the week. We plan on creating a rotoscope animation with a similar storyline to the Scratch game. The animation will revolve around a female protagonist that’s trying to escape a dream, she goes through a series of obstacles which she overcomes by “thinking outside the box” and coming up with creative solutions for the problem. Khai quickly drew a storyboard for the animation we will be working on, he created a total of 6 different scenes, each having it’s own theme and obstacle. 

We then went ahead and started recording the video to rotoscope. Patricia kindly offered to be the actor/subject for our video, this. Recording is a bit difficult especially since we don’t have props. All the extra effects needed to be added in during the rotoscoping process. Once all the recording has been done, Anwell had to start editing the footage. The video needs to be edited before we start rotoscoping over them since there’s gonna be a lot of teleporting and the subject shifting places. After all the footage has been edited, I began rotoscoping over the image using Photoshop with the ‘motion’ workspace mode. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Friday 7th June 2019

Showcase Reflection Although I wasn’t really expecting much from the showcase, I was quite disappointed with how it went. We didn’t really have much to show since we didn’t even have a functioning game to show. I’ve noticed throughout the night, most the booths that attract the most attention are the interactive ones. Our booth didn’t attract as much attention as the other ones did because there wasn’t really much for us to show and nothing for the viewers to interact with. I feel like we could have improved on our setup by keeping it more simple and less busy. We had so many things showing on the wall that it was way too busy and it was hard to tell what the main focus was. I think we could have taken some of the notes down and only kept the main and important ones. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Friday 7th June 2019

The group spent today to make final touches to our illustrations and finish the setup for the showcase. Each member brought things for the setup to make it more ‘homely and cosy’. We also decided to show our process throughout this project by pasting sketches and notes on the wall. This helps make the whole area look a lot more like a ‘study space’.

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Thursday 6th June 2019

We spent majority of today finishing the game. While the others worked on creating more physical prototypes, me, Khai and Regy spent the whole day completing the game. Regy worked on the game mechanics and I continued to finish the sprites Khai asked me to do. After I’ve completed the sprites, I gave them all to Regy to add into Scratch. I was quite excited to see how it would look once everything has come together as I think the illustrations turned out well even though they were very rushed and minimal. However, It was quite disappointing to see how badly it turned out after it was put into Scratch, the illustrations were very pixelated and all the details in the illustrations (especially the characters) were barely recognisable. I was not aware that Scratch was going to decrease the quality of the sprites that are inserted. Regy did not inform me of this, I would have changed the illustrations and made them more cartoony with less details and thicker outlines. At this point it was already too late to change anything so I decided to just place the character sprites into my background illustrations to save as a whole image. Because of this, we are only gonna be able to present images of what the game could have looked instead of a low-fidelity working game. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Wednesday 5th June 2019

The showcase is coming up soon and we’re still quite far behind, Khai suggested that we pull out from the showcase and focus on completing what we are currently working on. We approached to Charles to have a discussion about this decision. He gave us a little pep talk about how we shouldn’t pull out and use the showcase as an opportunity to display our process, discuss it and seek feedback. The purpose wasn’t to show a polished final product so he pushed us into doing the showcase anyway.

We spend today planning and preparing for our showcase setup. The way we imagined our setup to be was a cosy bedroom study area. We wanted it to be this way because we wanted the player to be immersed in the experience when playing our game. The setup is supposed to replicate the game’s environment as the setting of the game is the protagonist’s bedroom.