Sunday, December 7, 2008

Ticket to Read

Voyager is the last place of employment. i was concept artist and illustrator. i worked on a flash based educational program. 

The game helps young students to read. I created all the artwork for the game. from characters to interface buttons. it was a fun project. 

This project helped me grow in my drawing skills and pushed to become more proficient in adobe illustrator. The artwork had to be in vector from in order for the animators to use the artwork in flash efficiently.

Uncle Tocket


Uncle Tocket was the first character i did for this project, This guy was gonna be the one that would be the guide for the look and feel for the rest of the project. The direction i had was a cooky fun loving inventor and that he had to be a ticket. So i took a stab at it with different syles and levels of detail. i didnt know how detail i could go with it. i am satisfied with the final design.

K.T. Ticket


K.T. Ticket is a tom boy and likes to work with tools. We wanted someone who is strong, and have a strong attitude, but still be feminine. K.T. is the main character who the student will be interacting with. She is the one that puts the toy together once you have collected all the peices.

K.T. Ticket Facial Expressions


Here are K.T.'s facial expressions for the instructional portion of the animations. 
got your basic smiles,  sad, and surprised looks. 

ZogWogs


These guys are the zogwogs! These mischievous bunch are the characters that stole Uncle Tocket;s toys. i didnt have any real direction with these guys. cept for they had to be mischeivous and not from this world. i liked the end result. they look like trouble makers, but not threatening for the kids. plus the simple shape really helped me to be able to quicklty crank them out.

Big Z


Big Z is the leader of the zogwog;s. We wanted a hat of some sort to distinguish him as leader. i went through several hats to portray this. The bowler or derby hat was the favorite so that is what we went with. persnally i liked the leatherhead up there on the top left. but you can;t win them all.

Phoneme Mouth Animations


These are the basic phoneme mouth shapes for these characters. Did these for the animators for the instructional parts of the animations.

Tocket Shop Interior


Uncle Tocket's place for his visions. This is where he invents, brainstorm, and comes up with his ideas for new toys. The room needed to be something fun and inspiring for a creative thinker. should lots of his inventions in the room failures and successfull ones alike. I didnt want to put any tools in the room. Didnt want to give the impression that they built the toys here. that K.T.'s job. 

Tocket Shop Exterior


Here we have Uncle Tockets Shop. I did several designs of it. I imagined uncle tocket to live outside the city, more in the coutry side for some reason. i never got any real direction of where. but i didnt want to be in an urban setting. Since he is an inventor i assumed he would have his own means of powering his building. Also because he makes his own toys i wanted the building to reflect that its a place of manufacturing a bit industrial like. I tried to give a uniqueness something that you wouldnt normally see in a building.

K.T.'s Room


This is where K.T. puts the toys together. She is a mechanic type of a person, she doesn;t do the toy design, she just puts them together for Uncle Tocket. So i wanted to show some tools off and some spare parts. I had lots of metal parts and some industrial tools in the room before, but they decided the room looked to industrial and male oriented. I took it back so it can be more gender friendly. This room is also located in the same building as Uncle Tocket's shop. so i didnt want to stray to far from the looks and feel of his room.

This is also the room where we keep the completed toys in. So we wanted a shelf to keep all the toys in and make it easy for students to click on the box where the toy is kept in.

We played around with the idea of a carousel or a train of some sort to roll the toys onto the screen. but the boxes ended up being alot easier for the animators and programmers to deal with. 

Toy Design 1st Round


So here we have the toys that were stolen from Uncle Tocket. The toys have been broken into peices, to get back a peice the student has to complete an activity. Once they complete all the activities they are able to complete the toy and enjoy a short animation of the toy in play.

Most of the toy names were done when i came in. they gave me the name of the toy and i had to come up with a visual to the toy. the toys ranged from psycodelic style to your typical toy. plus i got to come up with some of the toys in the newer batch.

Toys Design 2nd Round


this is the second batch of toys for the kids to acheive, once they complete each session.

Storyboards for toy animations.


As the kids complete each toy. They are treated to a short animation of the toy being used either by K.T. Ticket or the zogwogs themselves. these are the first round of toys in action. they wanted the animations to be pretty short to keep the load times from being to long. 

Corgan Media Lab

This next batch of work, is from corgan media lab. where i was lead concept artist, architectural modeller, texture artist, and sometimes but rarely did some lighting using v-ray and mental ray in 3D studio max. 

i got to do some story boarding, and did alot of character design, and some environment work there. A small team would gather to come up with short story ideas for e-cards that were animated in 3D. Also came up with concepts for commercial spots for EXTV, which also were done in 3D. 

it was alot of fun working there.