The Internship

Okay, so I've told you guys a lot about my experiences in the city. But now I'm switching gears and telling you more about what I am doing with my time at Shine Global.

Again, a brief summary of my position: I'm the character designer & animator for a pending Flash game called "The Harvest" which goes along with a documentary movie of the same name which Shine Global is producing. The movie and the game are intended to promote awareness about migrant workers in the US - specifically, children.

Who am I working with?
+ Two other art interns who are both doing background design.
+ The Executive Director of Shine Global
+ The Assistant Executive Director of Shine Global
+ A Game Designer from entertainment company Worldwide Biggies
+ An Art Director from Worldwide Biggies

This group meets once every week and discusses our progress thus far and decides which direction to head next. The other interns and I get most of our direction from the Art Director.

The first assignment was to design six characters: Hispanic children between the ages of 11-16, which will be the player characters of the game. These characters needed to be pretty realistic and not at all cartoonish, because we had to be respectful of the community for which these characters were based.

I started out by building different body types in Flash - Two standard bodies, two "heavy" bodies, and two "lanky" bodies. At one meeting, people expressed being iffy on the lanky bodies because most farm workers are standard-to-heavy build, that and it looked slightly cartoonish. However, I modified them slightly, so that they were only slightly leaner than the standard build, but enough to still be distinguishable from the others. After that I sketched out a few different styles of faces as well as many different possible outfits. Again, during the meeting we selected our preferences (often the least complex of the designs).

When all these things were selected, I put the characters all together, making sure that each of their parts were seperate so I could animate them later. After getting them all approved, I moved on to coloring (I came up with a few different versions), and then, at last, animation!

Animation is by far my favorite part of this project. I do enjoy designing characters, but in this particular situation I didn't have very much freedom at all. However, bringing the characters to life was way fun as usual. There are only three simple animations I need for each character, and each involves harvesting crops. 1 - Harvesting something by reaching up, 2- Harvesting something by bending down, and 3 - Harvesting something in the middle. I divided these each into 3 parts - Starting from neutral, going in to grab the object, then a loop in which they harvest the object, and then returning to neutral. It is time-consuming, of course, but the progress I make is always fun to see. I don't ever replace any symbols (for those who know what this means) - I pretty much treat the character like a puppet and control & modify each of its parts as needed.

Whenever I finish an animation, I often watch it looped over and over and over...it's kind of hypnotic, hehe.

I can't wait to see these in the game interface. That will be awhile yet though! Anyhow, that's what I've been doing.