Group Project - Final Idea

We have now begun the YMCA group work and have now come to a final idea. We will be focussing on the YMCA as a whole and hopefully are able to demonstrate all the activities and services which take place in the animation. Though each service shown will be brief, we chose to do the overall organisation because we felt teenagers would rather know what the YMCA was about and what they have to offer all round, instead of one specific service. This was also because Craig Gough mentioned how the organisation was losing 'business' in all areas, so we therefore felt it was better to advertise all areas of the business so as to attract people to the YMCA as a whole, and once they have joined - it is then when they can find out more about specific services.

All our ideas have been put into a brainstorm shown below. The idea that we are going for is the one about a child getting older, walking into different scenes. As the child changes, they will be walking behind obstacles, or they can change when walking through a door etc.

YMCA Visit & Research

Following the visit to the YMCA in Chelmsford, I and my group members gained an insight into what they provide to help support young people within the community; by offering many different services such as fun activities and setting up events like live bands nights. It is also a place which gives a good opportunity for those to meet new people and make new friends where they can share and relate their individual problems, as well giving advice to each other.

These young people's ages range up to the age of 18, and will all have different reasons for joining the YMCA. Problems can range from financial/work difficulties, to family/health and crime and safety issues.

From the information that was given to us about their services, it helped us understand and gain a better knowledge of what young people will want when it comes to us creating an animation to help promote the YMCA. The animation will need to stand out, be fun and most importantly appeal to young people in order for them to have an interest in joining and taking part in certain services.

At the moment, the YMCA includes various ways of promoting themselves:

- Networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace

- Word of mouth

- Small leaflets

- Visits to Primary Schools

- Emails and letters

Obviously from these types of advertisements listed, they do not have an advertisement which is in the form of a video, which clearly would help attract more people to get involved, especiall as teenagers are usually stuck indoors watching TV almost everyday. Having an animation would most certainly attract a few more of the target audience.

So, from this visit, my group have come up with several ideas with how to approach this task already. These ideas will gathered into one brainstorm for an easy overview of our thoughts.

YMCA Mood Board

The mood board above was created to represent what the YMCA should be about; it should make the teenagers feel a sense of fun, communication between friends and happiness.

For example, the sunshine in the palm of the hand image portrays a sense of warmth, the arms shows 'togetherness' - everyone is in the same boat and are equal, whilst the lock image displays security and safety when you're at the YMCA. The rest of the images are self explanatory; with the disco ball and lights emphasising an atmosphere when young people can have fun and to relax at the same time with no worries on their mind!

Face Work - Topology

I have begun to start work on the face project, and already I am finding this very challenging! I've had a few problems with getting everything to line up properly on the features of my face. For example, if i moved the side picture so that the mouth is in line with the front view picture, then the ears, eyes and nose will all be out of line and won't match up etc! So this took a lot of adjustments to sort out, but I got there in the end.

When it came to drawing the lines on to mark any creases out, I did this using both Illustrator and Flash (I found Flash to be even better than Illustrator halfway through!) as they created smoother lines and gave me more flexibilitiy in moving the lines to the shape I wanted. I personally found these two software to be a lot easier to use than doing it on Photoshop.

I did struggle with this exercise too as I ended up with a lot of triangles and pentagons in the cheek and forehead areas, (shown in the first picture) however this was soon fixed and resulted in a more flowing direction with the quads (last picture).

Virtual Environments - First Impressions

For this module, there will be two tasks to complete. The first one will involve me having to model my own face, and this will be done through using 3DS Max. Photoshop will also be used in order to help guide me on modelling different aspects of my face - such as marking out roughly any 'creases' and then turning them into quads. Other modifications to be done on my face before I go into modelling is to add a lens distortion to it so that my face does not appear as though it is looking up from a face on - view.

Going into the second task to be completed; this will be a group based project. In groups we will be focussing on the YMCA (Young Man's Christian Association).

The aim of this group project is to work for a client in the YMCA in producing an animation to help promote the service in such a way where it will appeal and attract young people.

This will also help each individual to improve on different skills that the individuals wish to improve on to further their knowledge, which includes focusess on either 3D modelling, animations or 2D designs.

My views on these two projects are quite split at the moment. I know that the face one will be very challenging but will be an interesting task to do. I will however get very frustrated if I am not able to do this properly and will get extremely fed up with looking at my own face all the time!
The group project I am looking forward to seeing how we all co-operate and decide on what will happen together.