Digital Presentation 1- Post 1

Summer Brief:

The summer brief for my course, and this module, was to research robots from films, games, and other media, and organise them into the categories 'Good', 'Bad', and 'Ugly'. The boards would serve the purpose of helping us to generate our initial ideas for the first 'Digital Presentation' module which is to design three robots- one of each category- and produce turnaround sheets for them.

As these mood boards were supposed to help me come up with ideas for concept designs, I felt that it would be beneficial to include concept designs from professional concept artists and their recent projects so that I could see how they have taken current design trends and manipulated them for use in their robot designs.

I also wanted to create the boards in a way that would clearly convey the overall 'feel' of that particular category with just a glance; to do this I included swatches and organised my images so that the textures and colours of the robots would stand out.

I gained a lot of insight through the research and organisation of these boards and gathered enough design notes to fill 2 pages, snippets of which accompany photos of my mood boards and their reference sheets below:

Good Robots are robots that provide intelligence and generally aid humans, also robots that feature within the piece as a protagonist.

They are generally sleek and clean in design, and often resemble humans- note, they all have a face- in order to convince the viewers of their trustworthiness.

Bad robots are robots that are built for combat, also robots that feature within the piece as an antagonist.
They are more sharp/ angular in shape and are often lit or coloured red to make them appear threatening; they are generally more creature like in appearance in order to distance them from the viewers.

Ugly robots are robots that have been designed with function as the main focus instead of the aesthetics of the good and bad robots, they serve to fill the world of the piece. 

Their function must be obvious as they must portray it within a very short amount of screen time (they are often seen purely in the background or in cutaway shots), and they are generally designed without eye catching features so they do not distract from the featured robots of the piece.

These categories cross over depending on one's focus i.e. design vs plot. Wall-E is a prime example of this as he is a garbage compactor and has a design that resembles something of a garbage truck merged with a JCB (therefore 'Ugly'); but he is also the main protagonist of the film and so his design shows a lot of personality, mainly through his camera eyes which have been tilted and the lenses enlarged to give him a sympathetic "puppy dog" eyed look (therefore 'Good').

I hope to post my initial design ideas within the next week or so, and hopefully they will display the understanding I feel I have gained through this task.