Working as a team - Bronte Messam & Danielle Carden

We decided to pair up and complete the brief together in the first monday class after being told the brief and what was expected of us at hand-in.

In the 2nd class on tuesday we discussed our concept and what we wanted to achieve together whilst doing the experimentation exercises.

Because of the 2 week holiday starting that next week, we decided to outline what we wanted to achieve on our separate breaks independently for when we came back to class for week 7. This we both found very useful because of the short time frame of and what we wanted to achieve, we both came back from the break with concept work and could easily develop from both perspectives.

Danielle created a private Facebook page so that we could both post updates of any work we had done and made it easy to contact directly about what we needed to do, inspiration, what we had done etc.

In class we decided to create a workbook and blog to document our research, design work, processes, concepts, developments, refinements and finals.

Bronte was in charge of the workbook and Danielle, the blog. We decided this was our strong areas of expertise but we also helped each other with both areas of documenting.

It is hard to say who did what etc because we both worked alongside each other in many ways throughout our whole process. We used the Facebook page to keep in touch, but worked together in person at uni and also at each others homes. This made it easy for us to do block amount of hours on this project together.

Danielle was appointed to create the 4 food types, the 'arm' the waste hole and also developing the final onto after effects.

Bronte was appointed to create our background imagery, the 'man' and also developing the final onto after effects.

Our stylistic approach greatly came from Andy J Miller as our artist model therefore all of the imagery in the animation is hand-drawn either using pen/pencil or a Wacom tablet.

The bright pastel colours were then implemented by the photoshop paint bucket.
The smooth black lines outlining all the imagery was 'image traced' in illustrator to ensure the best quality lines and to get a visually interesting composition.
Animations and movements were all created in after effects.

In the end, we worked co-operatively and both had opinions of the work and listened to each other to come to a resolved agreement for the work at hand. We enjoyed working as a team, it definitely helped having a partner so the workload could be neutral and balanced.

We got there in the end and felt happy and successful with our final.

Screenshots of how we kept in touch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKQhr7YRVJ4&feature=youtu.be

Youtube link to final animation

Rationale:

Our interpretation of Kaitiakitanga/sustainability is the idea of a society revolved around over-consumption. We want to encourage individuals to respect and appreciate the environment around us through involvement in their surroundings, contributing to a sustainable planet. “Whirlwind” is based upon Bronte’s brochure “The Wellington Markets.” We chose the Harbourside Market to be our focus, and emphasised the concept of sustainability through the waste that the market produces at the end of the day.

Our animation portrays four foods that are offered to the main character (a symbol of humankind) and are rejected, resulting in a pile up of waste. The slow transition from bright and blissful to dirty and dull reflects us as humans and our tendency to not realize the damage we are causing until it’s too late. We see changes in our environment as minor right up until the last minute when the consequences have started to take place.

Our artist model Andy J Millar uses black outlines and bright colours in his illustrations to portray a positive message to the viewer. We took this idea and reversed it, making colours less saturated and adding imagery with negative connotations such as skulls to make the atmosphere go from one extreme to the other. The twitching, growing and changing colours in the background suggest an environmental utopia. However when the waste builds up these movements slow and come to a stop as the privileges of a healthy environment have been removed. From this point the planet (represented by the background) has become a wasteland with the monster (death) taking over. If we do not consider our actions in the environment, the consequences will kill us.

"Whirlwind"

Final Animation storyboard 

These images show the 30 second animation poster at series of time screenshotted. 

Once we had the final animation ready to export and render, we mashed up the first 9 seconds of "Time to Pretend" by MGMT. We thought this instrumental start really suited our animation as it is unrealistic in a world of sutle slow chaos emerging through us as humans not looking after our planet and our sustainability of food consumption and waste will 'eat' us in the end, we will slowly be killed by the consequences of our actions.

Process work of how we have gotten to this stage of the end animation is shown through screen shots as we have had trouble uploading the series of renders from after effects. This is because blogger will not let us upload a .mov file and we have had issues trying to export them as .mp4 files.
This scan shows the concept of our ending 'monster' from beginning > black and white pen hand drawing > to manipulations and also scanned in hand drawings to create a vibe around the monster so its not just a block vector object. This helped us when animating to portray the monster who is alive because our waste has killed us and taken over our world.

 Screen shots of work in process and action from after effects 'Final Animation' file. 

Further animation artist models. Researching ideas and ways of using the animation to portray the story in a clear way that will make sense to the viewer. This process also helps to build an understanding when using after effects. As we are both new to this software. 

Plan For Animation Final:

Frames per second: 25
Seconds Minimum: 30s

05s: apple comes into animation, left hand-side, grabbed by arm, shown to the
man' face, denied and thrown into the waste hole.

10s: carrot comes into animation, left hand-side grabbed by arm, shown to the
man' face, denied and thrown into the waste hole. Continuous waste starts to build-up.

15s: Hotdog comes into animation, left hand-side grabbed by arm, shown to the 

man' face, denied and thrown into the waste hole. Continuous waste is building-up.

20s: ice-cream comes into animation, left hand-side grabbed by arm, shown to the
man' face, denied and thrown into the waste hole.

25s: Waste is now considerably large from all the waste consumption.

30s: Waste grows and becomes an 'alive' character, which takes over the whole background.

35s: Monster is grown from waste hole.

40s: Monster then takes over the whole screen and the animation to emphasis our punch line, "our waste and abuse of resources will kill us."

Creating Pivotal joints to animate the 'hand' that grabs the food and follows through the poster animation board. 

Screen shots of work in progress on After Effects. Beginning of our animation towards final - getting our heads around the software. 

Today we had a few techno issues with OS X complaining it couldn't open after effects, all fixed now and back on track. After talking to our lecturers we have another artist model to further push our work towards animation (Yellow submarine by the beetles).

More imagery Work

Developmental Illustrations for imagery in the animation 

Drawn Illustrations for our animation imagery 

Research and planning to find our stylistic approach for the final, Chosen Artist model:

Andy J Miller 

First storyboard Plan for animation 

Random Projects to get out hands and head inclined with the Wacom

Danielle Invested in a Wacom and we are practicing on it to get used to it for our illustrations.

Exercise 1: Experimenting with the Lasso tool with portraits and landscapes on Photoshop. 

Day 1 Week 8 - Monday

Today we got given our brief which responds to aspects of kaitiakitanga. The previous brief, 'Puna' was about  how ideas come into existence; this new paper is all about turning ideas into digital stories. 

Jumping straight into the brief as we only had a 3 week timeframe to complete our digital stories in partners, we (Danielle Carden and Bronte Messam) therefore we started to brainstorm our storyboard and give each other tasks to complete over the holidays.