Scarlett White

Portfolio

Category: Personal Development

  • Ludic Lab Whispers Project – CONT’D

    I have been very busy during semester two as the deadline for the Whispers Project I started back in semester one is unconfirmed but soon.

    Following on from my first interview I began drawing the person and designing the image for the interview.

    This is the final outcome. It felt great to see my vision come together and work.

    For the image of the words I was inspired by the environment and worked the rusted iron gates into the image as I really wanted to embed the students words into the route – make them feel heard during the process.

    Whispers Talk

    On the 5th of February the leaders of the Whispers Project held a presentation where people creating projects could go up and speak a little about what they’ve been doing. I was incredibly nervous to speak about my project but I managed to do it.

    I really enjoyed the presentations and it was fascinating to hear how the project came to life. I was also awed by the different directions people had taken it.

    During the talk I noticed that the interview image had some contrast issues and the writing was hard to read.

    These are the changes I made afterwards.

    My second interview was with a fellow games student and lab member. Their perspective on Capital House was much more negative – a stark contrast to the previous interview, nevertheless I really wanted to further understand where they were coming from and had an enlightening conversation as a result.

    For the image I wanted to have some fun with the environment so I turned the bridges sides vertical like a ladder to house the words.

    For the third and final interview I reached out to someone from the Graphic Design course. She had not heard about Capital House before so it was interesting to see a fresh perspective.

    For the visual communication of the answers I wanted to do something different that was not just fences or gates, the moss covered stones provided this opportunity. I focused on creating texture in the moss.

    Working on Accessibility

    During a lab meeting it was pointed out to me that due to my work being PNGs someone with limited sight would struggle to experience the project. So, after the meeting I created a transcript of all of the interviews and compiled them into a PDF.

    Printing

    After the deadline it was now up to me to print out my work and give the project leaders the layout and dimensions for the work in the gallery.

    These are the specifications I used. I sought help from our technician in regards to the paper type and how to create the PDF.

    We used Inkscape to import the files and create the PDF whilst keeping the custom size of the photographs.

    I then sent it to creative services.

    Once the images were printed they were in a large roll of paper so I used a guillotine to separate the images. To flatten them I laid some books on the corners.

    Gallery Set Up

    We now have an official date for the gallery opening, Thursday the 7th of May.

    On Tuesday the 5th I have a slot to go and set my work up.

    To go with the gallery opening the curators of the project created this poster, I find it very cool to have my name featured.

    On Tuesday the 5th I went and put my work up. I went and collected my work where it had flattened very nicely over time. I brought with me double sided tape. When I got there I was given a wall, and got to work figuring out how I wanted them displayed.

    I attatched four pieces of tape to the images and arranged hem first on the floor below. After seekig guidance from the lead curators I decided on clustering them together in one big group. To put them on the wall I used a spirit level to make sure they were straight and only used the top pieces of tape to begin with in case I wanted to move them.

    I originally had them like the left image but settled on the right image. After removing all backing pieces of tape I smoothed them onto the wall and left.

    Later in the day I was called back as there had been some changes in how the layout was going to be and they wanted my okay for them to move the images. After I explained my work and the specifcations that each interview and picture had to be together I allowed them to divide them around the room. I did not mind this as my lab leader had suggested this a while ago and I liked the idea. I will see how the images have been put at the opening of Whispers on Thursday the 7th.

    Gallery Show

    For the opening of Whispers I invited my dad and sister along, we arrived in time for the welcome speeches and then we walked around and looked at all of the work.

    It was really lovely to see what everyone else had done and how the student curators had organised everything.

    My work on display.

    Final Thoughts –

    This project has been incredibly rewarding. I got to experience other departments at the uni and be part of a moving parts gallery show. Talking to students and being able to start to see their persepctives and how they feel was interesting and really got me out of my comfort zone by reaching out and interacting with people I wouldn’t usually have. Th support of the lab was amazing to have, being ablke to bring work in and ask for feedback and how I should go about things was needed.

    Undertaking this was stressful at times as alongside my coursework I had a lot to do but the experience was fantastic and I look forward to what opportunties might arise in year 3 with the lab.

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  • Working on my Traditional Drawing Skills

    Over October I created a series of horror inspired posters using only watercolour pencils and fine liner pens. I mainly draw digitally so this was both fun and a challenge.

    The 2019 movie Daniel Isn’t Real
    The 1992 movie Candyman
    The 1942 movie Cat People
    The 1990 movie Frankenhooker
    Dario Argentio’s Suspiria
    Sierra on-line’s 1995 Phantasmagoria

    Creating these helped me further my creative skills and learn how to adapt and fix problems creatively as if I made a mistake I could not just erase it. During some of them I used glue and mixed media to fix problems.

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  • Ludic Lab – Whispers Project

    To further develop my artistic practice outside of the projects I joined a lab that has just been created in the games department.

    For the first meeting I attended we were tasked with creating a one slide pitch of what we would like to focus on in the lab. I decided to focus on character design as I have always pursued it and it will be helpful to recieve feedback and criticism from the other lab members.

    The lab is also doing a partnership with the Whispers Project. An art exhibit to celebrate the opening of the new Capitol House campus. Our projects can be loosely inspired by this. In the meeting I played around with the idea of creating a character based on locations along the walk and inserting the character into photographs digitally.

    Project Development

    After doing further research into the Whispers project, my project idea began to evolve and change. Instead of creating new characters for the artworks I will now find real life WSA students and do photoshoots along the path with them and conduct interviews with each of them, about their courses, how they are doing in the uni etc. plus their thoughts towards the new capitol house building. The mixed media element is still there as after i have taken the photographs I will draw the students in my style.

    This is the presentation I put together to show off at the next lab meeting.

    The feedback I received was very positive and I was given some advice to begin researching interviews and how to conduct them. One of the other lab members also offered to source some travel microphones for me so I can transcribe the interviews at a later date.

    My Photographs

    I walked along the route with one of my interviewees and took some photographs. She was not comfortable for the reference photographs to be shared but I now have enough to start drawing her in the environments. The walk had some very interesting architecture and history along the way that was fascinating to explore.

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  • Game Poem with Twine

    After the lecture from Jordan I was inspired to try and make my own game poem. I decided to use twine, a text based open software used for making no-linear interactive text games.

    I based the game off of how I describe the feeling of anxiety, like a tiger is constantly following me. To make links to to the different sections of the game you put the word you want to be a button in brackets like [[this]]. That would then make it clickable and you can start editing the next sections. As seen in the screenshot below the different sections and how they connect.

    I wanted to make something personal but it also could be relatable for others. The game starts with you leaving your house to go to work with the tiger following you, if the player chooses to confront the tiger the game reaches a dead end. They must go the day then when they are back home the tiger attacks, they then start the next day, it is an endless loop.

    https://scarlett-tiana-games.itch.io/the-tiger

    The link to play the game ^

    This was a good exercise as it allowed me to explore a different software and to try making something more personal.

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  • Attempting to recreate a mechanic from Portal in one week

    Review –

    Narrative – Silent protagonist all dialogue comes from glados. Dry snarky humour is used to make it entertain and break up the levels. Environmental storytelling is used to reveal things about the facility 

    Mechanics – Physics takes precedent, it’s ultimately a puzzle game solving harder puzzles as you get through the levels. It’s a first-person shooter game with a portal gun. The game encourages creativity by giving the player no restrictions levels that can be solved creatively. 

    Visuals – Stark white testing facility, science lab. Prison. You feel like a lab rat being tested on. Orange jumpsuit reminiscent of prison, industrial feel behind the scenes, cleanliness is a facade. Evil corporation 

    Recreating the mechanic –

    The main mechanic in Portal is the portal gun. This will be incredibly hard to replicate the teleporting mechanic in one week along with uni, so I have settled on trying to have a working gun that shoots flat capsules onto a wall.

    To do this I followed a number of different youtube tutorials. They are listed below

    I began by making a quick moveable character that was a capsule with a camera inside so it would be first-person POV.

    I then made the gun, just a simple rectangle placed near where an arm would be. For the bullet and portal itself, I made them as prefabs. The portal is just a flattened capsule.

    This is a constant bug I was getting where the portals spawned sideways, after enough messing around with the transforms of the prefab it fixed itself, I could not tell you how.

    After a week of work and scouring the internet for help this is where I got it to, I have a gun that fires a projectile, when that hits a surface a portal prefab spawns. Unfortunately I could not get the actual teleporting mechanic to work but as I do not often work in 3D I am proud of myself that I managed to get it to this point.

    This was overall a fun exercise that took me far out of my comfort zone.

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