After recieving feedback for my Major Project, I decided to return to my Art Of and add in a few more pages to conclude the document better. I decided to add two pages of statistics about Eating Disorders since I want people to have more information about it. I tried to include a range of statistics about the various Eating Disorders and how they affect different genders, sexuality, races, and so on. Despite it being an abstract project, I still want to ensure I have real life woven into it...so I think it's useful to have those statistics available for people to see after going through the Art Of. I also added a short concluding statement which is an excerpt from my 'filmmaker statement' that I've been using to submit to film festivals as well as a 'special thanks' section. I hope this wraps up my Art Of better than it had previously.
In my feedback it was also suggested I experiment with adding my brick displacement onto the geometry I used for my projection footage. For some reason the displacement on the plane was being very fiddly, but I'm experimenting with a few ways of achieving what I want. I tried to have the bricks be very subtle since I only want there to be a hint of them. The first test I did the bricks were straight - in my room all of the bricks are distorted because of the UV map. I then went into Photoshop and morphed the height map so I could imitate the distorted bricks. I still need to tweak the texture because some of the settings (ex. specularity) is not the same as my original brick texture...so that may further improve the look. I'm going to continue experimenting and see what I can do with it.
This project has been a real challenge for me because I had to multi-task this project along with the Narrative project, CG Toolkit, and the essay. I think it helped teach me how to better manage my time and has reiterated how important it is prioritise my work based on the different deadline dates and other factors. This project has forced me to overcome my difficulties with content with comedic/romantic themes, which does not come naturally to me. It has allowed me to experiment once again with an art style I am not used to and have not done before (like how the 'From Script to Screen' project did in Year One). While drawing in a more cartoon style is a major challenge for me, I feel like I was able to find a middle ground between my normal drawing style and a more cartoon-like approach which helped me grasp the project. As mentioned above, I struggled to get my head around my sound clip due to its comedic nature but I feel I successfully created a short narrative that fits with the sound clip even while I stepped outside of my comfort zone. It has helped me improve my skills in both Illustrator and Photoshop because the style I chose required me to have clean lines and more blocky colours in comparison to my normal artwork that is normally more painterly/realistic. Once my characters started to become more refined, I became more excited to work on them despite my struggles to start with. I was glad I was able to improve my skills with drawing animals as I have never drawn ferrets or guinea pigs before. I found the guinea pig a challenge because they tend to be very blob-like but I am happy with my ability to keep real life anatomy in mind for both of the animal characters while it still being stylised. This is also the first time I had to draw a child, which was the largest struggle in this project for me in terms of the design of the actual characters. I'm happy with how she turned out, despite my frustrations to begin with. Overall, I feel that this project has helped me learn the value of multi-tasking, improved my ability to create clean line art, allowed me to experiment with different art styles and genres, and forced me to draw things I haven't done before which has increased my confidence in drawing and design.
