A completely new idea we had was the create an image that portrayed the creation of ideas. A very simple idea was the lighting of lightbulbs which traditionally signified idea creation. The conveyer belt goes into the man’s brain through his ears and there his mind lights up the bulbs. This was only a rough drawing and will be revamped in the future.
This was the final re-vamped image. I incorporated the earlier idea of the Dark Side of the Moon spectrum “of ideas” as well as taking into account our feedback. Conann wanted to see what was going on behind the eyes, so I drew a brain with lightning shooting out of it which can be seen through the corneas. I added extra detail to the lighting and hair texture as well as actually putting effort into the conveyer belt.
The keywords we decided to elaborate on here were “Structure”, “analysis”, “dynamic”, “conceive, create and apply” and “awareness”.
Here we began to think of eyes as the primary element of the picture (as visualisation is in the title and eyes are important generally in this line of work)
An idea we liked was the idea of including a visual representation of divergent thinking, and I thought since imagination is usually expressed visually as being magical and colourful we could use a rainbow or the colour spectrum to represent it.
We used the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album as inspiration:
Pink Floyd: Dark Side Of The Moon album cover
The idea of the beam of white light hitting a prism to separate each hue looks visually stunning, but the generation of one colour into many could also represent divergent thinking. We came up with these sketches that were inspired by the album cover:
using a brain instead of a prism we tried many different combinations of ideas. There’s the explosive brains with straight lines, the wispy lines, the storyboard lines and the comet which was quite random
We came up with this final image for this concept:
we used an eye instead of a brain to symbolise visualisation and kept the rainbow. we made it as colourful and striking as we could to make it interesting
Another idea we had was to elaborate on “data visualisation” and we looked to the film The Matrix (1999) for inspiration because a large portion of the movie is about visualising data and manipulating it in the digital world
some Matrix-inspired doodles
Both of the above images are stills from The Matrix (1999) and were only used as inspiration for our design.
To finish we made this concept image (using a completely original character) visualising a world of data Matrix-style
We decided to elaborate on the keywords “linear narrative”, “organisation” and “animatics”. At first we pondered on the idea of progression, such as a series of sketches getting more and more refined as we go along
some brainstorming showing our progression from keywords into concepts
Our second concept was an elaboration of progression which was evolution. We considered ideas of dinosaurs evolving into birds or the life cycle of a butterfly or a frog, and eventually narrowed it down to two ideas: the evolution of man and the life cycle of a chicken.
early concept art of the life cycle of a chicken for our projectearly concept art of the evolution of the animation student
Here we see the young animation student slowly but surely progressing from a carefree, innocent caterpillar into a sleepless, murderous butterfly plagued by fatigue from the many hours of dedication to his homework.
A very minimalist and cute life cycle of a chicken that very clearly shows the linear progression of time
Another idea we had was the Animator’s Toolkit
final toolkit idea
The chicken idea was meant to be minimalist and portrayed the idea of linear narrative clearly and simply. The aptly named Evolution of the Animation Student was a parody of the famous Evolution of Man image of the ape through various stepping stones in time becoming a modern human.
After some refinement the finished concepts for the chicken and the evolution of the animation student looked like this:
For our first assignment of the module we were tasked with creating an image for the “New Narratives” and the “Imaging and Data Visualisation” modules on the animationbelfast.com website. First of all we began by noting several key words and phrases from the module summaries: New Narratives:
Anna-Mation 