Week 1 – Collaborative Unit Brief

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Personal Notes for the Collaboration Unit

Week 1: Intro to the unit and projects

Key summary:

  • Level of standards expected
  • Expectations of professionalism
  • Pipeline to be used
  • Peers for feedback
  • Concept development
  • Story development, and idea pitching.
  • Explanation of how to work to the assignment
  • Blog being a constantly updated diary of working with other collaborators from cross disciplines.

Project Objectives

  • Self directed project to explore topics outside of MA 3D.
  • Collaboration, communication, practice and process.
  • Define research interests.
  • Critical reflection of working in teams.
  • Flexible in terms of the deliverable digital outcomes.

Note to self: Does not need to be story or character based. If it is story based, then write a 50 word story first.

Pipeline (Initial ideas):

  • Photoshop, Maya, Substance Painter, Unity, Cinema4D etc.
  • Brainstorming, sketches, storyboards, animatics, previs.
  • Supervision of the project – Ask for feedback and update mini deadlines.

Thoughts/ Ideas about Collaboration

I am interested in collaborating with games designers to create a video game, since that may be the area I want to learn about in the future. I Areas I naturally do are planning, organising, making to-do lists and taking notes, therefore I believe that I would be suitable for the ‘producer’ role in my team.

Seeking Collaborators

I contacted about 3-5 people from each course ( MA VR, Games Design, VFX and 3D Animation), with whom I shared some interests or I liked their work which they linked. Primarily I looked for people who seemed suitable to work with according to my style of working, from what I could tell so far.

Students Contacted

From Games Design:

  • Sophia McPolin
  • Xuyao Ren
  • Ziyu Yun (Nandi)
  • James Grey

From VR:

  • Cal Thorndyke
  • Wan Ting Hong
  • Xuan Liu

From VFX:

  • Chad Wang
  • Hao Yu Tony
  • Brad Robertson
  • A.raya0620211
  • Louise Mesure

After contacting these people, I received quite a few replies which slowly developed into a collaborative group members sharing possible ideas for this unit. Below are the selection of grouping and project options to look into so far.

Group/Project 1

Team Members: Hisham (from Games Design), David (from 3D animation).

An interacting experience that feels game-like, with no necessary start or ending. The current vision a well polished looking grass field swaying in the wind. The player controls a bee (a 3D furry model in Maya), hovering close to each flower and the bee enlarges when collecting pollen (Mario-like when he eats mushrooms). The plyer is in total control of the movement, this will be done in Unity. The game is inspired by the game ‘Flower‘.

In the end I chose this group, Sophia from group/project 2 joined as well.

Group/Project 2

Team Members: Sophia (from Games Design), Callum (from VR).

AR mobile game that involves a model of a dungeon that the player moves around through. The player moves real-life tokens in order to escape or interact with the dungeon model. The token will show up in 3D models and animations on the screen to bring the dungeon to life.

Dungeon rough test/example made by Sophia.
Another environment option- a city with paper flying birds/airplanes. Made by Sophia

One thing to note is that the VR course brief restricts them to have to base their narrative off of an already existing story, for example a film or tv series.

Group/Project 3

Team Member: Xuyao Ren (from Games Design).

The idea begins with development of a game with interactive animations like ‘Heavy Rain‘ or ‘Life is Strange‘. Except it can be shorter, with some narrative.

Group/Project 4

Team Member: Xuan Liu (from VR).

A VR interactive experience as an adaptation of the book called ‘Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane’.