Discussion Points from Academic Supervisor

This afternoon, my academic supervisor has finally emailed me a copy of the discussion points describing about our last meeting along with some good suggestions and tasks that we can do for my honours project below:

Honours Project Meeting 1 22/11/10

Discussion Points

We discussed the wording of the research question as it may be better to frame your dissertation as a discussion rather than it requiring a definitive answer at the end. Perhaps you could rephrase the question using 'what' rather than 'is there'.

The research question mentions the concept development process. It will be useful to define this process. What is the traditional concept development process? How does the 3D concept development process differ? Is there a defined approach for 3D concept development? If so, how could we use this? If not, how can we add 3D into the traditional concept development process? The answers to these questions will help to inform our next steps with the project, and will ensure that you are linking research to practice.

There is a need to explore different character archetypes to build on our understanding of character. There are a number of books which will help you to explore typical character archetypes:

• Ideas for the Animated Short: Finding and Building Stories by Karen Sullivan
• The Hero with a 1,000 Faces by Joseph Campbell

Once we have this information, we can use these to inform choices around the types of character which will be designed and prototyped for the project. It is important to select characters for a reason and to demonstrate exploration of a variety of characters prior to narrowing our search to two or three characters for production.

In the designs you do explore, try to explore shapes, proportions and style. These impact on the effectiveness of a character and also their production in 3 dimensions. Ensure these have also been considered prior to finalising designs.

This is the exploratory stages of your project and your character designs, so try to experiment with as many different character types and styles as possible. The designs you currently have are to a good level, however, we need to be able to use research to inform the characters selected and our process as a whole. Creating a broader range of characters at this stage will help to build your understanding of character design. This will in turn feed into your decisions regarding the characters you choose to create and will help to support the discussion of character design in the dissertation.

Agreed Action points

· Explore archetypes and use this to inform a range of character designs

· Define the concept development process and explore the role of 3D in this process. Create a framework/process which can inform, your practice. Break this into a step-by-step guide of the stages of concept development. Ensure you gather references to inform this.

· Experiment with proportions, shape and style in the character designs you produce

· Experiment with Wacom tablet and Zbrush for visualisation of concepts

Our next meeting is scheduled for 1pm on Wednesday 8^th December.

So from this, I'll try to continue working with thumbnail sketches to developp as many characters as possible, and also gather more information about the defining the concept developments with some references before I could work on my research proposal for next week. Hopefully the weather will settle down next wekk so that I can come in to the next meeting with Lynn and show my progress of bith my written and sketchbook work.