OUAN503 - Collaborative, Research

Early on in the project I decided to look into some aspects of the brief that would come into practice later on. By doing research into colour, shapes and references in terms of art style it meant I and the rest of the group would be prepared when it came to the production stage. I created several research boards before we had started creating any physical work that reflected my ideas on colour and colour samples that could be employed. Something I also wanted to do at this early stage is look at imagery that represented some of the arch types that we were looking at pursuing for the brief. To do this I made a type of mood board that contained 'epic' and 'adventure' driven images that could potentially fuel some of our ideas. It's quite a literal approach to the brief, but I think it's good sometimes to have a starting point than nothing at all. In addition to these I've looked at art styles within certain media that I have seen or engaged with in the past. I specifically looked at the game 'Journey' a game where from a visual stand point displays a simplistic but atmospheric art style, and in my opinion a great use of colour and lighting.

The images for these boards were sourced online, and mostly from Pinterest. I've found Pinterest to be a great tool when trying to source images because it pulls images sourced from all over. It also allows you to collect them within the site by 'pinning' them to boards, a great way to organise found photographs and references. Something that I liked a lot about the way images are found using Pinterest is that by searching for something like colour or colour palettes you won't simply get a normal palette and it can come in a variety of forms. For example some of the colour palettes came as dyed material, as paint or as tiles.

In the early stages of the project creating image boards like this encouraged me to think about potential ideas and development in a more visual way instead of a theoretical way. Through the development of different aspects that could later become elements within the animation we create, so colour, particular imagery or art styles it means that we have a starting point as a group. When I first read over the brief and saw the section on arch types and what they mean traditionally in fairytales and those kind of narratives I began to think in quite a narrow minded way towards the arch types and what they can represent. By collecting imagery under these arch types it allowed me to broaden the way I saw the simple story lines and think less literally about the stories that could be found within the archetype 'guidelines'.