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Personal reflection : Manca Prah

our lovely group pics

TANG PUI SZE reflection

Tang Pui Sze Tracy / Collaborative project / reflection

It was an interesting grouping in the collaborative project (points for poverty), it was my first time to group with those who are not in the same class.

I believed that our group had done a good job in division of labour, we generate d ideas together and threw out the ideas in group discussion. Afterwards, we divined our group into 2 main teams – graphic design team and animation team, and everyone of us is responsible for different part of the project, we cooperated with each other with good communication too. We show the tasks we have done on blog by time and meet every Friday to give opinions and suggestions to each other.

At first, we came up the idea of fat cat, which representing the rich people, and then, we started to do the secondary research immediately through filming the shop owners/workers asking them whether we can donate the points to famine area like Africa, as a result, we had collected their reactions with confusing faces.

Later on, we created an ironic scene that using Richard Branson (the fat cat)as the main characters of the game, and as the background of the story. It helps making the game become more interesting and create a strong structure of the game.

In this project, I teamed up with joey and we developed graphics design of some objects and weapons of the game, including doing research on the tone and manner of weapons chosen, and decide what kinds of weapons are being used to make the game funnier and look attractive! Those weapons are changed for times to reach the same tone and manner. I have put the main focus on the plane design and make different version for choosing. The problem that I have faced is how to make the aeroplane look like in 3-dimension,finally I come up with different angles of the plane so that it can suit the purpose of the game- to shot the fat cat with slingshot and the plane.

Lastly, it was a great experience to work with my teammates as I am learning from them as well. And this project helps to strengthen my ability of organization and graphic sense and how to cooperate with different people.

The following are some of the graphics I draw and developed so far:

1/first stage of weapons designed.

2/ Second stage of weapons developed

3/third stage of developing the different angles of the plane.

Reflection of Joey Jim Pui Ting

In this points for poverty project, I am responsible for making the weapon, including the art direction and execution( both colouring and drawing). At the very beginning when our group has came up with the wat the fat kat idea, we started to brainstorm about the weapons, we came up with some ideas like bombs, matches, hammers...etc. In the end, we made 8 weapons including the three I have just mentioned, we still have poisoned milk,chihuahua dog, gun, rope, slingshot and virgin aeroplane. We came up with the virgin plane at the stage of our production as it will be great and brillant if we can create an ironic scene that the fat cat( Richard Branson, the chairman of virgin airline) to actually hit by the plane of his company. To make the game more interesting, I have made a cashier, life bar, timer, trolley and health bar for the game. For the life bar, we gave 9 lives for the cat, the timer will count down by 60 seconds, for the trolley, it is to put the selected weapons by the user. For the health bar, energy will decrease from green to red. For some of the objects like timer and energy bar, I have made different version so as to let my group mates to choose which one look best and suit the game most.

In this project, I have worked happily and closely with my teammate, Tracy and Travis. We came up with the idea quickly and each of us work on different weapons and the result is great with the combined effort of we 3! I think our group did a great job in work distribution, we have separate ourselves into 2 group while working on the execution. We have both the media team and graphic team. We all came up with the ideas together and throw our thoughts out while discussion.
What we can improve is the software skills. I just know well about adobe illustrator and photoshop, but not good on after effect and flash, I can just help a bit on that, it will be great if I know these software so I can contribute more! It is a great experience to work with people from digital media as we can gather talent from the other field and work as a team. It is the same when working in ad industry, we have to work with different people for a good project. The joint efforts of each one of us make the result great!
Here are my drawing for the weapons

Sound Effects

We started the idea with a supermarket and I decided the sounds effects would have to be authentic and to record actual ambience noises in certain well known supermarkets.

However when the concept changed to an airport, I thought it would be good to have the sound of aeroplanes taking off and x-ray machines bleeping to make the gamer feel like he was actually there.

As the violence was made to feel more like animation, I chose cartoon comical sounds such as when the cat gets hit. The weapon sounds are authentic and vary from a chainsaw to a cat drinking poison. A personal favourite is when the mouse screams “cat please don't eat me!”

The aim of using sounds effects in this app is to assist in telling the story. We felt the sound effects were an integral part of WAK-A-FAT-KAT. Sound can go a long way in helping to immerse the player in their experience with this app. We felt that adding sound effects will add realism to our productions and help to give the app life.

Sound effects can also be much more than an immersion mechanism. Even the simplest sound effects are capable of holding a sentimental value.

Sound FX on this app adds a subconscious level of immersion. Playing with the sound off would create a sense of detachment to the player hence the sound is an important part of the user interface.

Sounds are transient, but a powerful way to engage with this game.

Ranjeet Rathore

Personal Reflaction

As the collaborative project started we were split into groups. My group consists of 11 people – 8 from BA Advertising year 2, and 3 from FDA Digital Design. As soon as our work started we delegated the work and we came up with the name Avalanche. We chose David as the leader of our group, because he knows how to organize and cooperate the work. The first thing that we were supposed to do was a research on what Points for Poverty is. The research that I made helped me learn more about the topic and how important it is. I also learned about the so called “fat cats” which is a term used to describe a rich person. We decided to use Richard Branson as a representative of a fat cat in our project. The second task was to ask people working in big supermarkets if we can donate our points from a Nectar Card or not, and after that to record a video with their reactions to our inquiry. I faced our first problem there, a lot of big companies such as Superdrug, Tesco and Boots didn’t allow me to shoot such videos in their stores because they don’t what people to associate them with something bad, in that case - bad policies.

It is very difficult to organise many people in one group and assign them different tasks. So to facilitate our work we started to do storyboards for everything that we were supposed to do during this project – we did storyboards about how we were going to split the work, about which name we were going to choose for the team and the game. This kind of organisation helped us to be more prepared for the next week and how to deal with it easier, because when you have everything written down it is more industriously.  So during the second week we decided to work in small groups and every group had an individual task. I worked mainly with Keith and Manca, we were responsible for the introduction video. For the next week we focused on the video which included people’s reaction to the question related to charities and donation and if they knew about Points for Poverty. We decided to do the video as sketches and hand which draws over them. We were not familiar with how to do animation except Keith, so we decided to draw the pictures by hand first and upload them into a video, but later on we decided that Keith would animate the hand which draws on the video.

We met almost every Friday to discus what everyone has done during the week and what difficulties we found. It was very helpful because we all supported each other. The teamwork was well organized and we didn’t have any problems with our meetings or our work during them. The most difficult part was doing the actual animation but thanks to the sources that our college provides and thanks to the technical specialists that can help us we dealt with the technical issues and finished our work on time.

It the last week we made our presentation and decided who will talk and what. As an advertising student I was supposed to do a Marketing Approach and find out which is the best way of selling the product. During the evaluation of the project I learned something which I consider is as a very important thing – to be organized and listen to what other think. I also learned how to work with some of the tools that Photoshop provides. This project helped me develop my creative thing and creative point of view. And last, but not at least, I met new friends, who I thought were very interesting and hopefully I would be able to learn a lot from them in the future.

Personal reflection

here are some updated weapons!

joey, tracy, travis

scanned drawings for animation (Keith, Mina, Manca)