BA2B - Collaboration

BA2B- Collaboration Week

Day 1 (Monday)

The first project we received in this new brief was a cross collaboration project where we have to work in teams with other courses throughout the University. Since the numbers added up the best we worked together with Graphics Design and "?". The groups consisted of around 7 people which were randomly selected by the tutors. When everyone were assigned to a group we got assigned what were considered as a "Mundane" object and a "Feeling" and it was now our job to use our creative minds to come up with a new use for this object. My group which were group 13 got Tin can and the feeling "Apprehension". 

My group is the follow people:

Johan Lagesson (Games Art & Design)

Billy Machin (Games Art & Design)

Joey Valkamo (Games Art & Design)

Laura Meechan

Carmen Balit

Julia Callaby

Imogen Brown 

We all decided to think about various ideas and concepts so when we meet up on the Tuesday we can brainstorm and have a good plan sorted out. 

Day 2 (Tuesday)

We all met up at University to discuss our different concepts and ideas. Joey had come up with the idea to use the feeling "Apprehension" as the excitement of trapping something and showed us a few concepts of a mouse trap. Me personally really loved this idea but since it was the second day we decided to explore some other options before deciding on one. 

Various concepts created by "Joey Valkamo"

We had a ton of different ideas by the end of the day, varying from a tin can grenade to use the tin can as some sort of gift wrap. We did have the issue of not being used to our courses different workflow. Where as us as Games Artist usually when we find a good idea we go ahead and do it to not waste anybody's time, but here is where our courses clashed a bit where the rest of our group wanted to wait until Thursday to think about another ideas. Even though we already really struggled coming up with anything better than the mousetrap design. 

Day 3 (Wednesday)

The Wednesday I spent the day blocking our various ideas we had come up with during day 2, since I find it a lot easier to concept using 3D. It is also good to see our ideas come to "life", this does to everyone can look at it and point out this we like/dislike instead of everyone having their own image of how it looks. It is a way to make sure we all have the same idea of an concept.  

Here are the different blockouts I created. 

First off we have the mouse traps, I created them by using Joey's concepts she made in day 1.

Traditional Mousetrap converted into a Tincan.

Beartrap version

We also had the idea of creating a Tincan that was locked with a padlock. The feeling of apprehension here to not know what was inside until you figured out how to open it. We noticed fairly quickly that this concept did not make any sense because the person could just slide the chains off and the idea was not as strong as the mousetrap.

I came up with the idea of creating a cryptex puzzle. Sort of what they use in the movie "The Da Vinci Code".

Day 4 (Thursday)

The Thursday had an unfortunate start, Billy did not enjoy this Collaboration project which made him leave the group, which was a shame but we had to continue without him. We had a meetup in the morning where I showed everyone the concepts, since the team had still not come up with any better idea's than the Mouse trap we decided to go with it. Also everyone really liked the blockout I created so we decided to use it, I just had to revisit it a little bit to polish some things like the cheese etc. We had a meeting with one of the tutors which loved the idea and we now gave each other tasks to complete over the weekend so we have everything ready by Mondays presentation. My task were to create a short animation to demonstrate how the mousetrap works. Joey got tasked with creating the storyboard for the animation while the others would create the packaging that comes with the mousetrap.

Day 5 - 8 (Friday - Weekend)

Since we would show how it functions using a video it seemed a bit grim to use a real mouse so we decided to go with a toy mouse, this also is a lot quicker for me to 3D model and the animation can be very stiff without looking very fake. I quickly created a toy mouse using Maya and Zbrush.

Since I only had a few days I had to come up with a quick way to create the animation. My initial plan was to use Marmoset Toolbag 2 for the rendering but unfortunately it does not yet support animations. To solve this I decided to use Sketchfab, which is very similar to Marmoset but also supports animations. The animating itself was very easy in Maya, since I had earlier experience with animation I did not need to follow any tutorials or such. It was a fairly straight forward process. The key were a bit tricky to figure out the constant rotation while moving but I solved it by first animating the mouse without key movement to later add it once the mouse animation was done. 

When animating I tried to follow the storyboard that Joey had created as close as possible.

Storyboard created by "Joey Valkamo"

Animation created by me in Maya.

And last but not least the animation itself. I recorded from different angles in sketchfab and edited it using Sony Vegas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1zwwCitg9o

Final Thoughts

This was a very interesting project, It was difficult in the beginning to accept the different workflows and strengths of everyone but as soon as we decided on an idea we all worked very well together and did a great job. The presentation went well and we got some good laughs out of the video. It was overall an interesting week with made us think more and realise how different everyone's workflow is.