Creative Futures
Raising Money
In order to raise some money for our End of Year Show, the class had to come up with ideas and organise some events. The two events that ended up being held were a pub quiz and a craft fair. The craft fair was organised by EJ and thanks to my previous placement experience I already had ample knowledge to take part, so I put my name forward and paid for a spot at the fair.
I was assisted on the day by my group member helping me man my table when I wanted to take a break, and used all opportunities to promote our upcoming End of Year Show.
Poster Design
Me and my other group member came up with a lot of ideas for our poster design, and had lots of concept sketches we talked through in order to come to a conclusion. We spent a lot of time at the start researching other posters for inspiration, and focused heavily on the posters from movies we thought were particularly memorable or had a similar theme to ours, we created a board where we kept them and talked at length about what we thought worked well within them all so that we could experiment within our own ideas.
We wanted our poster to be very natural and green, with an emphasis on the scale and wonder of the world we created, so we knew it was going to have a lot of plants in it from the get-go. We did think about designs that highlighted only one character such as just the bug under the magnifying glass, but thought having the two would be more appropriate since the two of them come as a pair within our movie.
We tried to whittle down our designs to the strongest, keeping in mind the ones with the best composition that preferably followed the rule of thirds with the title in a strong area. In the end we took multiple aspects from both of our stronger designs and merged them together to create our final concepts. We chose between two separate ideas for our poster and decided on the one we liked the best and thought gave the best impression.
Knowing that our poster was going to be hung above our display table at the EOYS, we wanted to create it from an upwards angle, so that the people that view it in real life get a more exaggerated perspective than they would just seeing in on a screen!
Final poster design below:
Showreel/Portfolio
I want to enter the industry as a 2D generalist, as I’m curious and excited to try my hand at as many different areas as I can, and broaden my skills in many different ways. I have a particular interest in character animation – so aiming for a place being a character animator or cleanup artist would be preferable to me. I also have an interest in concept art, character art and storyboarding, so I’d probably be happy wherever I end up.
My showreel has solely content that I created during my Final Major Project, as I think the work I did for this project is quite strong, and the project being entirely 2D also fits into the area of the industry I want to go into.
I included some animation and animatic work I created over the project, as well as the character art and concepts I created. The animation I included shows a lot of different angles and movement so I thought it would be wise to include to show I can visualise and animate things from a lot of different angles and stay consistent to the model.
The character art I included also shows that I can draw a range of different creatures in all sizes and shapes and not just people, as well as keep them in a consistent style so that they all fit into the same world.
Below is my showreel:
I treat my art station as a portfolio of sorts, as I previously said I have an interest in concept art and character art. It mainly contains character art and illustrations of mine and I use it mainly to gather strong pieces of mine to demonstrate my drawing skill and show interested parties.
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/neaveings
CV
When creating a new CV for this project, me and my other group member decided to brand our CV’s with the theme of our film characters in order to link ourselves with our film, with each of us having a small drawing of one of the main characters. I wanted my CV to be concise and reflect only the most relevant areas of experience in relation to what part of the industry I wanted to go into. I also made my CV easily customisable so that it can be changed and updated in the future depending on what jobs I apply for.
Business Cards
Within my group, for our business cards we decided to go for a more personal brand rather than brand it off the project, since I already have business cards for myself and a personal brand identity online where I sell my art and take part in the artist community, so I believe I’m recognisable already without creating a new identity for myself and want to continue growing my own personal brand as well.
Art Book
To show the behind the scenes and art that couldn’t make it into our final outcome, me and Una also decided to create an art book surrounding our project. We gathered up all of our work into one place and decided what we wanted to showcase within the book.
Included is a synopsis of our film, character art, concept art from the beginning of the project, storyboard pages, simple breakdowns of shots at different stages of production, and background designs. We are going to include this in our table layout because it’s always interesting to see behind the curtain in projects such as this and we think people would love to flip through it while they look around. It’s also helpful because it shows some of my concept work that wouldn’t get seen otherwise, and I’m interested in concept work in the future.
PDF Artbook:
Creating branding for this project was actually quite difficult for me, as I have an already established online brand for my Etsy shop and my personal art social medias, so I discussed it a lot with my group member about what we wanted to do. I think deciding to keep our business cards more personally branded and then branding everything else for this submission around our project was a very good decision on our part, as it now means that our Final Major Project is tied to our identities as well as our own personal projects and animation in the future.
Physical Display
When the room was ready for us to clear and organise to get set up, I showed up to help out shortly after Andrew and a few other volunteers like me had started. I helped out by clearing out the PCs, monitors and keyboards, clearing out the chairs and whiteboards, and cleaning and repositioning the tables with others in the exhibition layout we had organised.
Table Decoration
Once our table was in the right place and cleared, me and my group member Una went out to look for props and display items to make our table look nice and reflect our theme, complementing our poster when it’s hung. We visited 2 fabric shops looking for possible table covers, and also visited a few shops looking for throws to possibly use. We didn’t choose the first thing we saw though, as we had to keep in mind price and whether it was the best for our table. We also picked up a few table decorations while we were out.
I had a few decorations we could use for the table already, so I brought in various artificial plants and a plush spider.
This was it at the end of the first day, and on day 2 we got our poster up and laid out our industry facing materials and the placeholder for our art book.
Final layout before the room is locked:
Digital Strategies
Promoting my work online is something I have previous experience in. As for my placement last year I opened up my own shop on Etsy and so I have already created a personal brand and presence, and have worked on project launch countdowns and event promotion for my own business, so a lot of skills I have learnt through doing this have been helpful for this aspect of my project. I have an active social media presence on a range of different platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Artstation, Tumblr, Facebook) and use these regularly to post my work and promote myself and my brand, keeping in mind peak user times for posting scheduling.
When I have work I’d like to promote, I usually post it on all of my platforms with links to my other social medias and the work to boost my engagement and get more eyes on my work,
For this project, the class took over the final year Instagram and gave us all the opportunity to promote our projects and the various events we held, I did not take part in the branding this year but did voice my opinions when people were at the brainstorming stage.
With that and my own personal social media audience, I aim to get as many eyes on my project as possible. I’m planning to start posting on my social medias with the most following (Twitter and Instagram) in regards to the project and generate interest with a countdown leading up to the opening of the End of Year Show and film release. After which I will continue using these social medias to post my work and nurture my online presence.
