MINOR PROJECT

01.09.2022 -  05.12.2022
Haura Laiqa Naznin / 0345050 / Bachelors of Design in Creative Media
Minor Project

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WEEK 1:

During this week we were given the briefing about what Minor Project would be about. As I learned, we get to choose out of a variety of different projects to undertake for the rest of the semester. There was some where we collaborated with the business school and some where we worked with studios outside of the school. I decided to pick the Sang Guardians as it was the most interesting to me and focused on what my strength was - character design and concept art.

WEEK 2:

To further help us with starting our project, we learnt in depth to what design truly is. Design - as was explained - is a symbol or creation with the purpose of solving a problem. This is where we also began working more on the Miro board that compiled all our initial ideas and research.

WEEK 3:

We learned about empathy maps and how this would help advance us to reach our goal for the project. Personas were created - which are identities that were the target audience of our project. In a meeting with the studio we collaborated with - R&D Studios - they gave us a list of side characters to design. With these side characters we thought to use them to create the user personas needed.

WEEK 4:

As the weeks continued on Mr. Mike now began to guide us as we continued to work on the project. The next step was to create a survey in order to gather feedback on our ideas to further aid us with the designs of the side characters.

This is where we planned all of our potential questions for the survey. We made sure to cover most aspects such as local and western animated series, the environment, school experiences, as well as character design.

Initially, our questions were not specific enough as Mr. Mike said for feedback. After making the corrections, here are some screenshots of the final version of the survey.

There were 6 categories in total, each focusing on specific topics to help us with the side character designs.

WEEK 5:

Once the survey was complete and we sent it out, we received about 43 responses in total. Soon enough we would need to analyse it, but first we had to go on to interview the target audience for even deeper insight. We decided to interview 3 people in total - a 6/7 year old, 9/10 year old and a teacher.

As shown in the same screenshot previously, the interview questions were also prepared in advance. We initially wanted to ask a wheelchair bound student but could not find one in time unfortunately.

I took the chance to find a 6-7 year old to interview and managed to get permission from my friend who had a 6 year old younger sister named Sheikha. I was to interview her during the weekend. My other group mates found interviewees aged 9-10, one being Zetie's niece and the other being Mr. Mike's son.

What I found out through the interviews was that a 6 year old was quite challenging to ask questions to. It could be due to her personality, but from what I experienced she was far too shy and seem very uninterested in answering any of the questions. From this, my group and I concluded that 6-7 year olds was too young of an age group to target for Sang Guardians.

As for the other interviewees, Mr. Mike's son also did not seem too interested in questions regarding Sang Guardian's themes. Zetie's niece was a little bit more involved compared to him. We decided to try and find at least one 12-14 year old and through another friend, I managed to find us one of 13 years of age. They were the perfect candidate for this and gave us insightful answers.

WEEK 6:

We moved on to analysing the data that we obtained from the survey. There was a lot of information to go through and we summarised everything on our Miro board.

Afterwards, we attempted to write up a problem statement for us based on these results as well as the responses from the interviewees. It took a bit but Mr. Mike helped us to reach to a conclusion eventually.

This was the final decision on what our problem statement was going to be. Once this was settled on, the 'How Might We' questions were next to tackle. Those were also a bit difficult to figure out but we managed to find 3 questions that fit our goal.

This is what we ended up with and I believe it fit our main goal perfectly.

WEEK 7-8:

Our group continued to input everything we compiled prior into presentation slides as a proposal for R&D Studios. This lasted up until week 8, which was independent learning week hence there were no classes so it gave us more time to polish it up for us to present.

Initially, we put everything into the slides, using blocks of texts to explain every little detail. It got to the point of reaching 100 slides! Mr. Mike was flabbergasted and told us we should condense it as much as possible and make the information more concise, since R&D Studios would feel too overwhelmed with all the information. We didn't even consider that at first, so we quickly tried to amend these mistakes before our presentation to R&D Studios.

Some screenshots from our slides.

I had started with designing the hot jock and teacher by this point to put into our slides as an introduction to what sort of designs were going to be made for R&D.

Both characters were inspired by the results of our survey when the respondents were asked about certain character designs. The jock was partially inspired by boys I knew in real life who were my friends, because I knew some girls found them attractive. I just simply put that aspect onto a tween character with my own flair to it. The teacher was an attempt at making a soft looking character at first, but I realized she didn't quite fit any of the actual side characters that R&D gave to us so I amended that later on.

WEEK 9-10:

As I begun starting the character sketches, our group was also tasked to create a master moodboard full of art styles and color palettes that we wanted to follow for our respective designs. It was to help us keep track of each other's work and to keep it consistent as well, so none of us could stray too far from what we wanted the end result to look like.

This is just a snippet of what our (very large) moodboard looked like. Everything even down to textures was considered, after seeing concept art done by R&D, it appeared they had some sort of brush-like texture to their artworks.

Not only did we work on the moodboard, but we created a gantt chart as well which would be a timeline of all our individual tasks that we needed to complete over the next few weeks.

Here's just one list of things that our group and I had to do. My list in particular was used for basically every other character we had chosen, so it was a very in-depth and detailed agenda list. I liked that we had to use this though as it really helped me keep track of what exactly I was doing and not to overwhelm myself with what was needed.

I made more progress to do with the characters and sketched out 3 more - the jock girl, goth girl and coach named Cikgu Nas. The jock girl had to wear sporty clothing of course, she was probably seen in it more compared to her actual school uniform. Since she was a runner, I thought adding bandages to her knees would fit, implying that she fell over sometimes during her runs and scratching her knees. As for the goth girl, I came up with the idea of a hijabi that used her headscarf as a way to reflect her goth interest. It was a concept I found funny and interesting, since hijabi girls typically don't have goth styles. The coach was described as a really friendly man, so I wanted to convey that through his facial expression and body language.

WEEK 11:

After receiving feedback regarding my designs, I sketched up something new for each of the previously mentioned characters. I think Mr. Mike mistook the coach to be the jock boy, because he said he looked too old and needed to look younger with different proportions. He approved the girls' designs however. I added fishnet gloves for the goth as I improved her and shortened her dress to show her shoes, this was to match the main characters as I thought it might be strange that she had a longer dress. I didn't want to overdo her design because the school might restrict her, plus if it got too busy it would be difficult to animate!

These are the finalized coloured version for each. Choosing the colors didn't take too long surprisingly - I just knew they had to be bright enough to stand out within the environments that my other group members were going to make. The key to this is not to use too many colours of course, which thankfully was rather easy since their overall designs are simply anyways.

WEEK 12-13:

For the final few weeks, we continued to work on each of our set agendas from the gantt chart timeline whilst listening to the feedback given during the days where Mr. Mike had a consultation with us. By this point, I had completed coloring every character I needed - now all I had left to do was the other drawings such as orthographics. My groupmates who were doing the environment were also making steady progress.

WEEK 14:

This week would be our final consultation with Mr. Mike. I had started on the facial expressions and orthographics to show him.

Lianne, the other group member who was also making character designs, was done with her characters as well and beginning to start the expressions and so on. Mr. Mike seemed very impressed with what we had accomplished together as a group and believed R&D would be happy to see what we came up with.

However, there was still feedback to be given of course! Not all the characters were quite yet to standard and he was quick to offer us suggestions on how to improve some of them. As for the environment, it was a major improvement compared to last time, but this time he suggested they play around with the lighting more especially for a setting during the night time.

FINAL OUTCOMES