What If Metropolis; Reflective Statement

The What if Metropolis project was, again, a mixed bag for me. There are elements that I think could've gone a lot better, and other things that make me feel quite optimistic. 

To start with the negative, I knew from the moment I was given my artist that this was going to be an up-hill battle in terms of connecting with the aesthetic. I really like Leigh Bowery, and I love his taboo trashing sentiment. However, his artwork is quite far from what I'm used to, and the aesthetics I usually enjoy exploring. Having said that, I'm very aware that moving outside my comfort zone is important for industry, but also just in terms of cultural exposure. 

I think I did face the challenge to an acceptable degree, but I found that I was a bit blind as to whether what I was doing right/wrong, aside from feedback. Not having much experience with bright colour palletes and messy compositions, it was difficult to tell whether what I was producing even looked good; whether I was following Bowerys messy style, or just creating bad composition. 

Sometimes, I found myself falling back on my own personal preferences. For instance, it bugs me that I used black instead of yellow or white for the ground, since I think that would have been much more in line with the reference images. I probably did that because it 'looked right', and I couldn't figure out how to get white or especially yellow to work with the colour pallet.
Also, Bowery didn't use fluorescent light in his work. I think I added emission in because in a mess of seemingly foreign artwork, that's something that stood out as familiar and I could connect to (I really really like quirky lighting, and used to collect ornamental lights). 

I can in retrospect reason that fluorescent lights do have a big place in clubbing, and I don't think they necessarily look bad, nor would Bowery have not used fluorescent lights in a city if he had the opportunity. More-so that I can't really explain why I put them there, other than that I thought they looked nice. In film, in regards to mise en scene, you should always be confident that the reason behind an addition to the shot is based in the narrative or target aesthetic, or you risk contradicting it.

Moving on, I recognise also that my drawn preparation for this project was severely lacking. There was a good period where I produced a lot; my colourful initial thumbnails I genuinely really like, and they really drove my initial development. But in-between the initial thumbnails and the orthographs I produced very little, which was problematic. I barely explored my options for full composition at all, and whilst the idea I had for my concept art seemed good in my head, when I came to model later on in the project, it had some pretty serious flaws. I probably could have avoided this if I'd visualised and branched out more before doing my concept art. I'd have more thumbnails to show for it too, come to mention it.

I'm beginning to worry that with all this said, it's seeming like I'm implying that the project was a complete disaster, which isn't true at all. The main part of the project that really brought my enthusiasm back was the modelling process. I think I may have mentioned this, but I feel really comfortable in software such as Maya. Although my final piece suffered somewhat from bad planning, I really came to life again when I started modelling and fitting things together. It reminded me of the satisfying feeling of playing with Lego. I enjoyed texturing, I really enjoyed the lighting (perhaps a little too much), and experimenting with rendering was pretty fun too.

I don't want to get too over-confident, in a program like Maya, there's defiantly frustration waiting ahead. But, I think I've got my first taste of how powerful an expressive tool Maya can be, and as someone that always wants to express my ideas but is hugely under-confident in drawing, it's potentially a big liberator.

Coming back to the project, I'm also quite pleased with how I responded to the feedback from my first render. I really think I understood the problem with the composition, and although the fix was somewhat botched and makeshift due to the time constraints, it really did liven the scene up quite a lot from just a few small changes. It's far from perfect, but its better. 

And to clarify, I am pleased with my final outcome. Perhaps not for that it aligns perfectly with the brief, but for what it represents, and even just that it looks nice, and it feels good to make something that looks nice. I'm pretty sure that's not the type of reasoning that counts towards marks, but it certainly counts towards my enthusiasm.