Major Project 1 - Task 3: Concept Presentation

19.3.2025 - 23.3.2025 / Week 7
Chan Wan Qing / 0350928 / BA of Design (HONS) in Creative Media
Major Project I
Project 3

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INDEX:

1. Project 3: Concept Presentation
2. Feedbacks 
3. Reflection

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INSTRUCTIONS

Project 3: Concept Presentation 

This task serves as the culmination of the project development process, bringing together the ideas formulated in Task 1 (Proposal Development) and the design explorations conducted in Task 2 (Design Proposition). In this phase, students will refine and present their final design solution, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness in addressing the identified needs of their target audience. For this task, we will focus on the technical, creative, and conceptual strengths of the project, highlighting the design decisions, development process, and technical feasibility tests. 

Since we only have a week of time to finalise and complete everything. We quickly delegated the task within our teams. 

• Poses & expressions: Adriena
• Animatics: Han + ChaoRan + whoever finished 
• Testing: Wan Qing

I started the testing part after finishing the storyboard. Since at that time, our group decided to go for 2D characters and 3D background after the comparing 2D and 3D, I started the testing for Grease Pencil in Blender. To start off, I searched for some YouTube tutorial on using Grease Pencil. I go to Blender and opened 2D animation. I explore the tools to understand how it works. Then, I began adding the characters as references to test out the drawing process. Blender provides different types of brush and I chose to use pen to draw the outline first. 

Drawing in Grease Pencil

Then, I also opened another file to build a simple background, a graveyard to test out how will it be when I put the characters into 3D background. 

Graveyard

After that, I tried to find the ways to put the 2D characters in Grease Pencil into the 3D file. There are a few ways such as converting Grease Pencil strokes to geometry, linking or appending, drawing into 3D scene directly. So, I tried linking the grease pencil object from the 3D scene. 

Linking

However, when linking the Spirit to the 3D scene, the outcome doesn't seem to obvious since I didn't colour it. So, I redraw another character and colour it for another testing. I used a different brush when colouring the character to match with our rendering style. 

Colouring

Grease Pencil - Final Character

Then, I linked the character into different 3D background, a graveyard and beside a tree. I also played with the lighting to see if the light works on the grease pencil object. 

Lighting

Linking

Next, I also experimented with animation using Grease Pencil to test how the movement would look. I animated the character I drew, Yun in 2D animation of Blender. I selected the strokes and insert keyframes. It's quite similar to how we animate in 3D in Blender. It also provides us the onion skin so that we can see every frame while animating. 

Animation Testing 1

Animation Testing 2

Animation Testing 3

After I finished the testing part, Adriena and I did the slides together for the presentation. We also tried to finish the animatics as much as possible before the presentation.

Task 3 Slide Presentation

After the presentation, Mr Kaanan and Mr Kamal advised our group to think about using 3D and explore more different shots/camera angle while proceeding with it. So, we decided to begin by testing 3D character modeling before finalizing whether to use 2D or 3D characters for the project. For now, we’ll continue working with 2D as the primary approach at this moment before testing. 

Also, we continued with the animatics. I helped with animatics of storyboard 5 to 8 and storyboard 13 and 14. ChaoRan did storyboard 1 to 4, Han did 9 to 12 and 16, Adriena helped with storyboard 15. 

Storyboard 5-8 

Storyboard 13-14

Final Task 3: Concept Presentation

Slides Presentation

Final Animatics

Project Timeline (Gann Chart): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WN018eDqmO-ZcYG10pHEVVnF7iho2X2kTTp8ur7yJYE/edit?gid=0#gid=0 

Miro Board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVLhyOKW8=/?share_link_id=80328957188

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NeRx9_GEA7pCY0wKA7YrtTa1sMQS-RO5

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FEEDBACKS

Week 7 / Task 2 & 3

• Can shorten some of the scene
• Showcase the unique point of our character better in the first few scenes
• Go watch Spookiz, it is a good 3D animation
• Can consider changing it into completely 3D; if going for 2D, need to be dynamic
• 3D (can trick for some scenes), explore it
• Play more with perspective (Storyboard)
• Needs to be solid to our demographic
• Solidify it
• We need to find more reference
• study the effects and wow factors

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REFLECTION

For this task, we continued from task 2, storyboard. In this task, we have to do testing, poses and expression sheet and animatics. Since time is really rushing, we only had 1 week to finish all of these, so we divided our task immediately and started the tasks. After our presentation, our group began considering the possibility of switching to a 3D animation approach. However, we understood that before making such a significant decision, we needed to conduct proper testing. We also realised that we should watch different animations or films to study their camera angle, shots and "tricks". We should observe the films frame their scenes and transition between shots to help us better understand visual composition and pacing. We also need to different research when doing testing, when we test, we had to go through failures and observations. We can only make a good work after going through this trial-and-error phases. This task taught us that the creative process is not always linear. It requires flexibility, observation, collaboration, and the willingness to try, fail, and try again. By staying open to feedback and continuously researching and testing ideas, we are building a stronger foundation for the next stages of our project.