The Death of 2D Animation - What Happened?

Don Bluth and Gary Goldman are one of the most renowned animators and had worked on animated films such as The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time.

Recently, Doug Walker, whom is known for his Nostalgia Critic persona had a chance to interview both Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. In the interview, they were asked about their feelings about modern day animation. Don Bluth replied that when the early 3DCG animated films were successful, every other studios had switch from 2D animation to 3D, resulting them looking the same. The characters felt like puppets and lost the human touch. He also expressed that 3D animated films are trying to be more realistic to the point where it looks like a live-action film.

As someone who love animation, I can understand and feel for him. 2D animated films is becoming a dying art in the west. Heck, Disney even announced that they do not have plans for 2D animated films for the next decade. This doesn't mean that there is no market for this type of animation. The success of many crowdfunded 2D animation projects such as Don Bluth and Gary Goldman's Dragon Lair Returns and Hullabaloo Steampunk by veteran Disney animators clearly shows that people still do care and appreciate for 2D animation.

With that said, why did many institutions, schools and universities stop offering traditional hand-drawn animation classes to students? Some of my classmates were also eager to learn too. We did ask one of the lecturers and he wasn't sure why 2D animation was not included in our Digital Arts course. This is sad but it did not stop me from learning hand-drawn animation myself. I hope someday I could create my own full-length animated film.

Day 12 (Week 11)

CLIENT PITCH PRESENTATION
Today was my turn to pitch my video game idea. I believed I did okay during the presentation. The problem I had was there was too much information to talked in the 5-minute time limit. I had to remove 30% of the content, resulting in some parts without proper explanation. My stage fright also made my speech to be repetitive in the beginning but I managed to calm myself down after the few slides.


From this presentation, I can see that I have somewhat improved my public speaking skills since the first group pitch.

The Future of Gaming - Mobile Games

Arcade/Video game company Konami has changed drastically for the past year beginning with the cancellation of Silent Hills, a horror game directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, staring Norman Reedus. Since then, every news from Konami has have been very controversial. I want to talk about one particular news that came out shortly after Silent Hills' cancellation. 

Back in September, a report from Nikkei had indicated that Konami was moving away from the AAA console business and that they wanted to focus more on the pachinko business in Japan, as well as the constantly budding mobile market. From a business standpoint, it is understandable why they made such decision. AAA video games are very expensive to make and it doesn't always guarantee a profit, just like Hollywood films. On the other hand, mobile games are low-cost which companies would not have to worry about losing money.

Although mobile games are sometimes profitable, the mobile game industry is a huge mess at the moment. One major problem is that these games are plague with micro-transaction. It's the very reason why mobile games are nicknamed Fee-to-Pay. Many mobile games have locked contents behind a pay wall, forcing players to spend more money to buy in-game stuff. Before you know it, the player may have wasted hundreds or thousands of pounds just to play a game. This is a bad anti-consumer business practice.

Mobile gaming also has a serious problem with copycat apps. The mobile app market has become completely inundated with applications that do nothing but copy and paste the efforts of brilliant developers for a quick buck. It’s gotten so bad that most consumers don’t even know which one was the original. The saddest part is many of these clones are so successful that the original games and their original developers have no reason to exist beyond inspiring more clones.

Day 11 (Week 10)

CLIENT PITCH RESEARCH
For the solo client pitch, we were given freedom to pitch anything as long as it is related to our Digital Arts course. The idea I decided to pitch is an action role-playing game that has a hard but fair difficulty. I used FromSoftware's Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne as the basis and starting point of my game design.

Setting: Cyberpunk Fantasy.

Story: Humanity has fallen, only despair remains. The player is one of the few remaining humans. The player decided to venture into the city of Yggdrasil, home of cybernetic research, to unravel the mystery behind the humanity's destruction, hopefully finding a cure to the cybernetic virus.

Tagline: Technology makes us human, makes us more than human, makes us human no more.

Storytelling: The story is designed from ground up to be interpreted by the player, rather than told to the player. This can be achieved through minimal and vague cut scenes, environmental storytelling, item descriptions and NPC interaction. 


Gameplay: Branching level design with inter-connecting areas via shortcuts that can be unlocked by players. Each area ends with a boss fight.  Requires backtracking, encourage players to explore. Death has consequences. Asynchronous co-op. Easy to learn, hard to master.

Target Audience: 16+ due to violence and fear.


Cost: Marketing - 40%, Art - 37%, Programming - 12%. Debug/Game Testing - 3%, Manufacturing – 2%, Others – 6%

I will prepare some simple concept art to visualize the game so the client can understand more about the game. 

Day 10 (Week 10)

LECTURE - Self-employment
Guest speaker Peter Micklewright is a freelance graphic designer. He gave us an insight on self-employment and how it differs from working for a company. It is hard to freelancing in the beginning as you need to expand your network and sell your brand  in order to gain more customers. 

Positives:
+ Flexible hours
+ Control over jobs and clients
+ Work whenever you want
+ You are your own boss
+ Keep all the profits

Negatives:
- Inconsistent workloads
- Difficult to distinguish work and personal time
- A lot of traveling
- No employer benefits
- Risk of not getting paid

Freelancing means that you have to exchange instability and the risk of failure for professional freedom. On the other hand, if you are wiling to risk your stability for something more in tune with your professional goals than a traditional job, you have the opportunity to build your name and reputation in the industry.

SEMINAR - Production schedule and hourly rate 
Peter Micklewright taught us how to manage our production schedule and hourly rate for being a freelancer. The more experienced and professional you are in your field, the higher hourly rate can be applied. The hourly rate calculation/formula he gave us was pretty complicated at first but we managed to understand it after some practices on the spot.

I was happy that this was taught to us since freelancers usually do not disclose the details on their work.

Day 9 (Week 9)

LECTURE - Online Presence 
Simon Wood from Holiday Xtras was not available few weeks ago but he managed to return and give us a lecture. His lecture was about online presence like social network profiles. He explained to us that our online presence will always affect our working life. That's why we should always maintain a good image of ourselves online. Having a large network and connection can help to sell ourselves to companies.

GUEST SPEAKER - G Forces
G Forces is a company that does automotive web software and digital marketing for automotive companies. Some of the things the showcased to us was awesome. As someone who love video games, I was excited to see the high-quality 3D models of vehicles they made. This is the only guest speaker so far that came from a company that has similarities to a video game, VFX or film studio. I love how G Forces experiments on finding different ways to integrate the 3D models into websites and applications.

This could be my potential placement as I like 3D modelling.

Day 8 (Week 8)

GUEST SPEAKER - Google User Experience Researcher
Rajiv Arjan from Google gave us an insight on Google and his role in the company. He worked as a user experience researcher. He explained that he had to do surveys and experiments in different countries so that Google can create a more user-friendly interface and experience for different cultures.

I was surprised that people from Google would come and give a talk. I'd always heard that Google was a fun and exciting place to work at because they allow their employees to try out new things. From Rajiv's experience in Google, the rumors were right. I'll probably apply google for placement and a job.

SEMINAR - Pitch 3
We pitched our Gulbenkian app to the class and the response were mostly great. I was happy that I managed to present my part without needing to read notes as I was advised not to. Ania praised me for my improvement. It really increased my confidence in public speaking.