Gamecity

____The final project of my university course: Gamecity. My concept was to encourage people to feel 'involved' in the annual Nottingham festival, and by doing so I wanted to literally put human beings into classic games. I liked the authentic feel of those original games, that were slightly pixellated, and not-too-polished unlike today's games. At the same time though, I had a wide age-range to cover but wanted to make pieces of work for everyone: humour. By using humour, I felt that this would involve everyone, catch everyone's eye and hopefully keep everyone's attention as well as be a memorable piece of film.

Below are my 2 final pieces!



I am really pleased with how the game overlaying graphics turned out as they came out pretty precise to the original game. My roommate and coursemate (aka the characters of the game) hate me just a little bit now!
I'm also very happy with how the stop-frame animation worked out with the rest of the idea. The choppiness of the movements coincide with the 'retro' game concept and give it a lot more character than if it were just straight filmed, in my opinion.




I wish for this I had stuck closer to a racing game in particular. One that was later suggested to me was comparing it to Mario Kart! Wish I'd done more specific research on racing games at the start. It was also quite hard to judge the time it would take the "racing cars" (plastic chairs) to cover a certain distance across Market Square, and there is a big gap inbetween the female knocking the male's car(chair) over.
____Looking back I wish I'd gotten her to do a trick/wheelie on her chair/car to add something else into the mix where there's a break. Never the less, I am happy with how it turned out, I must just remember in future to do more specific research e.g how the graphics were that precise in the Pokémon game, do the same for this one, based on a certain racing game rather than taking features of different ones.

We also got lots of funny looks.

Many thanks to Nottinghamshire County Council for allowing me to film both these loony happenings in the Nottingham Market Square.


____Going back to the beginning of this project, I created some animatics for each idea, shown below, including a third one of a 'Tekken' (fighting game) spoof which never made it to filming due to lack of time and people being busy with exams, but the brief stated we only needed 2 final motion pieces anyway. I still would of loved to have filmed that stop-motion piece anyway.







____The Tekken spoof would of using the same concept as the other ideas: human-beings in games, filmed in the Market Square environment (because that is where the Gamecity festival is held and also because it's a nice effect to see the public popping in and out of the shot!), with the Tekken gameplay-graphics overlayed on the stop-frame animation. In this one, it would of had fantastic exaggeration of moves (just like in Tekken, but perhaps even more so) such as when someone is punched, they go absolutely flying, and even in this animatic (slight mockery) one player blows at the other, and the other one is knocked over.


____Finally, a development piece for the Racing Game animation: basically the bit before I added in a bunch more sound effects, some graphics etc. This was what I had done at the point where the friends that wanted to see what they looked like flying about on plastic chairs in the middle of the Market Square said "let's see it already!"