OUGD503 - Responsive - Studio Brief 02 - Royal Opera House - Further discussion and planning videos

In our groups we have once again met to discuss the project, At this point we have created some initial ideas and story boards based on our themes of -production, practice and athleticism. We all spoke of how it was important to begin working as we had mainly just been talking about ideas and planning rather than getting on with the work. We had around and a half weeks until the YCN submission.

Annie the illustrator of the group had created a large amount of sketches for the proejct, showing the kind of style that we could use, the rounded, fun and bright style we agreed would appeal to like minded creative people and hopefully a younger audience. In this style our design would be very different from what other people might create and hopefully be something a little different.

In the group we all talked about the style of drawing and felt that it wasn't to silly and the large shapes and playful imagery could breathe new life into ballet. 

The work of the Bauhuas was a strong influence in the imagery and these photos I had taken from the Archive in Berlin acted as a handy bit of primary research to help inform the drawings.

These set of 12 images show the first two animations story boards. One would show hands and feet getting into some of the classic ballet positions this repeating a few times and the finally the ballet dancer on stage. 

The 6 images on the right show the animation story board highlighting the production of the ballet, starting with the ticket being ripped by an usher, the the crowd awaiting and the conductor tapping, all coming together when the curtain opens and the ballet starts. 

Tom (animator) explained that this kind of animation would be pretty simple to create and the movements wouldn't be some complicated. This highlight the importance in our project having an animator as he outlined exactly what was needed and how the animations would manifest. 

 This image that is slightly difficult to see is our final animation story board we discussed as a group that we should focus on the other animations and if we have time in the end try and do it as well.

This initial drawing showed a more clear scenes, and how they may look. The simple nature of the drawing allows the animation to be more easily done. 

We outlined that the first thing to do was paint these scene. We chose a colour pallet of 7 colours so all the designs would be cohesive. We needed to decide on the ballet positions we were going to focus on. As Annie knew the most about what they mean and how often they are used she was the right person for this job. We all spoke about how in this project she would be doing much of the initial work as it required drawing but the work load would even out with the posters, animations and card describing each of the ballet positions. 

In terms of a style of working we moved away from the more collage based idea as it would be more messy and complicated and decided that painting the images would be more personal and give us more control of the content. 

These ten positions will form the basis of the project. They have been selected for their iconic nature and the fact they are some of the most common and used positions. 

Overall the group is working really cohesively and as a team, we all have a similar vision of what we are doing and our time management and contact time is so far spot on.