Well, the title works mainly because I feel these outlines look like a low-key stationary set.

Anyway, this stage was incredibly helpful. I’ve really managed to step back and asses what i want to accomplish, and on what scope. Granted, there are still one or two things I need to flesh out, such as a potential gate fold, but for the most part the groundwork has been laid.

I had to think long and hard about what kind of tempo I wanted the book to have. I already knew that I was looking at recorded time, and it was going to be a moment-to-moment transition-based book. I wanted to take clips, stills rather, of the life of a plant in two stages, and put them alongside each other, literally. I think it develops an interesting question as to whether the two plants are actually one plant, but at the same time gives that parallel I was looking for; one between life and death.

I think there’s definitely some kind of rhythm within the book, as there is a definite flow in the way things go. It’s predictable, but still intriguing in the way it is presented. I think the collage aspect will really bring a lot of attention to the plant itself, so that will definitely bring some more life and uniqueness to the book as a whole.

The temporal scope of the book is rather tame; there isn’t much going on at one time. However, I think that’s appropriate given the delicate nature of the book and the subject matter. Decomposition is a slow process, and while the book doesn’t move at a snail’s pace, it is definitely taking its time to highlight the significance of the event. The most important decision that I made was to cut the length of the book off at 12 pages, as anything longer would be a serious drawing out of the narrative.

All in all, the sequence of the book has been decided, and from here we let the artwork take the lead. The next step for me is deciding on a poem/piece of literature I want to use in the book, and then proceed with creating the collages.

Spacetime Studios came by to talk to us about the gaming industry, and it was incredibly informative!

I think the most beneficial speakers were Bryant Wood and Eva Tran.

Bryant Wood was definitely and eye-opener of sorts. I had always wondered if I would enjoy being a game designer, but Bryant made it abundantly clear that I would not. The whole profession was excessively tedious  in my opinion. Whether it is content design, system design, or data analysis, it’s an incredibly large amount of mathematical work, and doesn’t exactly match what I’m interested in.

Eva Tran was definitely more interesting. I liked everything she said in regards to concept art and UX/UI design, and I even got a bit interested in the animation field. She gave a lot of description as to what programs to learn, what the backgrounds of employees typically are, and ways to better yourself and prepare for a similar position, such as drawing 5-6 hours a day and mimicking different companies’ styles.

I learned quite a bit about myself and my interests, and I found a few interesting fields that I could pursue, so I’d say it was incredibly informative.

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The one question I have for the faculty is whether any of them think that technology has either enhanced or diminished art as a whole. Really what I’m asking is whether they think technology is hindering our ability to create meaningful and relatable art, especially in the animation industry.

So, I’ve managed to create some quick demos of what I’m looking at for my book. It’s all proof of concept, and I have to say I like how things are going together.

So these are two quick collages I put together that represent what I’m going for. On one hand, we have a blooming, vibrant flower, then we have a dying, diseased plant. In a sense, you can already see a chronological flow here, even if it’s just implied in the gutter between the photos on this blog post.

In short, I’m going to follow two plants (or maybe it’s the same plant) and they’re decay/growth. My idea is to pin to different narratives alongside each other, and bridge the two, probably starting with a seed and ending with a seed. It’s kind of a “circle of life” thing, but I didn’t want it to be linear in the life/death style, it jumbles the two together. These images gave me an idea of what I was capable of from a creative standpoint, and I think it proves that the project is doable, as I just need to pinpoint exactly what changes these plants go through, then make slight modifications to get them to look that way.

These last two images were my way of testing out typography. I didn’t have resources/know-how to create my own typeface, so I went ahead and looked at the default system fonts to see what kind of font/placement I’d like to use. I did a little experimenting with the text shape in the first image, trying to wrap text around the cut outline, while also creating a trailing group of letters that seems to flow off of the bud. I was going for a stream of water dripping off, but it was hard to do something like that with the heavy amount of text. I think depending on the size of whatever poem I choose to cover, I could maybe use individual words to give it that dripping effect. I’m really considering pairing these up with the two collages in a sort of double gate-fold, if that’s possible. I think it would go really well as the center of the book, but we’ll see how the narrative works out.

For the second image, I mainly wanted to play around with the placement of straight-up text boxes. I had some small “creative” elements on the top and bottom that gave a nice feel to the overall composition, I think, then I had the rest of the text flow in a zig-zag pattern through the text boxes (fortunately I remembered how to do that from my Yearbook days).

In both compositions, I wanted to stick with a script font, as I think it goes well with the delicate nature of both life and the plants themselves. I think that whatever text I source will benefit from this choice, as it’ll only highlight the nature of the text and the subject matter.

In short, this was a good sample and proof-of-concept for me, and I think the sequence of things will go pretty well together. There’s still much work to be done, but we’ll have to see how everything turns out in the end!