Evaluation

Evaluation
Following up from my original rationale I decided I would take up the subject of advertising undertaking to school leavers.. As I want to specialize in character design I wanted to continue focusing around this area. My very first ideas for this task were to make the job out to be a mockery. From the group ideas at the beginning of the unit I was set on pursuing the zombie idea. Here I thought i could have some fun drawing up the characters and be as creative as I wanted. I first drew up a storyboard to show what the personalities of the characters were going to be like. After sketching a few images, I then began to research more into the actual job looking at the different types of work an undertaker does. To gain further detailed research I was advised to ring up arrange an interview with an actual funeral director. This proved to be more difficult than I thought as a lot of the companies were family owned businesses and were constantly busy. I also felt quite aw quad and insensitive when talking to them as they were busy taking care of families deceased member. So I decided to ring up a bigger corporation. Finally I was able to have an over the phone interview where I got my questions answered. After acknowledging more information about the job and what person you have to be, I decided to drop my original zombie idea as it did’t feel that it would fit well with the characters I wanted to design. I quickly drew up another storyboard where I would used the style of a black and white 1950’s announcement video to show the personality of the characters. I decided that I was going to continue using the designing undertaker’s character but instead of continuing with the zombie idea I was going to replace it with a corpse character. This way any drawings I designed before I could still use them as further development. when it came to designing the both characters i focused mainly around the head area as I feel that more personality is shown through the face. I drew them to scale making sure that the lining on both views of the drawing were equal. Like the usual process I added colour to them on photo shop which I always enjoy. This is mainly because I like to see my drawings at their best. Here I created two versions of the characters where one in colour and the other is tinted black and white. I used this effect to make them look old and more in the style of my storyboard. I especially looked forward to the next stage when it came to importing these designs into Maya which is a program I am quite interested. Although it was not long until I realized how difficult and time consuming it is modelling a character truly was. I was able to shape a basic looking head of the undertaker where had to continuously alter the vertex points to make the cheekbones and jaw structure. I also halved the model so there were less points to move about. As I have not really attempted anything this big in Maya I soon felt out of my league and got stuck at times. Finding it frustrating instead of keeping it simple I kept creating more vertex points and ended up getting to complicated and mixed up. Instead I was advised to build my characters as an avatar in second life where I felt more familiar. Although I have never built a customized avatar properly which was also new to me. After looking at a few tutorials it seemed to be quite basic to understand. This was to simply add my original character designs over the second life templates, where they had to fit perfectly. This was a trail and error process and I had to alter a lot from my original designs. mainly because the scale I drew them at was either too big or small. Each part of the clothing had to attach in line with each other. Eventually I managed to fit everything together quite accurately but because the shape of my actual characters the clothing looked a little distorted and stretched. Never the less I found the process very interesting to do and would like to continue creating second life characters maybe as another project. I continued to work mainly in second life throughout the rest of the brief. where i created my own funeral home including an objects that relate to an undertakers job. These included coffins, gravestones etc. i also created my own hearse as it features as a main prop in my storyboard. to make the hearse more eye catching i tried to make it similar to the hot rod hearse from the programme the Munsters. As i was a bit limited with the textures, the overall model looked a little plain looking, making it very similar to a toy car. overall i still think it looked similar to a toy as i was a bit limited with textures the colours came off a little plain looking. To make the place look a little more professional work place i included tables and filing cabinets. What really worried me at this late stage was that i found out that I had to document the models and characters on second life as a moving image. With the lack of movements and gestures I was unsure what to actually film and with the mixed advice I started to worry. Eventually I decided to just take screen shots of the scenes which featured in my storyboard making them as a slider. To refer back to my original style of how i wanted my storyboard i made to versions. one slide is with colours from second life and the other has a tint over the top so it creates a 1950's feel to it. although i came across many complications over this unit i would still like to continue doing this sort of work in the future. I especially like to design more characters using second life but i will also like to learn more about the gestures and how i can create them.