Semester 2 Week 7 3D (Floating City Presentations)

Floating City Conclusion

Reflection
The Floating City is now mostly finished, so it's time to reflect on the whole experience, and what went wrong and what went well. Frankly, after presenting and getting feedback on our project, I think the project went poorly. Alec seemed to have a lot of criticisms of our project compared to the other projects, so I feel like I missed a lot of important parts to the project. I'd say there are 3 main points where we missed the mark; Research, Concepts, and the polish on the final product.



Research and Concepts

Alec asked us about whether or not we knew the studio that made the Game of Thrones intro that we mentioned as an inspiration, and we hadn't thought to look up the studio to see what else they did. I do think that we should have had more research in retrospect, to look at what other similar projects are like, and how they're done. We would have then had a bunch of sources to base our camera angles, our style, and our presentation on. He suggested we look at the Studio that made the intro sequence, so I did. It was done by Rock Paper Scissors Production, and three branches of that group. Elastic handled the bulk of it, while computer graphics were by a52 (Source 1). The titles were all actually functional mechanisms, and all of them actually would work if they were made in real life (Source 2). The sequence also serves an important purpose to introduce the locations of everything, so the audience understands the mood, the themes, and the style of the show. 

The Game of Thrones intro was designed as an homage to Indiana Jones' transitions (Source 2). I think Alec's comment about researching the studio and the sequence was basically to say that we should have done more research, and more consciously pulled from other films, rather than doing what feels right (or cool).

Elastic Studios: Daredevil (TV Show) Concept

(Elastic Studio)

The Game of Thrones Intro studio has done a ton of different TV show introduction sequences, like Westworld, Daredevil, and American Gods. I think the studio's strength is to find the important elements from the shows and transform them into a short sequence. The opening sequence is like a thesis statement for the show, and Elastic is really good at making that statement unique. (Source 3)

In terms of Concepts, we simply should have done more. In looking at the presentations of others, they had more concept work, and the result was more visually consistent. I think we should have done more work at the beginning of the project, and the rest of the work would have been easier, since it would just be based on the concept we'd already have. Essentially, we should have followed the design pipeline more closely.

Polish

Alec mentioned a bunch of things that irked him about our final video. There were a lot of technical issues that he pointed out, and I don't think I realised a lot of them. I suppose we can fix this for the final hand-in, but it's still disappointing. I'd thought our project looked pretty good by the last render, so for so many issues to be so easily visible to Alec means I didn't do enough to make the project look good. It could be because I've looked at it so many times I don't see the problems any more, or I'm just not good enough at putting together a Maya project to get rid of these problems.


Further Reflection

In retrospect, while I like the idea behind our project, the core concept still feels a bit unfinished. The project seems a bit vague, partially due to our idea. The idea we had meant that the city had to be divided up quite a bit, and I think this took away from the final product's ability to capture the city's mood. We also just didn't have as many models as other groups, I feel.

After reflecting on the project for so long in this post, I still don't think I got to the core of the flaws in our project. Upon the final submission this Sunday, I'll try and fix up some of the problems with our projects, and take another stab at figuring out why I'm not satisfied.

Our Idea was pretty sparse. There's a ton of space in between each region. You can't quite get a feel for the city.


Other Groups:

Seoul Group:

I like this project a lot, mostly because it's so straightforward, direct, and easily understandable. You immediately get a sense of the city, and you can visualize what the city is like with the simple design. If anything, it's just difficult to read the text sometimes.

International Group:

This group came after mine, so I wasn't as focused on it. However, I liked the way that the project looked, and I thought the design was really nice. It looked a lot like a video game world, and by that I mean it looked liveable. It was also really consistent. they didn't have a full render for the presentation, though, so we couldn't get the whole experience.

Kowloon Group:

This group obviously did a ton of research, concepts, and visualisation for their project. It shows in their presentation, and I think they did a great job. The design is also really nice, and it's all visually consistent. they definitely had the best effects, animation, and style of all of the projects. They didn't have facts, but they had a reason to do so. the project captured the appearance and feeling of Kowloon far better than the other groups captured their cities.

Hashima Island Group:

This group also did quite a few concepts and tests to make sure their idea was sound. they seemed to be really passionate about the idea, and their models looked great. The final render was nice, and I think the design was visually consistent. The only real problem with it that I can think of is the camera work, since it's fairly robotic.

Las Vegas Group:

 Las Vegas had a lot of energy in their project I think, but for whatever reason it didn't come together in time for the presentation. They had a lot of different pieces as well. I don't know how the project would have come together.

 Moscow Group:

 I saw some of what this group was doing as the project happened, and I liked how their project looked a lot. They did a lot of research on the design of their animation, and also on the history of Moscow. They seemed to know a lot about the Architecture of the city. Their video looked fantastic. It had a lot of style, research, and design behind it that was clear in the finished product. It also seemed like they were telling a story with their animation, which I hadn't seen in any of the other videos.


Sources: 
(For simplicity, I'm not sourcing these academically, since it's only a blog post) 

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