In this week, we had two workshops that would help us with time management of our project, as well as an intro to story telling. We also had our second social gathering to share and discuss interests between the students from all the masters involved.
We started the week with a social gathering at the LCC canteen so we can exchange our views about the topics between all the students involved in this Collaborative Unit. The aim of this gathering was to find people with ideas that we are interested in to form a project group. I was really kin to get involved in the Dystopian and Utopian project that has been set in the Padlet board so I focused on finding people that was seeking to pursue this project. I found two MA VR students – An and Ria – that were interested and after a long chat, we agreed to find the required group members to get this project moving. I then spoke with two of my classmates, Martyna and Jess, to see if they were interested in joining us, since this project would involve a lot of 3D modelling and it would be better to have 3 modellers instead of just one. Lastly, we thought to add some animations so Martyna and Jess found two students from 3D Computer Animation that also were interested – Veronika and Gloria – and we consolidated like this an initial possible group.
Time management workshop
We saw several tools and methods to improve time management like scheduling our time, using resources to increase concentration and focus (like binaural beats, white noise, etc), and tracking our work patterns to get to know ourselves and how adjust our scheduling accordingly.
I consider myself as a night learner as I feel more productive and inspired at this time. My creative flow is at its best after around 9pm. I am definitely not a morning person, being hard for me to focus on creative work at this time. I also prefer to work alone as I get easily distracted in an environment with other people. Music or podcasts in the background has always been helpful but it depends of my mood or the activity I need to do.
Storytelling workshop
In this session, we started with the narrative structure of a basic story. Usually the stories are shaped into a 3 act structure:
- Beginning. Set up or thesis.
- Middle. Confrontation or anti-thesis.
- End. Resolution or synthesis.
It is important to differentiate between plot and theme in story telling. The plot describes what is the story about, whereas the theme describes context of the story (time frame, aesthetic, etc). It is also useful to differentiate between text and sub-text. The text is the narrative or the actions that take place in the story, and the sub-text is how the audience identifies with the story (no need to be shown in the actions of the story but what it is interpreted from what is shown).
The characters and the story shape must have the following in order to be engaging and interesting:
- Suspension of disbelieve. Audience is willing to accept anything that is happening in the story (e.g. talking fish).
- Character flaw. This makes the character real, problematic, and gives them the opportunity to grow, which can be part of the story development (character arc).
- Inciting incident. This is an incident that confronts the protagonist with a major dramatic question that makes the story to move forward (plot points).
- Climax. This is the moment when the second act ends and the audience wonders how is this going to be resolved (character flaw or problem cannot be sustained anymore).
These two workshops were very helpful for our future projects. I consider that time management is a key aspect for any job from any background but for VFX artists specifically as we will have to deal with really tight deadlines and with last minute problems that will need to be resolved quickly and effectively. The story telling is also a key aspect of this industry as we could be really good VFX artists in the technical aspect, but we need to keep in mind that a sequence of a movie can be very well produced and not show any interesting story to keep the interest of the audience, so it is important to take care of how we tell or transmit a story.