bctgohanneturtal

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Circuit has problems with the LED configuration

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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

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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’.

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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. 

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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.

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Signal 

Monday 3rd - Tuesday 4th June 2019

So since we weren’t able to come in to studio because it was closed. I’ve just worked on the sprites needed for the game. While the others worked on different aspects of the game, I was assigned to create the different sprites. We decided that we could really only work on one emotion timeline as we wouldn’t have enough time to finish all 7 timelines by Friday. The aim was to have a working prototype to show not a polished final product. Khai was gave a list of different things he wanted me to draw, he suggested that I created the background in a minimal 2d pixelated style but I have no experience with creating pixelated style images. I ended up doing it in a minimal illustration style as it was the easiest and most time efficient way for me to create the sprites. 

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Signal

Saturday 1st - Sunday 2nd June 2019

Creating timeline  So I made an attempt to draw a timeline for the series of events and loops that will occur in the emotion ‘anxious and acceptance’ I decided to incorporate acceptance into anxious as I was planning to link the 2 into the timeline/story. I honestly struggled with creating the timeline. The idea was the the protagonist needed to escape this stage by going through a series of events and choosing the bad decisions. The player is given the illusion that the good choices will lead them to a good pathway which leads to them escaping the ‘anxiety’ stage. However, selecting the “good” goes through a loop and takes the player back to the very start (at the protagonist bed) where a new day starts and she is given more options to choose a “bad” path or else she goes back to her bed to start a new day. Its the bad choices that will lead them to the escape pathway as this means the player is taking the risky choices and overcoming their anxiety. 

I struggled with creating the timeline as it was difficult to come up with different events that the player encounters that will allow them to make a decision so I instead wrote all my ideas down as bullet points and paragraphs rather than in the timeline

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Friday 31st May 2019

Reflection.. We’ve really struggled a lot throughout this whole project and It was mainly due to creative blocks. It was really difficult to commit to one thing, and I honestly wasn’t sure why. It might be due to the fact that we were too focused on how we were gonna execute the idea. I think it would have just been a lot easier if we just went along with one idea and LEARNT how we can execute it instead of getting so fixated on how we were gonna do it with the skills we had. Because of how far behind we are, we are now working much more compared to other groups. Honestly, at this point I’m not happy with the idea we are doing. A Scratch game isn’t really what I initially planned on doing. I was very set on an animation or interactive story with the minimal art style I thought of from the very beginning. This idea would get shut down as none of us have experience with creating an animation or an interactive story. We honestly could have just done our research but I guess that was on me too. I knew animating or rotoscoping wouldn’t be so difficult and it would be something we can all easily learn even with the time we had but I should have done my research first on what program to use to do this and then presented my idea with it so it would be more convincing. 

I also realised that I haven’t contributed as much to this project. This was also the same case with the data objects project as I only really contributed to creating the product and not so much with coming up with ideas. I think my strongest suit is the production of our idea and I haven’t really been able to show this throughout the signal project as we haven’t really had a proper idea to produce. Contribution to idea is definitely something I should work on and I need to overcome the fear of sharing my ideas. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Thursday 30th May 2019

So today we started by planning out the day and week. I created a timetable to help guide us and help us keep track of everything we need to get done each day. Hopefully, this will keep us more organised and help us manage our time and tasks. Moving on to storywriting, we all brainstormed ideas on to the google docs and picked which concept we wanted to do after. I really struggled with this as this area is probably my most weakest. I’m not very good at story writing or coming up with one. This is probably something I should work on. I think the fact that I was too scared to share ideas was what held me back from even trying to come up with something, I also felt really pressured as everyone was expected to contribute and have an idea. In the end, we decided to go with Bel’s idea about the dream loop. 

We still wanted to go with the female adolescent as the main protagonist which was the idea we had in the previous story we had written. The idea was protagonist was stuck in a dream loop where she is forced to explore her dream and go through a series of obstacles which she needed to overcome in order to escape the neverending dream. Another idea that came up during discussion was to incorporate emotions into the dream to reflect each of her emotions. Each ‘emotion’ would have different environments for the game and different kinds of obstacles to go through. We wanted to create obstacles in the game that “enables experiences to diverge from instructions or conventional status quo format”. This would go really well with our storyline as the setting would be very dream-like making it easier to create those kinds of obstacles. We split up each emotion to each member to create a timeline for. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal 

Wednesday 29th May 2019

aaaaaand.. we’re changing ideas .. again.. It’s so hard for us to stick with one concept. I think we’re being to fixated on the execution of the product. Because none of us have any experience with creating an animation or game, we keep changing our idea over and over. We are trying too hard to work around our group’s set of skills. This had been pulling us back so much. We decided to create a simple game through scratch, relying on Regy (a member who has rarely been coming to studio) to do the game mechanics and everyone else to work on creating the sprites and story for the game. So today, we mainly focused on what we needed to do to get this done as we were running out of time until the day of the showcase. We needed something to show even if it was just a low-fidelity prototype as the purpose of the showcase was to show progress and seek feedback. 

We talked to Regy to make sure he was able to work on the game mechanics from home as he was the only one with experience with using Scratch. He told us we could rely on his to work on the game as all he needed to do was put everything together in the engine while we provide all the sprites, dialogue and resources. The photo shown is what Regy sent us to show us what the game would be like. It was very low-fidelity looking and choppy but that’s just how Scratch is, we can’t really complain about it at this point as we were too far behind.

So as a group we came up with a plan. Firstly, we were gonna spend one whole day each coming up with an idea for the story and all the timelines and loopholes. We were still gonna relate it to our brief. Next, we needed to start designing the layout of the game and the aesthetic, this is where I come in, we wanted to do a simple minimal design for the game as we didnt have enough time to make it more detailed. Then we needed to identify the sprites we needed and start creating them on photoshop, meanwhile, Regy needs to start working on the layout on Scratch using the default sprites as a placeholder. 

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Tuesday 28th May 2019

So even though I wasn’t able to attend studio today, the rest of the group was able to continue with the physical prototypes for the brief. Ethan came up with a ringtoss game while Anwell came up with an impossible maze. Both games had an objective that was impossible or difficult to complete. The aim for the player is to find some sort of way to complete the game.

Ringtoss The goal of this game is to throw the ring and get at least 3 pegs inside of the hoop. This was really difficult as the rings were very small but it is possible to get 3 pegs in a hoop. It’s just up to the user to figure out how they were going to do it. The hoop was actually made with a string that was tied together to create 2 hoops that are attached together.  When this was tested on me I actually separated the 2 hoops which creates 2 hoops that were attached to eachother. This would have worked as it would be able to get 3 pegs in if there were 2 hoops.  The actual simple solution was to pull on the string that was in the hoops and it would untie it creating one big hoop.

Maze Anwell designed an impossible maze that had all the exits blocked off. The aim was to allow the player to find a way out even with the exits blocked. The maze was possible to complete. The idea was that the really simple way out would be at the back of the maze. The start and exit were connected through another way behind the paper.  

[bctgohanneturtal]

Signal

Monday 27th May

I came in quite late to studio today and by the time I came in, the group had decided to alter our brief a bit. This was quite a shock to me as we already struggled so much because we couldn’t make up our minds on what we wanted to do for the project. I thought that this change would just cause more confused and pull us back further behind however, after discussing with the group I realise that this might actually make things easier for us. 

Our new brief  “Create a task that enables experiences to diverge from instructions or conventional status quo format in order for users to complete it.”

This new brief was created by anwell as one of the prototypes he was working on was related to it. We can incorporate this brief into our animation and story as well as it quite similar to the previous we based our story on. So while me Khai and Ethan worked on altering the story slightly, Anwell and Bel continued to work on more physical prototypes for the brief.