Project 2: Self Assessment

For this project, I focused more specifically on the combination of imagery and sound to evoke a certain emotion of feeling from my audience. Specifically, I explored creating a feeling of tension, not quite branching into pure horror material but still making the viewer's heart beat just a little bit faster. I decided to explore this avenue of combination of media after my first project sounded better with sound added to it but it didn't really have a devoted music piece for it. I drew a lot of my inspiration from video game soundscapes, as in my opinion the sound design in my favorite game has really made the mood stick with me and this was a phenomenon I really wanted to try to emulate. Both the visual and auditory components of my project were meant to be reminiscent of a video game overworld or ambient environment, where not much is actually happening but the viewer is meant to soak in the setting itself as opposed to following a story that they are being told.

During the brainstorming process for this project, I had a few ideas. Aside from the indoor hallway scene I eventually settled on, which was inspired by the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I also consider some more apocalyptic style scenes drawing more along the lines of the Fallout series for inspiration. Ultimately I settled on the indoor hallway scene due to ease of design, though I would like to approach the other scene concepts another time. This may be an approach I take with my next project, if my other ideas fall through due to the constraints of the projection medium.

Like my previous project, I start this project in Adobe Illustrator, creating the line art I would use as a base. Because of the simple nature of this project's design, I spent no more than a few hours in Illustrator, focusing mostly on getting the perspective of the room accurately. Most of the time used in Illustrator that was not dedicated to perspective was devoted delicate line work, making sure the curves of the ceiling looked realistic and making sure all the lines connected properly so that the piece would not look disjointed in any way.

The majority of the work done for this project was done in Adobe Photoshop. Due to the lightly animated nature of this piece, two images were necessary. One was designed to look fairly normal, the other was designed with much lower, foreboding lighting and bloody coloration with literal blood smears on the walls and floor. A lot of time was put into the design of the textures of the piece. I designed my own brushes for the majority of the textures, taking existing brushes and manipulating them to better suit my needs. The bloody scratches on the walls were the most complex texture to create. Not only was a custom brush needed, but the brush strokes were smudges to create a directional appearance, sharpened to make them more jagged in appearance, then blurred a little bit in order to remove a pixelated appearance. Other brushes were more simple; the blood smear brush was a smudge-looking brush that was adapted to vary in shade and transparency in order to create a more realistic appearance of bloodstains. My color choices were fairly straight forward, with the base color scheme loosely taken from photos of church halls and the colors changed to red and brown tones for the bloody image.

A very important part of this piece that did not involve traditional programs used in this class was the design of the music piece I used alongside the art. The piece was created in the music program Logic Pro X. The piece was fairly simple in design, with a low rumble providing a tense base sound and various mysterious sounds playing at random intervals increasing the mood. A heartbeat track was added to the piece as well, drawing from my videogame inspiration where a heartbeat is often added to a stealth or horror scene to make the player subconsciously feel as if the heartbeat is their own and adding an immersive factor to the piece.

The two pictures and the music were combined in Adobe After Effects. Being my first time using the program, I had considerable setbacks using it, which ultimately resulted in several unproductive hours trying to get effects to work only to be forced to start over a few hours in. The animation was created by setting up a camera to zoom in on a focal point over the course of a minute. The two images flashed into each other, loosely corresponding to the music’s heartbeat and other sound effects but not quite syncing up in order to create a sense of dissonance. Some fade and an effect called burning paper were added towards the end to fully enhance the work.

My work habits were more effective than they were for my first project, working on the project for at least an hour at a time a few times a week outside of class. However, my time management was still not quite up to par, as I was left without time to finish every piece of the project that I had set out to do. Had I set a few more hours a week aside to work on this project, and perhaps worked on it more during spring break, I may have seen more desirable results at the end. However, I do believe my work habits were enough to achieve a solid product and I am not unhappy with how things turned out.

The final project seemed to achieve the goal I set out to achieve. When I showed the piece in class, the room went dead silent, the tension clear in the air. I was glad to receive positive remarks on the piece, and one classmate was able to identify the videogame from which I’d derived most of my inspiration, which makes me believe I was successful in achieving my goal. While I was happy with the combination of music and image as well as with the coloration of the piece, the design of the hallway itself was very simple, and in the future I hope to create more complex images of a similar type. Also, due to my only getting to the point where I was ready to use After Effects at the last minute, I was unable to finish every aspect of the project I wanted to include, resulting in a piece that, while effective, was much simpler than I had intended it to be. If I were to elaborate on this project, I would definitely go back and try to add some more complex imagery as was originally planned. On the side of the message of the piece, however, I feel that I was very successful in what I set out to do, both in terms of my own opinions on my piece and judging from the reactions of my classmates.

Had I achieved every goal I set out to meet with this project, I might think I deserved an A for it. However, since some adjustments were done last minute which resulted in time constraints being stricter than anticipated, my goals were not all realized. Due to this being in part the result of work habits, I give myself a B+ for this project, as while I was unable to get everything I wanted to do accomplished I still believe I managed to achieve the overall result I was striving for.

Reading Response: New Media: Guerilla Culture to Gadget Art

Whether to resist or embrace the new, the novel, is always a question in the back of someone's mind when the "next big thing" comes out no matter what the subject matter, and art is no exception. In fact, I would argue that art is especially vulnerable to this sort of question. Whether something is or isn't art is the sort of conversation I hear over and over again, particularly in relation to newer mediums. And yet, even when something is largely considered art, that acceptance by the masses in itself may play a part in lessening the message that art sends. Commercialization can only be truly effective in well-accepted media, and the process of commercialization often sterilizes a message in order to make sure it appeals to the masses, careful not to offend or criticize anything that might be well like out of worry that consumers may be lost. If these messages are so sterilized for the public, though, has the medium ceases to be suitable for art? Or is the message itself unnecessary? It would argue that the message is important, at least for art to truly have a purpose rather than simply be a pretty piece in someone's collection. After all, I would argue that one is rarely offended or inspires by a piece of art itself but rather by the meaning one perceives behind it.

The idea of technological art in itself does not sit well with some parts of the masses, but it is when the very definitions of art are stretched in the name of the message that the public gets riled up. It is by acting for the sake of the message and using art as a medium, rather than creating art to express a message, that these norms are stretched, denying commercialism the sterilization it desires in order to make some sort of point. These messages may not always be positive, and the techniques used to express them may not always be easily identifiable as art, but their presence suggests a desire to express oneself in new and unique ways, whether to grasp the attention of the public or simply to gain a new angle of perspective on an issue.

Despite its resistance to commercialization and standardization, guerilla art, as it may be called, is absolutely the art of the masses. It is not art to appeal to the masses but rather to speak to the masses, to express a message they may not otherwise hear about, to show an angle that the masses may not always be able to see in mass media, or to introduce something new that may be perceived as negative or unacceptable by those who would wish to censor it. People identify with it in a way that they do not to mass produced media, as it has more personality and, truly, more genuine and relatable a message. It is the guerilla art movement that has been able to give rise to new media art, giving it a place to begin where such new ideas may otherwise have failed due to poor reception. Readily available tools in the hands of a population eager to spread its own messages and ideas to the world, whatever they may be. This is, of course, in stark contrast to what may be considered the 'fine arts', what you would consider to belong in an art gallery. These fine arts are in no way a bad thing, but they are not necessarily relatable or accessible to everyone in the way that new media art can be.

Project #2 (May be updated)

Project # 2: Research

Artist #1: Hethe Srodawa


(Source: http://hethesrodawa.blogspot.com/)

Hethe Srodawa is a professional concept artist who lives in San Diego. Currently he works for Rockstar Games, but he has also done work for Trion Worlds, Inc., Brain Tangent Entertainment, and Superscape. Being a video game concept artist, he has done work for several well-known games, including Grand Theft Auto V, LA Noire, and Red Dead Redemption. I did not know he worked on video games when I came across Hethe's work in a Google search, but it would explain why I am drawn to his work. Even the work he did not do directly for a game reads like a concept art piece - and rightly so, given his career as a concept artist - and I am heavily inspired by such work.


(Source: http://hethesrodawa.blogspot.com/)

I'm hoping to create tension in my next piece, in contrast to the relaxed feel of my first project, so to see both outdoor landscape work and interior environment work that both embodied the sort of feeling I'm hoping to encapsulate naturally drew me to Hethe's work. The colors are largely subdued, brighter or more bold when the eyes ought to be drawn to a particular part of the piece but otherwise allowing the viewer to take in the landscape as a whole, getting used to the environment over time. I really admire this in an environment piece. Whether peaceful or tense, immersion is super important in creating a successful environment, drawing the viewer in and making them wonder what might be around the corner if they could walk around inside.


(Source: http://hethesrodawa.blogspot.com/)

While I would not call Hethe's work realism - his work is often of clearly fictional landscapes or environments -  They certainly have enough of a realistic quality to them that they COULD be real, if that world was the world we lived in. (This is true of his character art too; though I have not included those pieces here due to his landscape environments having more relevance to my own work, I will be including a link to his blog at the end of this entry should you be interested.) The lighting and colors of the pieces are often someone stylized, but at the same time the pieces are very down-to-earth, the shapes a bit rough around the edges which just makes them that much more believable.


(Source: http://hethesrodawa.blogspot.com/)

I am heavily inspired by video games in almost all the art I do - The project I'm working on right now is inspired by a few, including Amnesia: The Dark Descent as far as ambiance - and to see the work that a professional video game concept artist does is very enlightening. The feeling of the scenes I have included in this post in particular are relevant to both the work I am doing and work that I hope to do in the future, a tense atmosphere that isn't in-your-face scary or intimidating but the longer you look at it you can sense a dissonance in the air, as if the order - or disorder, as it might be - that you're seeing isn't the whole story. It draws you into the piece, and I hope to combine this sort of ambiance with sound to produce a full piece that has a good sense of immersion and atmosphere.

Hethe's Blog: http://hethesrodawa.blogspot.com/
Hethe's LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/hethesrodawa

Another cited website: http://kotaku.com/5866552/the-dusty-concept-art-of-red-dead-redemption/

Artist #2: Feliks


(Source: http://fel-x.deviantart.com/art/Over-The-Stream-390667641)

I could not find a last name for this artist, as every source I found for his art only referred to him as Feliks aside from some signatures on his art that I could not read properly, so the information I could find on him is limited. What I do know from his DeviantArt profile is that he currently lives in Southern Poland and that the art styles he enjoys most are realism, comics, and abstract art. While his pieces are not reminiscent of comics in any way not particularly abstract most of the time, realism plays a large role in his personal work.


(Source: http://fel-x.deviantart.com/art/brook-331214515)

What drew me to Feliks' art first and foremost was the amazing lighting he utilizes in his pieces. As an artist who is both interested in working on landscapes and who struggles with light in her own pieces, I am blown away by how real the light and shadow in Feliks' work is, creating scenes that look three-dimensional and real enough that I could almost walk right into them. Though the pieces are not quite photographic in their realism - the colors are just that much crisper and the textures just a little more smooth than reality - I don't think they need to be. The environments within each piece are still absolutely breathtaking.


http://fel-x.deviantart.com/art/mountain-landscape-299142250

Feliks uses realistic colors and shapes in his pieces, but even so they aren't quite as subdued as the colors one would see in a real landscape. The greens and floral colors of the flora are brighter and clearer, the figures of both the natural and man made features of the environment are smoother and cleaner, and the view of the horizon is bolder and easier to see than in reality, creating an environment that is, arguably, more enticing than a real place. Not only does it look like a place you COULD step into, it looks like a place you would WANT to step into and walk around for hours, not necessarily going anywhere but simply appreciating the beauty of the place. It creates an opportunity to daydream, even for a few moments in passing, before moving on to another piece and another environment to mentally explore.


http://fel-x.deviantart.com/art/Lake-300432406

As I have already mentioned, landscapes and other similar environments are something I like to explore and my work, and these realistic yet whimsical pieces that Feliks creates serve as a model that I can strive to one day emulate. By seeing the way he uses light and colors, I can better understand what goes into a piece to make it truly look like a landscape and not just a picture on a screen. I hope that by looking at these pieces and trying to understand them as environments, I can better my own work and move towards creating pieces that look like a place you could explore. I hope to combine such landscapes with my growing experience in soundscape design to create truly dynamic landscapes that draw the viewer into them through multiple senses.

Feliks' DA: http://fel-x.deviantart.com/