Heath Ledger - The Joker digital drawing

More practice with my Wacom Bamboo tablet with a drawing of my favourite movie character of all time- Heath Ledger's Joker

Zoe, Josh, Aimee, Mark, Shannon and Abigail - THE DREAM TEAM

I can't even tell you how much I've loved working in this team, I love these guys, and our photoshop memories. #TEAMPETRASTELLAM

I also love how Aimee used this picture to describe this difficult break up;

Jesse Pinkman Digital Drawing - Practicing with Wacom Bamboo tablet

Im still getting used to my graphics tablet, so I decided to do a drawing of Jesse Pinkman/Aaron Paul, I think it turned out well for my first actual detailed drawing, but a lot more improvement can be made, time to get more practice!

PetraStellam Opening Credits- Typography and Sound

After 2 weeks of hardwork and even more fun we can now present to the world the PetraStellam Opening Credits!

Interaction Design- PetraStellam ThemePark Coming Soon!

Mark did these great digital drawings of the different features in our theme park and best of all...he drew us in them!

Abigail enjoying her 'cupatea' on the water ride as Josh and I cling on for dear life and Aimee tries to keep down her lunch.

Shannon being a wee darlin' in one of the many gift shops found over the park

The man himself, Mark welcoming you in for the first stage of the PetraStellam Journey

Sound- Week 9

Mark, being the little wordsmith that he is wrote some lyrics for the song, and even got a cheeky Shakespeare quote in there too:

"Stars hide your fires,

Let not light see my deep and dark desires,

On this path we must tread,

Replacing stars now gone and dead.”

He and shannon then recorded themselves singing and we hand shannon's boyfriend play a few chords on guitar, mark added this to the element song from Dracula, skyrim and the theme from Remember the Titans as well as the vocals from our two lovely singers (mark and shannon) in editing an echo will be added to make a deeper and mysterious ambiance.  

Sound - Week 9

So now we've got filming underway for our title sequence we need sound. something haunting and compelling for such an interesting planet, so we began our search for the perfect sound to PetraStellam:

In University we were introduced to an application called GarageBand, I'd personally never used it before but later that night Abigail sent us the outcome to her first time experimenting with the program, Mark however loved it so much he just let them musical vibes take over...

We began to look into soundtracks we thought we could mash together for the right feeling we wanted for out own soundtrack:

Listening to the skyrim soundtrack we wanted to have a deep voice within the sound to help with the haunting vibe.

A favourite within the group was the words to pippin's song from lord of the rings as the lyrics seemed to connect with the story of our world:

Interaction Design- Trailer

Josh was amazing and put together a trailer for us on such short notice!

Interaction Design- Rides for the theme park!

I had to share these sketches of the ideas Aimee and Abigail drew up for rides because they are just awesome!

Interaction Design- Get Yo' Ticket!!

This is the ticket for the theme Park:

Simple and cute :)

Interaction Design- Time to get to work!

Now that we had done our background research and knew what we wanted to have we each began to work on different aspects we needed for the theme park, I was in-charge of posters, billboards and tickets.

Anytime I create posters I think back to my work experience at Ardmore Advertising because there I created my own music festival and made posters and tickets for it, but I got to see how they came about creating such things as well as past work they completed. One thing that stuck in my mind was their work for 'Tall ships Atlantic Challenge' when it first came to Belfast in 2009. They had a number of billboards which would be known as 'Stings'. these billboards would feature an image of the ocean and in the distance you could make out what seemed to be ships approaching, this image was married with some type that read 'They Are Coming..' and that was it. These billboards continued for months until the festival began, but I loved the idea of doing the same for our theme park before it opened, so I came up with the follow ideas;

Each poster telling the audience how great PetraStellam is but not actually saying what it is until the grand opening.

I think if I spent more time on detailed posters I could have created something really interesting to reflect the personality of the world and theme park.

Interaction design- Theme Park Sounds

As we made our way back to University from Build-A-Bear we came across a busker, he was drumming and we thought it would be the perfect type of sound for a parade in the theme park before the firework display and the end of the day.

We of course gave him some money for his talents and helping us with our project:

If we believed in creating an all encompassing and immersive experience design through our theme park, then this music was wholly appropriate as it really transported us in our minds immediately to being in that situation, and if we could transcribe those feelings in any way that would be amazing! (quote from Mark Mullan's Blog)

Interaction Design- Research: To build a bear we go!

One of the features we wanted in our theme park, as I meantioned in a previous post was for the kids to build a soulkeeper toy, kind of like Build-A-Bear...so we took a little trip into town to visit build a bear (and grab a quick McDonalds) to get photo references to help us in our project and designs.

Interactive Design- I went to PetraStellam and it Rocked!

Mark only went and made us t-shirts for our wee theme park. Have you ever seen a more chuffed guy? We're all wearing them for our final presentation because we're so flippin' cool!

Interaction Design- PetraStellam Theme Park

WE'RE BUILDING A THEME PARK GUYS!!!

So we've decided to go with the theme park idea, why?
BECAUSE IT'S SO AWESOME! THAT'S WHY! WHAT WERE CONANN'S INSTRUCTIONS???TO MAKE IT AWESOME!! AND THAT'S WHAT WE'RE DOING!!

And the best part about it is our tag line: "I went to PetraStellam and it Rocked" (courtesy of Mark's creative vibes).

We sat down and talked through what we wanted the theme park to be like in more detail, Mark had already begun to sketch together some fast ideas for rides and merchandise. We knew one thing for certain and that was that we wanted to have a journey to complete through the park in reference to the entire purpose of the planet and the journey from the mines to the starmaker mountain and we came up with the final concept:

When you arrive at the park and before you begin your journey you are presented with your own Soulkeeper. It is our job to help assist the soul keeper on their journey to Star Maker Mountain, the central ride and landmark of the theme park. You carry the soul keeper around with you throughout the park, and it allows you to interact with exhibits, shows, photo booths where the soul comes to life on screen. At the end of the day, when you arrive at Star Maker Mountain for the fireworks display you present your Soulkeeper doll and are gifted a lantern in return. To the lantern you attach the detachable velcro soul that was kept on the Soulkeeper doll, and release the lantern into the night sky along with the other children to create a beautiful pathway of souls rising to the night sky amidst the fireworks.

Art for what the final display would look like.

Interaction design

We're in the same teams for our last project of the year, you know what that means? I'm with my little squids for another week and I'm so happy about that! I love these people..

Anyway!! onwards with the new project!!!!

INTERACTIVE DEFINITION: 

"Technically the ability for the user to intervene in computing processes and see the effects of the intervention in real time. Also used in communications theory to describe human communication based on dialogue and exchange." (Lister 2003) “The shaping of digital products and services for people to use, although it is recognised that the scope of interactive design expands beyond this definition to include complex systems and immersive environments too.”

BrainStorm Time!!

Most of the groups in our class (i say most but everyone apart from us did) were going to make a game for their world, we wanted to physically involve people with Our world, not just in digital form, so we came up with a pile of ideas like board games, pop up books and card games.
The one idea we were swaying towards was a theme park (I honestly can't express how excited we got about this idea). We each took one idea and developed concepts for it to see what it would be like, Josh and I made little pokémon inspired trading cards with the different characters you'd find on our planet:

Typography- Time to experiment!

We began to mess around with lighting techniques like using red tones and blue tones to recreate the stars shooting around and the souls coming from the mines, this was a really fun process to do because we found a christmas decoration in poundland and used that as our main lighting on top of the mountain:

We then taped red stones across the torches on our phones and it worked put really well. It almost looked as if the map was underwater but the shadows added so much to the map and made it come to life- PetraStellam is being an actual thing!

Typography- Putting the map together

After a hard working week and a few late nights we were able to set up the entire set and finally see what it looked like together;

Seeing it all of it put together gave us a great sense of what we could do next, so we began to experiment with different lights and creating shadows to add more drama to the map. Mark even made some little characters to place over the map as they are just as important as anything else, here are some close up detail of the map;

You can see the different things we used like ground up coffee, crushed charcoal and real stones:

Making it rain charcoal

Typography- Typefaces are cool, but ours is the best.

Aimee (the wee star) did this finalised version of our alphabet for the world that we will use to spell out the different landmarks on our map as we pan around it in the opening credits. She kept it similar to our own alphabet so that it is still recognised by the eye but it works so well!

The hard edges to the letters represent the hard edges of the rocks found on the planet and the small circles represent the stars which the planet produce to the galaxy. We plan to have these letters glow with a red ambiance and in the title, the small dots will glow as well.

Abigail put an example of the final title of the world together in a sketch with a few extra details, and it looks great;

Inspired by witchcraft and voodoo typography.

'Create a World' Project switch- Creative elements

Up until now colour was ignored in the 'Create a world' assignment so that we could focus more on getting a solid idea for a world.  

Now in week five we will focus on colour and colour palettes for the world, only, we won't be working on the same world as we were previous. So its a fresh start.

We moved onto a project about an alien race who are travelling through a black hole and have created their own religion- worshipping the black whole.
The Twist in this project was to create christmas in this world.

Coming up with a whole new concept of christmas was really difficult. So we took some inspiration from the Argos aliens;

Not being from our planet, they try and interpret christmas in their own way, and being really ignorant towards christmas they cant really get to grips with it, therefore they end up thinking the kids toys are dinner guests and kitchen utensils are toys.

We wanted to bring this over to our aliens so came up with different scenarios for the aliens to be in like;

At the dinner table eating christmas decorations.
Having stockings in the shape of their weird alien feet instead of ours.
Giving the alien children presents like dangerous ray-guns
For the concept I worked on, I used 2 colour palettes.

One as a reference to the normal, 'spacey' world.

and the next for the christmas theme.

This was the work I did, for the alien eating decorations instead of christmas dinner....just...because..