Month: November 2017

Project 4- Sounds of Singapore

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Our group consists of Jannah, Nisa and I.

Our theme was Sounds of Asia. But after the presentation, we realized that it was actually sounds of Singapore since we are focusing on the 4 main ethnicity here; Malay, Indian, Chinese and Caucasians. Jannah and Nisa came out with the concept and we each added on to improve it.

The main objective of our project was to guide our viewers to the times during early Singapore days where trading was at its peak. Since Singapore was located in the middle of Southeast Asia, it was the most convenient for people from other countries to come and trade things with other people or with us. Hence, we’ve decided to use this installation to have an educational purpose to educate Singaporean on the history of trading as most of us are clueless about this topic.

We’ve decided to build the installation at the ADM pond. Since water is surrounding the installation, we’ve decided to make use of it. Hence, we’ve used ships from different races to be played on the screens within our artifact. Why ships? Back then, cars and aeroplanes were not as commonly used compared to ships and boat. Ships were considered the mostly convenient way of travelling as they can carry a huge load. The only downside is that it’ll take weeks or months to reach their destination. The main purpose of the screen was to make it as immersive as possible for our audience when they are viewing it. The room will be dark and the only light source will be coming from the screen itself.

Nisa has created a short stop-motion on how the animation will most likely look and sound like.

Link: Sounds of Singapore

She has used music from the 4 different race to enhance the video. Some of the musical instruments used can be found below.

European instrument

Chinese instrument

Malay instruments

Indian instruments

When Nisa created the sound, I focused more on creating and modeling the visual outcome of our final installation. I’ve used the Maya 2017 software to create this setting. It was then rendered on Arnold.

For the final piece, we’ve decided to use the concept of the Orang Laut type of old jetty. Hence, why the jetty looks very Malay instead of it being a general and neutral rooftop. Trading started since the Orang Laut days. The rooftop was made to look very traditional and giving off the kampong vibes. Fences can be seen to be surrounding it as in the old days, these were used to make the bridge or jetty strong and it was also used as a barricade to prevent people from falling into the see.

 

 

 

Moving inside, bowls can be seen hanging from the ceiling.These bowls are hung to be interacted with. How do we know which are interactive and which are not? The bowls that are hung to a reachable length are the ones that needs to be interacted with. There are 4 main ones which are of reachable length. These 4 bowls are off the 4 different cultures and race in Singapore as mentioned earlier.

There will be a motion sensor attached to the bowl so that it will activate the music and the “museum guide” will start explaining what the touched bowl represents and also the story of their trading back in the past.

 

As you can see in the image below, there seems to be a button located in the middle of the walkway. Our idea was to use it to allow audience to come and press it as natural human instinct are always attracted to buttons. Hence, some will be curious and press it. The button uses a 555 timer which can only be activated once for a certain amount of time. This prevents people from pressing it excessively. The main purpose of the button was to activate the whole set display and wow-ing the audience.

However, after getting comments back from Michael and the class, it seems like it was better to use motion sensor instead of a button as people would not be attracted to an empty room (before the lights are turned on). Adding on to the things we could improve, Michael suggested that we could make the exhibition slanted and hidden so that people would be more curious and enter the place. Because for now, our installation is too bare open and people would just take a peek inside and walk off when it is not interesting.

 

All in all, I’ve enjoyed doing this project as I can finally put my skills to a test. It was enjoyable as we learn about our history along the way while we were researching. And also, we get to experiment and visualize easily how we want our end product to be with the help of this software.

Project 2 – Text and Image (Advertisement) FINAL

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The food object I took was the San Semo Spaghetti.

Since it was a wholemeal product, I’ve decided to focus on the healthy part of it. Wholemeal food were created to make you feel fuller since you have a longer time taken to chew your food. My idea was to show that instead of eating fast food and oily food, why not eat a wholemeal spaghetti and shred those fats. Hence, the shredder. A big blob of junk food can be seen going through the shredder and coming out as the wholemeal spaghetti. My main intention was to show the shredding part of the food since I wanted to emphasize on shredding of “fats”. However, my lecturer and peeps commented about how it seems like I’m converting the junk food into the spaghetti which basically shows that the spaghetti has the same amount of unhealthiness as the junk food that was being shredded. And also, I should’ve changed the “shred those fats” font colour to white instead of black. So that it will be easier when seen from afar.

I’ve realized my mistakes and will improve in the future.

But overall, I do enjoy this project as it helps me train my image compositing. I’ve never done it before as I was an animation student and everything was made from scratch. So, the use of editing images on Photoshop can be quite new to me.

Ego in different settings (FINAL PROJECT)

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Finally we’re done with our final project for 2D Foundation!

For this final project, we were required to come up with images (made from any medium) and turn it into an equation.

The equation is:

Me + Setting = different me

I’ve decided to make use of the skills I have learnt and decided to use digital painting as a choice of my medium. I was contemplating between realism and cartoon for my panels. I have listed down the pros and cons for each type of digital painting and after looking through the points taken down, doing a cartoon-styled drawing was more convenient and time saving for me. The images below are the 2 different kinds of digital drawings I did during my days in Singapore Polytechnic Digital Animation.

 

Cartoon Character Design

Realistic Drawing

I’ve no specific artist reference when it comes to drawing of my characters. Most of them are of my own imagination and art style. To start of the project, I came up with a few possible equations and showed it to Mimi. She approved of my ideas and gave me tips on how I can enhance and make the ideas better. Changes were made and then carried out.

I started out with the sketching of the designs.

Then proceeded to shading and filling in the details

Colour added

My way of drawing digital images always begins from gray scale. I sketch out the outline before adding in the details. The pros of using gray scale first instead of adding in the colour straightaway is that I can change the colours easily without ruining the original image. An overlay of colour were added in and can be changed to fit to our preferences easily.

Now I will proceed to explaining the different colour used for each panel.

Initially, I tried using triad as my main colour harmony but realised that I was pretty much limited as the adobe kuler was fixed to 3 equal parts and the group of colour chose are repeated. I then changed to complimentary and was quite pleased with the colour group as there are more group variety I’ve decided to use complimentary colours for one row and split them up amongst the 3 panels and focused on monochromatic.

Refer to image above:

This is chatty me. As most of my friends know, I’m quite talkative and open. But if I am on a date, I am usually quite timid and quiet. I get very shy as I always try to make a good impression of myself to my dates. But if we’ve already passed the awkward and shy stage, I will unleash my makcik mouth and talk non-stop. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a boyfriend.

I’ve used yellow to represent my confidence and boost of happiness in the first panel. Purple represents luxury and high-end which shows the dating place. And pink was used to represent love/shyness.

Refer to image above:

Turning 21 years old, I’m already considered a full fledged adult. However, since I am also the youngest in my family, I can still be seen as a baby in my family member’s eyes. Quite restricted to doing things but being pampered like there’s no tomorrow. Heh.

Green represents the refreshness of me turning 21. Brown/orange was used to show the warmth and protection of my family members. Blue was used to represent the baby-ness in me.

Refer to image above:

I can sometimes be awkward to begin with. I may be an extrovert but I do have my introvert moments too. To be honest, it can be quite a pain to attend a wedding. Not because of the food or whatso but because of the never-seen-before relatives who kept asking personal questions over and over again. Umm, do I know you?

Turquoise is a mixture of green and blue. Blue was used to represent the coldness in me when I attend weddings. Green was used to represent me being enervated. I was drained from talking to people I’ve rarely/never met before. Purple was used to represent weddings as most Malay weddings can be quite posh and atas. Green was used to represent the colour of the turtle. It shows the awkwardness in me too.

 

Refer to image above:

Who doesn’t love food? I love eating to be honest. Days when I’m carefree with no work or commitments, I will always be committing myself to food. Due to this, I’ve gained about a good 2-3kg of fats. However, it’s a horrible thing to do especially when I’m competing in an upcoming competition. I have to be between the range of 53-54kg in order to compete for my weight class. In the end, I make myself suffer as I always have to go on a strict diet and limit myself to food which makes me happy. All this for a competition. Why.

The colour red was used in the first image as it enhances the appetite. This represents the food surrounding me and how much I love to eat. I drew myself to be a little fatter too. Yellow was used in the second panel as it shows stress and anxiety. That is the exact feeling that I feel before entering the arena. Green was used to show the disgust of me having to each vegetables and fruits everyday to keep myself in weight.

 

OVERALL REFLECTION:

I’ve enjoyed myself while doing this project as I can finally put my skills to full use. However, the choosing of colours can be quite tricky as I’ve used different monotonous colour for each panel and it doesn’t look like a whole image equation. Each row looks like they’re more towards individualism compared to a group on its own.  Mimi pointed out that the colours used can be too jarring and don’t really compliment each other well. That’s one of the things that I could improve on. Maybe I could use split complimentary colours instead.

 

To Mimi;

Thank you for being such a great lecturer and adviser during the duration of our 2D Foundation module! 😀

Goldberg Kinetic Structure: Research

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My chosen scene is from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, the part when the trios (Harry, Ron and Hermione) met for the first time every on the train towards Hogwarts.

The idea I came up was to create a kinetic structure that plays with sound instead. The actions will happen in a box covered with a black cloth (maybe? Depends if I can get a black cloth) and let the audience HEAR my artwork instead of seeing.

My artist reference is Andrew Huang from YouTube. He plays around with sounds and music by using everyday objects, food and other things. It’s very interesting as to how he can make music with just an everyday object we use everyday.

My only concern now is how I need to put it all together and create different sounds at different timings.

If you want to find out more about Andrew Huang, you can access to his YouTube page at the link below!

Andrew Huang YouTube Channel