Marionettes and Sea Shells

Well it’s been a good while now since my last update but I’ve been hard at work with a few different things.

Sunken Temple

Firstly an update on my Sunken temple. I’ve been making quite a few alterations to the original design of this piece, only additive so far. As well as this I’ve started adding textures to bits of it and bump mapping a lot of things which I rather proud of only recently learning how to do this.

I’ve also taken quite a bit of inspiration from this photo which my sister recently took whilst on holiday in Italy:

Seeing this exquisite room made entirely of shells really inspired me to go all out in putting some more detail into my model so I am adding a little at a time more and more detail (and shells) as I go as well as generally shaping the room more and more and adding more points of interest.

Essays

Aside from working on this model I have also completed my Literature and Contextual Essays which I shall admit I strongly disliked doing.

Not because I’m against doing research, nor writing. Quite the opposite as I had already spent a large amount of time doing both and compiling my findings before these essays anyways. However I found for the amount of references collected (10 books 10 journals 10 websites and 10 of another variety) the expected essays were pitifully short and it barely seemed worth the effort to do so much research for what is essentially a page of writing where one barely has room to write a thing...

The actual essay writing pert was rather easy, in fact the hardest part was trying to condense it down as much as physically possible.

But by comparison finding that amount of references was EXTREMELY hard indeed!!! Just try searching for books or journals on ‘Video Games Lighting’ and you’ll see what I mean....

And I’m not the only one who’s had problems with this one. Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to have had real problems collecting references too.... It’s a tad annoying I’ll admit as I haven’t really learnt anything new that my own private research hadn’t taught me already. It just seemed to take up a lot of time I COULD have spent much more productively.

However as it is a necessary part of the course I suppose there is nothing to be done about it.

Anyways that’s all done and dusted now thank god so there’s a huge weight off my shoulders.

Looking forwards

As well as my current work I’ve also been looking more into what I’m going to do with my final piece this year. I like to be prepared.

The whole battle cutscene idea has been thrown out of the window just due to the scale being to huge. I always was overenthusiastic.

Instead I have found two great versions of one piece of music which I have merged together to form a nice transition. The piece being the classic Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairystarting off with the classic version and transitioning to a much darker version. Both pieces were created by the talented Kevin MacLeod. Who’s beautiful music really inspired me and can be found here .

With this music I intend to create an animated short ballet piece featuring two characters entitled ‘The Spider and the Marionette’. I have a general overview of the piece in mind and my dancer friend will be helping me choreograph the piece. So as a small teaser here are two designs of the Marionette character.