In my final major project, I hoped to concentrate on concept art design and to be working with different mediums and ranges of surface. I also had an idea of a story line for my project that would’ve been narrated via text or a voice narrator. I had also thought about doing work for my peers and be given tasks to follow for their work and follow a short brief that my classmates would’ve set out for me. I had many ideas for my final project, and I might’ve been a bit too ambitious. However, when I started my work, I came to realise that I would have to cancel few ideas and stick to one solid idea and to concentrate on that one main theme.
The concept was food porn, but just not any food porn this food porn was based on “curry” or “Indian food”. This project was mainly to educate the western part of the world that there is no such thing as “Indian food”, but there are state cuisines and regional cuisines. It was to educate that if someone came from India, they do not speak Indian because Indian is not a language and in the same manor “Indian food” or “curry” is not the language of the Indian cuisines. The cuisine that I have concentrated on comes from the state Gujarat. A land with a diet that mainly survives on seasonal fruits and vegetables, pulses, lentils, different types of breads, rice, spices, and sweets. It’s a land that is predominantly vegetarian or vegan, the use of meat is very limited and most of the state is dry so people had to and have to rely on ration that is like lentils and pulses because they are easy to store and won’t go out of date.
This project was truly a one-man army. I had to play many roles within my own project, from researcher to animating my concept on After Effects, although I did get some help from my classmate to help me out how to animate my work. The first thing I had to do in my project was to start of by creating mood boards using secondary images found from the internet then to start taking pictures of my own cooking and turn them in to mood boards on a software called Pureref. By working from primary resource, the work became more personal and intimate.
I also watched a documentary on Indian cuisines on Netflix that is called Raja Rasoi. The show covers many mainland of India and there cuisines and the history behind those cuisines. I was reading articles online about some of the cuisines or deserts and their origins. This process of doing researching was a boost and helped me to be influenced and invested into my practice.
To illustrate my work, I started to use the photographs to work on my concept work and draw everything out in a sketchbook. Just the way I would cook and take my own pictures I wanted my drawings to resemble the same where it was and drawn on paper and coloured in, I didn’t won’t my drawing to look to digital because then it would take the purity away.
For the project I also made Foley sounds and worked with a friend who makes music and I gave him an idea that I wanted a 1 miniute and 30 second sound piece that was a fusion of the Gujarati folk music Garba and something that you might hear in a Studio Ghibli so we collaborated and created the sound piece that was placed in the video after the animation was complete. The Foley sound and the sound piece makes the video whole and gives a sense that the work is somewhat complete, when I know that I could change and make it better in many ways.
Foley sounds
Foley sounds and the final sound piece.
There few ups and downs in my project. The ups were the drawing and stylizing the work. I think the drawings came out to look great, the concept, positioning to colouring all of that turned out to look vibrant and vivid, however when it came down to animating my drawings I had to cut out many of them and the reason behind that was, because they were hand draw and not digitally I had to edit the scanned images on to Photoshop so that one image is broken down into layers, which then would make it easy to animate and what to animate on After Effects. And because this was a time-consuming process and with had a time limit, I could’ve not got all the images done in time, so I had to be selective.
I must say that nothing went badly, but it did fall short and I think that was because the nation went into lockdown and we didn’t have direct contact with our peers and tutors. Being around them during school times would’ve helped me and the rest of the class to make even a better project, but nonetheless I think I/we have done a great job of it at home even with the less resource that I could download on to my laptop from the creative cloud, and I am glad that the tutors had Zoom and Microsoft team meetings with us. That was a great way to communicate remotely.
During the lockdown communication was the key, the survey didn’t prove to be the greatest form of communicating because hardly anyone answered both my surveys, however the Microsoft team and Zoom meeting were more beneficial because could hear people saying and giving advice on my work.
Finally, to conclude my evaluation, I am going to express that I got to learn quit a lot about my own cuisine and their origins. I learned that working on paper and then to animate it later doubles the job so in the future I will work more digitally so it will save me precious time and also acquire another skill, and refine in it. I think I will be concentrating on concept design, illustration and sound especially Foley sound, because that makes me think about the technical aspect of doing an oil painting and I see Foley sound in the same way. I have learned many things on this course, but these will be the main fields that I would like to concentrate on.
Nav's Game Design 