THE END RESULT FOR MY PROJECT
this is the 4 final paintings I decided on and the formation I went with. Within the 4 paintings almost every shape multiplies into another and the shape moves across its canvas to create a new painting.
This week I gathered the materials I needed for the project being the canvases and paints for the work. I then started intensely practicing and producing the paintings. These are the ones in created.
PAINTING #1
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PAINTING #2
I then ran out of canvases so i resorted to anything i could find. SO … i began painting on paper and on the pages from the phonebook.
After doing these works i started thinking about how i would be presenting my ideas in the gallery space. SO the plan is to have the paintings on one side on the wall and next to them will be a projection of a video of the the paintings being animated with the colours moving around.
The questions I am am asking during the proccess of this work include.
Does the digital painting create the next physical painting?
Does the physical painting create the digital animation?
Physical painting + digitalised painting + movement + shifting of colour and scale = new physical painting
With all of these things in mind I created the first set of animations and continued to experiment with them into week 10.
This week for my project I began exploring more in depth the relationship of colours with each other. This interest in colour for my project stems from the work Sunrise #3 (2005) by Robert Owen. I am intrigued by his use of colour in this installation work as every time it is exhibited he places the colours in a different spot. This is was sparked my idea for movement within colours.
I began analysing the colour wheel to pick out which colours I would using for the paintings i will be creating.
I decided on sticking with the primary colours and not try to mix in any secondary colours to my work because i wanted to stick to the basics and focus on the relationship between the 3 primary colours.
Along with blue, red and yellow I chose to include the use of black and white. I then picked out the shapes i wanted to include .
After making these decisions i went on to planning the designs for the work. This started with sketching up designs for the paintings i wanted to make.
This week included all the final planning of designs for the paintings. In week 9 I plan of starting the paintings and working out how i was to animate them to make them move in a digital form.
This post will outline my ideas that I created for my individual game project. It will discuss the process I undertook for developing my idea from just a brainstorming thought to a structured game with a story line, theme and mechanics.
The initial idea
The initial spark for my idea began in class when we took part in a class activity of writing down 5 random game ideas in 5 minutes. Along with a lot of complete nonsense that I wrote down such as Drama Llama and DJ doggo one of the ideas I wrote down was Sewer Rats. I liked this idea because it was about an animal that usually doesn’t get much good publicity in comparison to a unicorn, cat, dog, llama. It wasn’t like any game I have heard of before. I began to expand and think more deeply about the idea that I had written down. I came up with this idea :
‘Each player is a rat that enters the sewer pipes and is trying to escape to the other side’
Narrative and Storyline
This initial idea created the narrative in its self. My board game would follow the journey of a group of rats trying to navigate their way underground the town of Bega. Scurrying through dark tunnels/sewer pipes in order to find the legendary cheese factory which will supply them with never ending cheese.
I chose the end destination to be a cheese factory as I thought it would give the players more motivation to reach the finish line rather then it just being the end of the tunnel with nothing on the other side.
I chose the setting of the game to be in actual town being the town of Bega because this town does have a huge factory that creates the famous Bega cheese. Although most people playing the game will just think it’s a made up name for the game but for the people that do recognise the town name it will add a little something extra to it.
Inspiration
The first picture I get in my head when I think of a rat in the sewer is Master Splinter from the Teenage Mutant ninja turtles. After researching the show and the different versions made over time I was inspired by their art and colour and would like to appropriate this design of greens, reds, purples and black colour into my design. As seen in the pictures below.
After brainstorming these ideas I went to the internet to confirm that there isn’t already a board game with the same concept but it came up empty. Although there isn’t anything specifically called Sewer Rats there are various different games relating to Rats. But nothing that is too popular. The closest thing I could think of is the popular game Mouse Trap. Pictured below is the search result of “Rats” on boardgamegeek.com.
This is the basics for my game and this is where I began my research into what was the next step to developing. I was inspired by the game Carcasonne that I played in the first few weeks of class where you build the game as you go. I wanted to incorporate that into my sewer rat game where the player builds the tunnel as they go to create their own path to the final destination.
What I liked about this idea is that every time you play it becomes a different experience. This could also be created by having a permanent board that has different pathways to the finish line. Giving the player the choice of where they would like to go. This could also depend on what the player rolls on the dice to show what direction to go in.
I knew I wanted to use this idea of chance in my game so I decided to go with the permanent board with multiple pathways. The pathways being the tunnels that lead the rats through the town. Although some pipes will lead you to the wrong destinations that could harm/delay your journey to the finish line. For these destinations I came up with the locations of a church, jail, residential area, pond, park, school, shop and a cat café because everyone knows that cats eat rats.
BASIC DESIGNS
With these elements in mind these are some designs I drew up in class for it. At first I drew up with this one but realised very quickly I needed to upscale everything and add more squares and way more pathways and destinations for the players to land on.
So from this design I grew from this and created this one.
I much preferred this design because of its size so the game would go for longer and there is more opportunity for strategy and game tactics. This week I will be creating this design and play testing it further to see if more squares or locations need to be added to increase the game time.
Materials
Along with of course the game board my game materials at this point are including 4 little rats as the players pieces, cards that have instructions on them that are given to players when they land on a destination, cheese pieces which are going to be used as lives/health and normal dice for each turn.
SEWER RATS!!!!
With all of these ideas , research and designs in mind my final board game idea sewer rats will be :
A board game
Ages 10 to 101
2-4 rats racing through the tunnels to the finish to get to the cheese factory
Roll the dice to determine how many spaces you get to move
if you land at an intersection you have to turn in the direction it states
If you land on a destination you must pick up a card from the correctly coloured pile and follow the instructions on it
Now that I have my story line/narrative, design ideas, and core game mechanics it is now a matter of me physically producing my game and creating written rules to give to my friends to play within the next week to see what is working and what isn’t.
During class in week 4 my group consisting of myself, Loui, Dylan, Floyd and Sophie sat down and created some ideas for our first board game prototype. We were given a few materials to work with such as playing cards, a scoring card and ‘meeples’ (tiny colourful wooden looking humans). We bounced around some ideas for a theme. I initially thought of the idea to collect fish in a fishtank and become the ultimate fish breeder and after analysing our materials we realised that we should keep the idea of collecting a marine animal but change it to starfish. We then settled on the idea of incorporating starfish into our game because the meeples pieces looked like colourful starfish and we thought that was a more unique idea to capture our audience.
That’s where our idea of our board game Stealing Starfish first came into the picture.
Our theme concept was that each player is a marine biologist and wants to collect the coloured starfish from the ocean and put them into their own tank. We wanted It to be a fun quirky simple idea that could become a family game suitable for a large age bracket.
After a quick google search we found there is another similar themed game out there called Aquarium. Which is a game about collecting sets of fish. I found information on this game on Boardgamegeek.com. I found this interesting video describing the game and its mechanics on
https://boardgamegeek.com/video/108523/aquarium/aquarium-gen-con-2016
What I liked about this game wasn’t necessarily the mechanics but more the illustration and designs on the cards and box. I enjoyed the look of the colour scheme as I thought it was very eye catching and appealing to the young generation. What I would like to appropriate from this game is their designs for the action cards into our own game. What I didn’t like about that game was after watching the video review/explanation. I think it seemed a little bit overcomplicated. For our game prototype we wanted to keep it more simple.
These are the list of game materials we decided on
After finalising the theme, design ideas and materials we moved into the rules of our game and the players end goal. The aim of the game is to collect the starfish onto your scorecard and fill up a line on the card in order to score a point.
RULES
Player begins to steal the starfish depending on the card they choose to play
Once they play a card it goes to the side and they can now pick up another card
The aim is the fill up the scorecard (tank) with the different coloured starfish to fill up a line. Once a player has filled up a line they receive a point
The next round begin
First player to get to 3 points wins.
We did play test our game a few times and to start out with it seems to work fine. Although we need to research further into how many starfish would be an appropriate amount to go in the middle and if maybe we need to alter the commands on the action cards to make the game run smoother. But at this point im happy with our groups progression for our prototype and our teams equal contribution to all the ideas being discussed. Within the next week we hope to have researched fully into the development of our game Stealing Starfish.
During week two of our BCM300 class my group and I played the board game Carcassonne. The game Carcassone is a Euro-style strategy game that is created by a German designer Klaus-Jurgen Wrede and published by Hans im Gluck and then published in English by Rio Grande games. The game Carcassonne is named after a French city which shares the same name (city as pictured below).
It is a tile placement game which allows the players to create the landscape as every turn progresses and a new tile and new part of the land will be created. The landscape includes farmland, roads and cities.
Initially we found the rules to be too complex for us and there was a lot of elements that we couldn’t get our heads around such as the scoring of different area but after we all read the rules like three times we soon got the hang of it and were immersed into the world of Carcassonne.
With each turn a player puts down a tile and gets to choose to put down a ‘meeple’. The ‘meeple’ can be placed on the farmland/city/road. Depending where they are placed will determine whether they become a farmer/knight/robber/. Each tile is different but when placing the tile it must link up with one that has already been placed on the board. So the roads have to link up with previous roads and the city walls have to match each other.
Once the meeples are placed and the section is completed in that area you get points depending on which area they are in. So if your meeple is placed on a road as a robber and the road gets completed the player then scores the points for that road. Players get to make the choice of where to put their meeples. As some places allow for more points. It becomes very strategic as each player wants to score the most points but also save their meeples for the best areas. The game ends when the last tile is placed and the points must be scored and the winner is announced.
A key element in this game that makes it stand out is the players being able to create the board as it goes along. I found this to be the most interesting part as each time the game is played it creates an entirely different board each time. Expansion packs have been created for Carcassonne to enhance the experience and add extra parts of board that score difference points.
This game became such a success that it was even turned into a mobile game which is available to purchase on the app store along with it now being available on xbox, pc and the Nintendo platforms.
Along with being able to place the tiles I also enjoyed the design of the meeples. It was a very simple idea but it felt so nice to be in charge of a cute little group of people that began to spread over the board.
I think the game had a strong theme that continued through the game and had fairly easy rules to understand and was an enjoyable experience for the entire group.
For this project for MEDA202 I have created a sculptural work that consists of a triangle that is hung from the roof (the beams on top of the room before the ceiling) by fishing line (so its not visible). The stick of the triangle is hung next to the dangling triangle. The fishing line is attached to a motor at the top which I have programmed through the Arduino software to specifically make the line move at a certain pace, direction and rotation in order to sway the triangles stick from side to side hitting the triangle and creating random melodic dings. The work sits at eye level. Or more importantly at ear level creating a louder experience for the viewer and forcing them to hear the dings. The way the stick swings is unpredictable. Sometimes the stick swings and even misses the triangle all together. This builds suspense for the audience as they begin to wonder every time it swings if it will even hit and make a sound at all. This brings a sense of humour to the work as a triangle is the easiest and most childish musical instruments to play. So seeing the stick miss the triangle is actually very comedic.
To create another layer to my work I will be using a focused white light possibly the light from the projector. Which will be set up behind the work and shines through the triangle to create a shadow onto the wall in front of it. The way the light will be set up will create a big shadow of the triangle. This also adds to the humour because the shadow of the triangle will be huge but in real life the triangle that is set up is tiny and makes a very little quite sound depending on how hard and fast the stick moves.
I wanted my project to focus on sound and music. That’s why I incorporated an actual musical instrument. But instead of a human playing the instrument I created it so that it would be played by technology. The element of sound was inspired by Swiss artist Zimoun. He creates sound sculptures using cardboard boxes and simple motors to create interesting works of art. I liked the ideas of his sound artworks because he created something musical from materials that aren’t musical at all. I took inspiration from this and incorporated musical instruments and sound into my work.
My experimental film project which I named “Recurrence” was inspired by the idea of a repetitive dream or nightmare. My original film that I created included colour but I made the decision to remove all colour from my film and make it just black and white. By doing this I could play around with the darkness and lightness of my film in the editing stage. The base of my idea was created within the editing where I layered my film on top of each other and changed the speed and direction to create a sense of confusion. I wanted my audience to watch my film and feel a sense of discomfort. I did this by reusing the same film over and over again but slightly changing them in relation to their darkness and direction/rotation. In regards to rhythm, I attempted to create a feeling of rhythm by speeding up and slowing down my video in the editing process. I used the found footage of a man shoveling and repeated this sequence over and over to maintain this feeling of rhythm.
Shania Jay 