RECORDING
22/02/2021
I was very lucky to have been paired up with a friend who I had worked on a project with before during my foundation year. It was reassuring to know that we will both be diligently working on this project together with no awkwardness or distrust, which was something often found in group projects.
The recording was an interesting experience and I was glad that there was nothing I regret saying/not saying. The conversation was an interesting discussion that had the both of us wondering if a group would want to animate it.
Though I was slightly worried about not having any idea for any of the recording, I was still excited about working on the project.
BRAINSTORMING
23/02/2021
The recorded conversations were all different in terms of the energy and dynamic of each pair. Some were active and comical, swaying off-topic or filled with improv. Some were more quiet and awkward, with long pauses and nervous chuckling as they didn’t know much about the given topic.
I initially thought that the best recording would be the more natural ones where the conversation flowed with no hesitance or stuttering, though as I listened through to all the recordings, the one I really enjoyed was track 06, an awkward, mostly one-sided conversation about the Mars rover.
There were a lot of long pauses, nervous chuckling, and both parties had dramatically different personalities. As neither of them knew much about the topic, everything they said were ambiguous and applicable in a variety of different context.
Discussing with my partner, we short-listed a handful of our favorite recordings (as well as played around with the pen tool) and pitched different possible ideas for all of them.
Because of the ambiguity of track 6, there seemed to be a lot of freedom for us to insert any non-verbal conversations and play around with the visual more, so it ended up becoming the track we went with.
With a rough mindmap, we wrote down all the ideas we had and possible scenarios the two characters could be in. What a lot of them had in common was the idea of a human trying to find out what the creature she encountered is.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE CONVERSATION:
[A] What is that? (laughter) Um….
[B] oke
(long pause)
[A] Ohhhhh….sorry, I had to Google that. I didn’t know what that is. So it’s basically the thingy that drives around Mars?
[B] Heh…oke
[A] Yeah. I-I didn’t know either. (laughter )
[B] (unintelligible) um…k
(very long pause)
[B] Oh…ah, yeah. Uh, yeah. It’s, uh….(laughter)
[A] (laughter) I’m sorry.
[B] Yeah.
[A] D’you wanna say something? (laughter)
[B] Eheh…? I don’t know…(laughter) We can imagine a robot on the…Mars…planet, on, uh
[A] -yeah.
[B] -with an alien or something like that.
[A] Yeah.
[B]Heh. Strange(?).
We decided to go with the straightforward idea of space, as it was one of the few specific things mentioned in the conversation. I suggested an idea where an astronaut encountered a creature on Mars that was similar to the Mars Rover.
I made a rough sketch to visualize our idea so far.
We both like the wide-eyed look of the alien, and I decided to explore more designs based off of scientists’ speculations of extraterrestrial life as well as incorporating the appearance of the Mars Rover.
RESEARCH AND LINKS:
- Mars temperature ranges from -63C to 20C
- If alien life exists in our solar system, it may look like this
- What Would Aliens Actually Look Like? We Asked 7 Experts
- What would alien life actually look like?
Based on her voice, I also did some early sketches of what the astronaut could look like (a rather naive, rookie astronaut on her first space travel). I drew a variety of styles so we could decide on which design we could both draw.
I feel very optimistic about the start of this project. Me and my partner have been communicating well and our ideas are being steadily developed. The division of work were also fair and play up to both of our strengths. I hope that we will be able to keep up this dynamic as we begin to work on the animation.