Introduction:

 

First of all, in my final year project, I will focus on producing concept arts. I chose Concept Artist as my main role. The sectors that I am looking forward to pursue my career in the future are children animation and animated feature film.

 

I will try to develope my own visual style throughout the project. This is the hardest part because there were a lot of artist reference. I used them as reference and avoid mimicking their style. At the same time, I would like to try out different approach of styles.  There are styles of concept artist that I like especially concepts works in The Dam Keeper (short film), The Little Prince (Netflix Originals), and Song of the Sea (animated feature film).

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As a concept artist, I wanted to produce concepts which can be used in both 2D and 3D productions. In order to come up with different styles, I will challenge myself to do digital speed painting, watercolour studies and collaborate in different projects.

 

Concept art is an important stage during pre-production stage. This including the choice of colour, mood, lighting, and design to go along with the story. Both concepts and story has to go along and not contrasting with each other.

 

My main objectives in my final major project are producing strong concept piece with story moments and beats. The final film will be presented in 2D animation. Although producing the concepts is my main priority, I will also challenge myself to animate in digital 2D hand drawn animation to present my final major project.

 

In the project, I will be directing and making a lot of decision according to my story. I hope that by the end of the project, I will be able to showcase the ability to take care of the whole process of concepting and directing. In order to achieve that, I will take part in other’s project to practice different visual styles and experiment in various roles to improve my project.

 

The challenges ahead of the project include concept mood piece, colour script, storyboards, lighting, character development, environment and props design. In addition to that, 2D animation will play a part in the project. The potential of concept arts developing into a piece of animation is a huge process where I need to work closely with the schedule to complete the piece.

 

I hope that in the end, I will produce a 2D animation of my own visual style  where it will be easily recognized and appreciated.   

 

 

 

Objectives:

 

My main objectives is to become a concept artist who able to tell strong story in a piece of work. In this project, I came up with my own workflow of creating concept piece. There are different workflows in concept art depends on individual preferences. It can be vary from research, colour script, sketches, black and white, or mood and lightings. The workflow will be explained later on in the report.

 

I want to create a workflow that is effective and comfortable to work with. The process of concept art is complicated and I wanted to polish my work especially in colour studies, mood and lighting.

 

Besides the three main elements that I looked into, I also decided to look into environment design, character development, camera angles, storyboard and storytelling. All of these are the targets that I set for myself.

 

 

 

My First Omelette:

 

The idea of My First Omelette derives from the intention to create a children illustration book on a first time experience cooking for a child. My first intention from the illustration book is to create moving image of story moment. After several discussion and progress, the idea of creating an animation came to life.

 

My stand on the animation is to keep as authentic as it would happen in Malaysia. I break down the element of the story according to Maurice’s process  (Polson and Noble, 2013,  p. 61). I break down my story element into location, time, time of the day, props and mood. The description of each elements is documented in my blog (Pang, website, 2017).

 

Next, the process of storyboarding is time consuming for me. It is the most important part because even though you have a good concept design, if the story does not goes well, the design will not enhance the animation and vice versa. In this case, I tried to get the storyboard finished first. There are few changes in the story until the final version of storyboard.

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Concept art  

Concept art is the specialism role that I will be focusing at in this project. The entire development includes character design, environment design, colour script, lighting, colour studies and mood.

 

I collect reference on visual style, environment, setup and props. In this project, I want to develope my own visual style rather than other artist style that I really like. Quote from Maurice Noble “Be careful not to reference other animated films or animation artist when designing. This is a problem I see with many animation artist.” (Polson and Noble, 2013, p.67). At first, I have the tendency to follow the style from the concept artist that I like. After trying out few different pieces of works from other project, I came back to the style which I tend to have in the first place. I am still in the process of developing my visual style but I came to realise that I have some kind of illustration style which i am happy to keep on developing.

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Character Development

The process of developing the character is hard in term of getting the right facial feature and form. The face shape and body language inform the characteristic of the girl. I spent more time on the girl than the mum because she is the main character.

 

I make a mistake which I will not attempt in the future. I start of with character poses without having the exact design for the character. Although it is a different start, it does not affect much in term of design. The character poses actually help me to define my character design in term of costume and hair. The entire development is documented in my blog (Pang, website, 2017). Designing the character is tough for me because I do not want it to be heavy influence by western animation. Most of the character design in Malaysia is either influenced by western animation or Japanese anime. The character is design in 2D which also make it harder to accentuate the character identity. In order to make it more realistic, I decided to give her a school uniform to wear instead of normal t shirt. This is because the primary or secondary school uniform are nation representation. They are the same across the country. The school pinafore gave the girl an identity.

 

Due to time constraint, the design for mum character is less strong. As it is 10 years ago, I played with the hair design because it is an important factor during that period of time. I gave the mum short hair because of the weather climate in Malaysia, it is always hot and short hair is the easiest for a mum to style her hair everyday.

 

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Environment Design

Environment Design is the part that I enjoyed the most. I have the chance to play with the colours and light in the process. As usual, I collect visual reference and also it is inspired from the place I grew up in Malaysia.

 

The design of the bedroom and kitchen resembles a typical Malaysian apartment design. I would say, the design of the kitchen has more freedom to showcase the design. For the bedroom I gave the window frame a specific design as it is the most common pattern of window frame. Because the weather is hot, the window will be opened all the time, the window frame act as a safety precaution.

 

In the kitchen, you will be able to see the appliances, props and floor tiles design specifically to bring out the identity of the place.

 

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Story , Colours , Lighting and Mood

Story telling of the animation. There were few stages before finalising the story. The decision includes the process of storyboards to see if the story flow is continuity, animatic for the composition and camera angle to tell the story clearly.

 

The story is about a little girl who like to cook since young and when she grew older, her mum finally allowed her to cook for the first time. It is the first experience to cook in the real kitchen. Most of the story moments happened in the kitchen with her mum.

 

“Colours should support the story not the contrary!” (Pang, email, 2017). I am lucky enough to get feedbacks from Celine Desrumaux, Production Designer for The Little Prince. She gave me professional feedback and make me change my mind in the colour of the kitchen. I keep the bedroom colour from my initial design after contemplating to go with her feedback or not.

 

Lighting and mood are essential in for a great piece of concept art. They can either improve your story or give a wrong impression to the viewer. For example, when I had the kitchen in monochrome colour, it looks serious and the contrast between the bedroom and kitchen is too huge. The contrast actually stop the continuity of the story flow.

 

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Animation

2D animation is part of my animation. This is consider my first time animating in hand drawn animation. Previously I am either animating 3D in Maya or puppet tool in After Effects. This is a huge challenge for me to learn all the tips in short amount of time. I only started my animation in late April which meant I have only 6 weeks to finish my entire animation. I overestimate my ability in the first place because I thought I had all my backplates ready and I just have to worry about animating the character.  As I have my 3D previz to act as my reference, they are some backplate where I have to work on at the same time due to different camera angle. As I animate along, understanding the arc and secondary animation also add up the working process. The whole process of animation is documented in my blog (Pang, website, 2017)

 

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Sound and Music

Getting the professional help from the sound and music student is a big advantage. The communication between us has been effective. I would say it will be my problem if they did not able to finish the sound and music in time for submission because I might not be able to finish my animation in time. Despite the worries, I keep them updated with my progress so they can work on the piece while I am still animating.

 

 

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Measuring my work

For my concepts work, I measure myself with the industry professional to push myself towards their standards. At the same time I also measure myself with peers and online platform artist. It is a healthy competition because I work more to produce better piece of artworks. Communicating with other concept artist also give me the chance to introduce myself to the community.  

 

As for my 2D animation, I try not to pressure myself with artwork from other students’ work or professional. I am still in learning stage and improving. The process of animation make me realise if I really want to pursue in 2D animation in the future or stick to concept art. I had fun in the process as well as stress because I always want to do better but I couldn’t animate to the point i expect myself to be.

 

Continuously practising concept art, I create loose concept, speed paint, colour scripts and other that make me a concept artist. I knew my work is ready when my concept is ready to go forward in the pipeline. For example I am really happy when my character design for Reece is modeled, rigged, and animated.

 

I access my final work as a concept artist and not animator. I focused on the design, colours and story moment. It is not about creating beautiful piece of artwork but a single image that tells the story. So far, I think my concept for my final has been successful. With the help from 3D model by Jake, I am able to capture the composition, angle, and proportion in my story telling. Each colours in bedroom and kitchen has their purpose and continuity in the story. I like the lights, highlight and shadow created with my own experiment in 3D software.

 

 

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Schedule

As a concept artist, I am able to keep up with my schedule and improve in term of time taken to create a piece of concept. I used to have 3 days to finish a piece of coloured concept, but now I can finish a piece in few hours. This is excluding the amount of time for research. Collaborating in other projects also prove that I am able to deliver concepts for pre production in short amount of time.

 

For 2D animation, it is a bit of disappointment in myself as I am not able to keep up with the time I plan to animate. Initially I thought that if I could animate 2 shot in a day, I can finish my animation in 12 days. As it goes along, the shot increased as different angle and quick cut added to make sure the story flow smoothly.

 

 

Collaboration:

Reece - Character Design

I collaborate with Reece during the pre production stage of my projects. He asked if I could design a monster character for his animation which he will modeled and rig himself. I accepted his request as it will be benefit in my portfolio and also I wanted to challenge myself to design a character.

 

Initially, he came up with few characteristics of the monster and an image which he really like. I start off with fifteen designs according to the characteristics given. (blog image)

The entire process from the initial design to the final design was documented in my blog (Pang, website, 2017). He picked the round monster as the final design for his project. The main reason is the round monster has a better shape, silhouette  and the character is more likely to be approachable in term of design. (Beiman, 2007, p.68)

 

He took the design and modelled it in Zbrush and also rigged the monster. This prove that the collaboration with Reece is definitely a success when I saw the final rig came to life. This became a practice and experience for myself in the future to create character design in other’s project.

 

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Jake - Environment Design

Collaboration with Jake in his Architectural visualisation.

The task given by Jake is to came up with a coloured version from his blue print. It is a challenge for me as I understand he need the concept to create a photorealistic 3D model.

I took the challenge and tried to concept the exterior environment for his project. I create three piece of concepts for Jake as a reference for him to model the environment.

 

In this process, I am slightly disappointed with myself. I try to create an environment with perspective and lightings. These are the first few attempts in drawing out of blue print. I do not like my concept as the style that I attempt does not looks like concept art for architectural visualisation. The concepts look flat in term of perspective drawings.

 

This make me realised that if I wanted to draw concept for architecture modelling, I will need to use 3D software beforehand to quickly block out the scene so that I can paint over to get the right perspective. Google Sketchup and Autodesk Maya will be helpful in the workflow.

 

Although the feedback from Jake is positive where he liked it and helps in his exterior modelling, I would prefer to create a better piece for the environment.

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Ryan - Concept Art

3D characters with 2D transitional animation.

In Ryan’s project, I am required to concept from his story moment. The main task is the colours of the layout and the poses of the character in a single frame. Ryan’s requirement in the concept is vector and plain 2D background.

 

At first, I took the concepts too far from his exact expectation. I focus on the colour and layout design  mostly in the concept piece. The first concept piece colour is inspired by Song of the Sea. I really like the piece of artwork I create and I went overboard in details. Because it is supposed to be a loop animation, the colours for next piece is maintained in cool colour background as well as similar style for the background design. After finishing the first two piece of work, I showed it to Ryan for feedback.

 

The feedback was I put too much details in the character as he did not want a detailed character in the first place. It is my fault because I forget to follow his requirements in the first place.It is a misunderstand as well, as I thought he will be having a 3D character therefore I came up with a more detailed characters.  I accept the feedback and make changes in the next piece.

 

In the next piece, I change the style and play with the colour instead. It is a climax in the story so I use warm colour to show a drastic changes from cool to warm.

 

I measured the process of collaborating with Ryan a success because I am able to come up with concept which I really like and a different style approach from the others’ project collaboration.

 

 

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Tide Travellers - Concept Art, Storyboards

Tide Travellers is an animated tv series script pitch by Amanda to the class. It seems like a great opportunity to work on a huge potential client project, so I decided to take the challenge. I am excited to work concept arts and storyboard in the project.

 

The script was given and I read it thoroughly  to get an initial idea and research. It is a 22 minutes per episode series. I can imagine the amount of work needed in this animation and also it is the first time, I try to work on a 22 minutes animation.

 

I put a lot of effort in research especially in visiting the place, Washington, East Sussex to understand the countryside calmness as the place is set in the countryside. I took photographs and some tiny sketches of props and building. The story also set to go back into victorian time, where I also gather photo reference and history research on East India Docklands.

 

In the project, all I did is just a piece of environment and some story beats. I overestimate my efficiency alongside with my final major project and others project.

 

Fortunately, I can work on this project once I am finish with my final major projects. I will want to focus on creating environment concepts rather than character concepts as I enjoy the process of creating environment more than characters.

 

Environment piece allows me to be creative in term of mood, light and colours which is a field that I really want to be good at. Another objective in this project is to create strong story moment with good composition and mood. In conclusion, I am looking forward to work on this project once I am finish with my final major project.

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Collaboration had been so much gain and fun for me so far. It helps me to come up with different style approach and also giving myself a break from my own project. It is very much needed because if I continuously work on the same project, I feel I did not progress in term of style, creative composition, mood, and colours.

 

 

 

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Conclusion

Overall, I am proud of myself as a concept artist. I see myself improved over the year and created a workflow for myself to become a concept artist. I would say I manage to develop my own style in concept and also variety of styles that do not resemble artist I like. If I could turn back time, I think I wanted to spend more time doing concept piece on others project than spend my time in animation.

 

Even though the 2D animation is part of the final film, I definitely do not have enough time to showcase my ability. In the future, I would choose to focus on short animation rather than an entire animation. I wish they are collaboration happen during the animation section but the nature of the class are more into 3D animation. Those who are doing well in 2D animation are working hard on their own project.

 

Finally, the concept art for my Final Major Project can be made into 2D or 3D animation which is an extra point to show that my works can be produce in both medium. I chose 2D animation because I want to challenge myself in different medium as I had been doing more 3D animation in my course.