Project #4 Complete! Sort of...

I finished project four.  Didn't come out as epic as I hoped it would, probably because my lack of time and experience with the software.  But anyway, here it is.  The quality on Youtube isn't all that great though.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au1PmCdMPDY

I didn't bother with changing the initial title of the piece, the actual title is supposed to be Manasurge Prologue Pt. I

Project #4: Writing the story

I'm still in the process of writing the story for my narrative project.  I've already picked out the song to go with the video, which will be a combination of a sort of comic book frame narrative with some simple animation to go with it.  It's the story of a fictitious future in which someone triggers an apacalyptic disaster that breeds countless monsters, and after surviving that, we have to go to war against the evil archfiends that were born from this.  The story doesn't go into detail with plot, characters, etc., it's more of a summary of events.  Actually, it's the prologue of a video-game story that I'm developing.  I've written up a quick and dirty outline of the narrative just to help me organize my thoughts and get an idea of what kind of pictures and dialogue I'll need for this project.

Project #3 Endgame

Because I went back and started over, it took me longer than expected to finish.  But it's done, and here are the pictures I used for research.



I did make an effort to do my own background for this project, but it didn't work out so well.  As for the characters, I chose to copy the art style of Chrono trigger to get more detail into the sprites rather than using the even more distorted sprites of FF6.  This is the final result.

The thing about video games these days is, they're trying to get further and further away from the digital aesthetic, trying to make everything look as real as possible.  So I decided to take stuff from a game and instead of making the graphics better, making them lower quality instead.  Great graphics are nice and all, but they're not all-important.  So I took characters from Final Fantasy 7 and gave them a 16-bit makeover, making them look more similar to characters from FF6 or Chrono Trigger to give them a really retro feel.  There is a definite contrast here, much more so than there would've been if I had turned a different game into something retro.  Other ideas I had included doing something with Mass Effect, turning Devil May Cry into a side-scrolling brawler, and giving a Wolfenstein 3D look to a scene from Bioshock, but I settled on this since it's part of a much longer series spanning so many console generations.

Project #3 Sum of its parts

Okay, so I've made some of the characters for the FF7 scene that I'm retro-making for this project.  Sadly, they resemble the kind of crappy animation from cartoons typical of Adult Swim.  So I'm redesigning them to look even more digitized than before.  For starters, I'm using straight lines and perfect shapes wherever possible.  I'm also taking advantage of Photoshop's resources to make individual parts to be saved on their own and used with each other to make different pictures.  For example, I've designed a basic head that, when some minor details are altered, can be used for multiple characters so long as they're still human (there are two characters in the game that aren't human that this wouldn't work for, but I'm not using them anyway.)  Furthermore, each character will have a separate file with all of his/her individual parts saved separately in addition to the completed drawing.  It is an amazing thing, this Photoshop, for even those of us that are stuck doing old-fashioned frame-by-frame animation can still produce something in far less time than it would take for the process of using hand drawn frames to animate.  I'll have one still-scene prepared for Friday's class, and the animation and sound will come in the final project.

Project #3: Going back...

I've decided to take something from a popular video-game and redesign it with older graphics.  It is important to choose a game from a series for comparison purposes, and as such it is imperative that this franchise has been around for two or more console generations.  So I picked Final Fantasy VII, with the intention of redrawing the characters to resemble 16-bit sprites from the SNES as opposed to their original 32-bit forms.  FF7's predecessor, FF6, was on the SNES, so I feel that this conversion will serve to show how significant a difference the graphics made from one console to the next.

Project #2: The Clique Bears

This is my twisted parody of the Care Bears.  The idea behind it is that we all have to watch shows when we're little kids that try to teach us values that society deems necessary for us to believe in, and what happens when we get older?  We turn into people like this.  There are five highschool clique stereotypes here, from left to right: emo bear, nerd bear, jock bear, cheer bear, and my personal favorite, the punk bear.  But I find that the stereotypes are just as shallow as the childhood values that society tries to program into us.  So it may be a good thing that we left behind those childhood lessons because the world is too complex to live by such simple ideals.

Project #2 The final pieces

The following are pictures that I used to finish off the project.

Next, we have the three bears that I created and the background I selected, which is my favorite spot at my previous college.  The bears are supposed to be in highschool, but I don't think it makes a difference.