Ed: Post Mortem

In this document I will be discussing my final major project, the problems and successes that we faced and whether or not I feel we achieved what we set out to do. I would also like to discuss the ways in which I will use this project in the future.

For my final major project I worked together with Lucy Freeman to produce a concept art book based around the nineteen twenty-seven film Metropolis from Fritz Lang. We aimed to produce a seventy five page book that displayed a range of subjects as we redesigned the films characters and settings. We also hoped to display our process and how we thought through our designs, with a focus to its eventual use in a video game context.

Our research had us looking at historical mining works and modern cities and constructions; we wanted to show the clear divide between the two halves of the population.

The duration of this project was eighteen weeks once we had received an extension at the beginning of the Easter Holidays.

The primary structure of our project was one of 'mini' projects; we would pick a subject and work on it for either a week or two weeks in length each time. In this way we would complete a chapter for the book with each project. My aim was to complete a chapter after each two week time slot giving me time around this to produce other content for the book such as covers and prologues and also to format it for printing, as well as provide us with two weeks at the end before hand in which would allow us to send off the book for printing and have it arrive in good time.

Though this structure didn't exactly go as planned, as certain projects took less time or more, however with a little time management it was easy to juggle the times around and we were also provided with a three week extension before the Easter holidays which not only allowed us some breathing space but also allowed me to work on some of my stretch goals that would not have been completed otherwise.

We were very successful, Not only did we meet our target of seventy five pages, we exceeded it by a wide margin. We had actually produced nearly one hundred pages of work each by the time we began to edit the book down into the finished one hundred and thirty six pages you will see when we hand it in.

My personal successes I think are the techniques I used to produce so much of the work here. I married familiar design techniques with newer ones and I used skills like white boxing and paint over to a scale that I had never used before. Often the speed at which I was able to produce my designs was greater than I expected.

I am particularly proud of our consistency in style, colour and motif. We put a lot of effort into not only establishing a recognisable and consistent visual style to the city and its people but also enriching it with meanings, reasoning and the feelings of the people who would have created this culture. It was an interesting experience to think not just about my own process, but of the process of the fictional people who would have constructed the society and buildings that I was designing.

Another success was being able to fill one of my personal stretch goals; as a proof of concept and as a piece to show at the degree show I was able to sew a set of clothing for display. I chose to replicate the three main garments from Freder's outfit.

We were in fact very fortunate that we didn't have many setbacks. The printing process of the final book went very smoothly and we were able to work steadily and efficiently throughout the project. Where we did see setbacks they were often beyond our control or easily managed.

Our first major setback was in the printing of the first, tester book. We sent off to different companies to get to examples of what we could get printed however we had some trouble with transferring money to one of the companies. This was a setback that took nearly a week to fix with several calls to banks, and problems with banking servers. In the end we did not use this company; though once the money had been sent through we received the book quickly the print copy was lower quality than the company we would eventually use, with many printing errors.

We had minor issues with software as we came to format our pages. We started out using Microsoft publisher, believing that it was a powerful enough program to handle the needs we had when it came to showcasing a large amount of text and high resolution images. It quickly became clear however that our work was overtaxing the software which would often fail to display the images often in the software itself but also when the document which was visibly fine was exported as a PDF file where the images would be displayed as a large red 'x' or not at all. We solved this problem by switching software. Originally we had not wanted to use Blurb's downloadable book creating software because of some of it's odd image positioning qualities and the limitations on installing software on the university computers. However this is the software that we would eventually use and once we had gotten used to the different processes involved compared to publisher's software we were able to produce the book at the same speed we had hoped to achieve with publisher, whilst eliminating the problem with images. Blurb's bookwright program was more than capable of hosting the large, high definition images we had produced.

Our main issues were found in visualizing scale when it came to deciding what to concept. Often our settings were just part of vast areas and it was easy to get a little lost and legged up in concepting everything and often would find that there was a subtle sense of wrongness in the scale of our images. We found that a great way to help ourselves get over this was to draw the whole area, rather than trying to visualise a medium area with small concepts in it; by establishing a rough overarching scene with quick sketches we could give ourselves a sense of scale that seemed more correct when it came to designing medium or small areas within the whole.

Moving on into the degree show preparation work we are hoping to create different ways for the artwork to be viewed. We're also looking to get some large prints of the artwork displayed during the degree show.

We didn't have many project changes. We rearranged the books layout slightly and changed the areas that we intended to work on but other than that we stuck closely to our final brief.

Looking back on this project The things I would do differently are mainly to do with how the book was produced. At the beginning of the project we made templates to add our images into. We didn't stick to these though as we were creating our images and we found that it produced a little extra work at the end of the project. The first thing I would do differently is adhere to these templates more closely. I would also start putting the work into them sooner. It got quickly tiring to do it all at once and I believe that working on it steadily throughout the project as we'd originally intended would expedite the process and prevent the tedium we felt as we did it in one large chunk.

Personally there are elements I would have liked to push further, I realised too late into the project that the female characters heavily outnumbered the men and it was too late to change it, doing this project again I would have liked to have a better and more even range of genders in the characters.

In conclusion I believe that this project has been a huge success we have excelled in what we wanted to achieve and we have exceeded our goals and even our expectations to produce a body of work that we can only be immensely proud of. We've produced a professional looking piece of work that has translated exceptionally into the format that we wished to show it in and we've managed to supplement our work with other varied mediums to demonstrate a wide range of skills, disciplines and interests.

Looking to the future I intend to use this project online and in person as a portfolio of my work and design process and I also intend to build on it for other portfolio pieces, branching out in my own time to display 3D modelling skills and engine skills as I create the environments and characters.