Character Biographies (Collaboration)
One of the original ideas I had for the exhibition was to show off the characters of the game/story.
My idea for this was to collaborate with the art team and show my character biographies along with their character art/concept art at the exhibition, to allow the visitors of the event to learn of the characters in our game and allow them to see the concept art and briefly read about each different character.
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I felt that this would be an effective area of my work to show off at the exhibition, as the majority of my characters do not appear in the game demo (as my group planned to only create two levels). In addition to this, we didn't manage to implement my story into the game, meaning that the few characters whom we did manage to implement into the game (protagonist and sidekick), aren't really explored or described (character/personality wise).
Due to this, I felt that showing them off separately to the game would be an effective exhibition resource, as it would allow the visitors to see all of the characters I would have hoped to have included (early concepts of their visuals, as the artists, never made final completed digital concepts), as well as the biographies for said characters (allowing the visitors to read briefly about the characters and have a visual as well).
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Process
As this task made use of assets which had already been created by myself and the artists previously, there wasn't much of a production process to this exhibition resource. But the process will be explained below as best as possible.
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To begin with, all of my exhibition related tasks were planned out during an exhibition planning task. This idea was the main idea I had at the time, although there were some other ideas.
The exhibition planning task can be found below (same planning as the other tasks).
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After I had the idea set, I got in contact with the art team (specifically the character concept artists) to make sure that they were good to go along with my idea (as it involved their concept art). They confirmed that this would be a good idea and that they were happy to collaborate, and so I now was at the point where I needed to find/print my character biographies.
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To begin with, I thought that maybe showing the character backstories would be more effective, as they show/tell the lives of my characters more effectively. However, I decided that I'd use my short character biographies, as it would be a quick and simple way for the exhibition viewers to understand my characters (and not scare them away with pages upon pages of writing).
And so I went back to the production task I had carried out with my character biographies, made some changes (such as changing areas such as 'Island 5' to 'Ignis Island', as I had decided on the island names since carrying out the task of my character biographies), and then printed them off.
After printing them I cut them up using a paper cutter/guillotine, as I wanted each of the biographies to go with their respective artwork, as opposed to having a sheet of paper with all of the biographies on, and then the characters dotted around separately.
The page with my character biographies is linked below.
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After having my character biographies printed off, all that was left was for the artwork to be printed, which was left up to the specific artists. I had to remind them to get the task completed/printed a number of times, but they managed to do it in time for the exhibition.
After this, the only task remaining is for this to be set up at the exhibition.
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An example of my idea is shown below
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Art by an artist in my group, Stella
I have been able to set this up at the exhibition, and I feel as though it is somewhat effective, as being able to see the character and then read about them allows us to show what we couldn't for our characters in the game.
However, I do have some thoughts/problems with this.
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Problems/Improvements
One of my problems is that the text is rather small, meaning that it's somewhat difficult to read. To avoid this I should have increased the size of the text for each biography (although as they are now, it's not like they're unreadable). However, although the text may be small, there isn't too much that's needed to be read, which is a decision that I'm happy I went with as too much text would have been unattractive and ineffective at drawing people in and interesting them.
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One of the other problems I have, Isn't really too big of a deal. But this problem is is that I feel like our section of the exhibition would have looked more professional if the artwork was all digitalised (as we only had one piece of digital artwork on display). However, I know that there were a number of reasons towards the end of the project that meant they could not have been digitalised, so just having the concept of art was good enough.
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Reflection
I feel as though there were a number of areas that could have been improved when this was shown at the exhibition. The main areas have been previously stated, being larger/easier to read writing as well as digitalised artwork.
However, although there were these problems/areas of improvement, I feel as though this collaboration was somewhat effective, as it did allow the artists and I to show off some of our work (my work being the bios and the artists being the concept art), which we wouldn't have been able to show off otherwise,
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