Week 8 - dichotomy

This week marks the start of another project, the dichotomy project. I'm going to be honest with you, before this project I had no idea what dichotomy meant. By definition it means " a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different". So it's basically a fancy way of saying opposites.  We weren't given too many limitations, in fact none at all providing it can be justified, for example researching tri counts for various systems etc. I decided to forget this for now and jump straight in with designing and research.

I started the project the same way as the last, do some quick research on Pinterest and had a flick through some art books looking at character concepts. I was pretty sure after a few pins that I was going to do a sci-fi character, I've since realised this was the wrong thing to do but I'll talk about that a little later. I started by sketching, just basic doodling really, as I was quite rushed by the time frame we were given; our tutors were expecting a finished design in about three days. I soon settled on a basic design, a scifi girl and her robot. I tried to create dichotomy using shape, angles and size and obviously one is a robot and one isn't. I then went on to think about individual parts of the character, starting with the face and working my way down to the outfit and eventually the robot however I never really got around to designing the robot.

Towards the end of the week of the week we presented the work we had done so far on the project, having a presentation this early straight after the hand in of another project was incredibly stressful and requiring such a large list of work was a big ask. I feel if we were given a little more time to finalise our ideas we could have perhaps justified them a little more. The presentation went disastrously, I knew this the entire build up to the presentation. I figured my idea was quite weak but I didn't expect to be told to start again, I left the presentation more confused about the aim of the project than when I walked in. I wasn't the only one that felt this, I spoke to my peers and most of them were also told to restart.

After rethinking my approach and discussing the project with my tutors I began to think about the project again, I aim to start again from the very beginning and maybe grab some of the silhouettes from the previous attempt and work into them. One of the main things I was criticised for was having an image of what the character(s) will look like before I start designing them. So I will think about the general shape of the silhouettes. I will also avoid deciding on a genre for the characters and decide this later once I have an interesting pair of silhouettes.

In conclusion this has been an up and down week for me, it started positive by handing in a project and I was quite looking forward to the first character project. In all honesty I am feeling a little discouraged about it all however I am sure it will pass by next week and I'll be back at it again. I am surprised by how I'm  actually finding myself with more enthusiasm for characters in comparison to environments. If you would of asked me at the start of this course which I would prefer to do I would of said environments in a heartbeat.