progress 9/28

For the past two weeks I have spent my time learning Unity. At first I was looking into different programs that make visual novels, so I wouldn't have to learn coding from top to bottom. I found one called Vinoma, which has been very useful so far. It works out most of the coding for you but is very simple. I know that later on I will have to start to get into it more and make some of my own changes manually. This last week I spent learning unity and how Vinoma works with it. I watched quite a few tutorial videos just to get me started, and then began making a test of my own. I came up with some sketch graphics as place holders until the real sprites are done, and I wrote up a quick script that is also not final but just for testing purpose. In my demo there is a start menu, which I have not figured out how to change yet. From there you go to the first scene where the chief greets you and tells you to go to your desk. Then the options appear on the screen where you can choose where to go. Most of it is click based action so far, but I'd like to look at what I can do once I have the mechanics of the game figured out. My next steps are to watch the more complex tutorials and start making the real sprites and script for the game.

Update 9/13

For the past two weeks I have mainly been focusing on research that I will be using for my video game. The research I have done has given me a good idea of when and where I would like to place my game, which will make it easier in the upcoming weeks to start creating artwork and game mechanics. In my research I have looked at several articles and artist to figure out what I would like to do. After looking some of my sources, I would like to place my game in a 1920-30's setting. At that time, homosexuality in America was starting to be defined, and become illegal. People could be arrested for charges such as "loitering" when truly it was that too many effeminate seeming people were hanging out in the same area. At the time however, there were a lot of homosexual artists who were able to perform because they pretended their life was just apart of the act. There are a lot of good acts, both male and female from America and Britain. For my game, I want to use real world examples, but I want to set it in a fictional place. In Papers Please the atmosphere is well presented even though it is a made up country. I don't necessarily want to be limited to just the information from the 20's and 30's, but if I mix other examples in I can make it seem natural. I also would like to use the different terminology, specifically anything that never says anything that we would refer to homosexuals as today. Throughout time different words have been used to describe gay people. (inverts, faeries, queens, pansies, ect) I feel these will help create an atmosphere, but also give people a different mentality to those who they are looking at. I tend to use examples such as Gladys Bentley and Douglas Byng for audio and visuals. As mentioned in class, I wanted to use polari in my project. While the language has been around since the 17th century, it got very popular in the 1960's as a radio joke. If I make my own world in the game I can use it without it seeming out of place. For the game itself I wanted to make the main character a cop who has to sift through different media to try and find if someone is gay or not, and present enough information to back it up. I did some research into it and Unity has a graphic novel maker which helps you put together stories and such. I feel using this will be a good start for me, since I'm very new to unity, but I can start with the basics and edit it after I've gotten more use to it.

Attached is the story bored I also came up with this week. It features some ideas for the game. I would want it done in a pixel style, so thats why everythings drawn more with squares. The first frames are the police chief who you'd be reporting to. Then the next two panels are what you would be presented with as your gear. Files for looking up codes, a phone for calling either the chief or the accused, and your badge. The next frame is your desk you will work at. The game will be in a first person mode. Next is the process where you are given a file on someone and some background information. The bottom panel shows how you would listen to the audio, and from there you can view things such as the lyrics sheet and the case information. The last panel is an interview with the person being charged where you can ask them questions or not. I want to leave it open so you can end up sending an innocent person to jail or also not send the correct guy. After I get working with unity I will know more about what is or is not possible.

Art 451 Project

For my Art 451 Project I want to make a video game. I am very interested in learning Unity and I figure since we have an entire semester to work on the project, it would be a good time for me to learn the program. Because I am taking a few gender and identity courses this semester I wanted to relate it to that. After thinking about it for a while I decided it would be interesting to make a game based off of my Gender and Identity in Music course. In this course we are looking at homosexual music and the history of it. One of the most interesting topics we will be discussing is how some music use to have code words in it to talk about LGBTQ people without others knowing. I want to make my game similar to Papers Please where you get information and you have to decode it. I will be using a mix of music, art and dialogue depending on what I find in my research. In the past I have made games using Game Maker, so I think learning unity will be a fun experience.

Jackpot Grant

Here is the link to the Jackpot Grant I wrote:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwlFOBm1GWWFdjgwSFVHSGR2LXM/view?usp=sharing

Final Paper

With art, I feel there should be craftsmanship behind it. I enjoy a piece when I can tell that a lot of time and skill was put into it. If there is a piece that is more on the minimalistic side I feel that it has to evoke thought, otherwise it comes off as lazy. In my art I try to show craftsmanship, but time constraints do show. Describing my own artistic practices can be difficult, because I feel like I have two categories which is Music and Art. I tend to blend the line between those two, and most of the time music gets more of an emphasis because it is what I know best. My own practices usually involve things I already know how to do, but when I try something new it is related to something that I have always been interested in. To put it simply, I make art that I know how to make and I make art that I like.

    Recently, I have been really into the styles of stop motion animation with 3d printed objects. I love making 3d objects because I feel like while drawing is trying to figure out what lines can create something, 3d is what shapes can create something. The work that really got me inspired to do 3d modeling with stop motion is the “Bears on Stairs” piece. It has a very whimsical nature about it, but I love how fluid the motion of the entire piece looks. After doing research, I found the artists behind it are a set of studios. DBLG and Blue Zoo made the project together, but DBLG is the one most credited for it. Their works and business model is something that I am interested in. Their piece “Bears on Stairs” was made as a fun project, to test out what they could do with animation. The fluidity of their animation is what I aimed for in my piece with the cello model. In the piece I’m working on for the final, I got the idea for 3d printing the animals because of this piece. I wanted to try and print out several models of one animal, such as they did, and use it to make a stop motion video. My favorite part about their project, something that I would like to focus more on in the future, is the fact that it was simple, and made for fun. The bear did not have any significance other than it was a model they had reused off an animal planet add, and they wanted to try something new. While I do appreciate the value of a project back with concept and thought, sometimes it is nice to do a project for fun sake and not have a deeper meaning behind it.

    This last semester has been a mix of both good and bad in regards to projects. The Heidger project was perhaps one of my weakest pieces, mostly due to time constraint and not having a clear idea of the project soon enough. My work on my cello piece really opened me up to works I would like to continue in the future. I found stop motion to be time consuming yet rewarding in the end. I also enjoyed 3d modeling and printing. I had made things in 3d modeling programs before but never had I printed. The use of color key was also a new technique to me. I have known about it for years but I did not know how video editing software actually did the technique. I found it simple yet frustrating at the same time. It made me a lot more aware of the lighting that was going on in the piece. This semester has been an exploration of new projects but I have not improved on one of the ones I wanted to work more towards. I enjoyed working in game maker, but I also really enjoy working with electronic music. While I can easily provide music for any of my projects digitally, I wish I had worked a bit more with sound this semester. I felt the grant writing was really helpful. While I myself might not continue onto doing gallery art or needing a grant for artwork, as one of the organizers of the Reno Video Game Symphony we have to write grants every year for our organization. I feel now I can help our one grant writer to make our presentations look much better.  I am glad that I got to discover my enjoyment for stop motion animation though.

    In the future there is a lot I would like to do with art. In my free time I usually draw, and I would like to continue working on that to become better. Most of my drawings are for commercial reasons or entertainment. As far as the fine art world goes, I know next semester I will still be in art classes but after college I do not think I will be continuing as much. I will keep drawing but I’m not sure if I will do much else. I hope to get a job at a company where I can work with digital art though. Someplace that uses 3d models would be fun, but I would also be interested in any sound job. If I do continue work in the fine art world, it will probably be more on the music side of things. I enjoyed making electronic music and I hope to continue making it. After seeing Rioji Ikeda in class it made me want to start doing works similar to his. I greatly enjoy the sounds he is making and I feel his visuals complement his work very nicely. I already know how he is making his electronic music, so the next step would be exploring in video editing and trying to make visuals that complement the sound. If I make any works after college it will more likely be for fun though, and not for a gallery.

Work Cited

http://dblg.co.uk/

"CR Blog." CR Blog RSS http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/bears-on-stairs

Natural Trash

For my final project in Digital Media we had to create and work and present it as a grant. I used the concept of beauty as the basis of the project. Using Nevada landscapes, I wanted to recreate the environment out of trash relating to the environment itself. My piece should bring up the question, is something still considered beautiful if it is made out of something that is not. I used different news papers from all over Northern Nevada to make the foundation for the land scape, then using magazines advertising UNR I made the branches of the tree. The tree itself was made from card board from an Amazon box. The plastic in the river was the packaging from Nevada made candy. The animals were 3d printed to help them stand out from the environment. The entire project was shot using a stop motion animation technique. The end result feels like a camera was placed in the landscape to observe nature and took several pictures, making it into one big time lapse. The sounds in the video are a recording of the Carson River. Overall the project should make the viewer think about the concept of beauty and the trash that we as Northern Nevadans leave behind.

3D Printed Stop Motion Narrative Assignment

Aging of a Musician

My piece is about all the changes in life, but the one constant of playing an instrument. The person and instrument were stop motion animation with a green screen, and the background was a mixture of footage filmed and found by me. Early on in the project I knew I wanted to print an instrument, but I did not know what kind of narrative to put to it. Originally there was going to be a busy street in the background, but I picked my story about the life cycle and decided the street didn't match as well as I had hoped. Throughout the piece three stages of the one person's life can be seen. First, child, then young adult and ending on adult. During the child portion of life the background is that of a more playful room. The character also plays a little more hastily and pauses more than in the other stages. The young adult section has a more serious room about it, but still a bit messy to show the person isn't fully grown up yet. This person plays a little more smoothly. Finally, the adult stage is in front of a concert hall, showing the goal of a musicians career. He plays a bit slower and smoother than the others do. To create the entire thing, first I did my 3d model and printed it. Then, after coming up with the concept I did the stop motion. That took a very long time to get all the pictures, but I did reuse footage. My inspiration for this partly came from La Jette, because of the romantic feel of that piece. Every time I kept trying to think of what to have the narrative be, I imagined the feeling of that and I knew I wanted to have a romantic air about it.