For the past two and a half weeks the AIM studio have been working on a group project entitled “Substitute for Revolution”. The project brief required us to take previous rooms each student had made in unity and turn it into one big game/interactive. We applied for different roles and assumed a studio working environment for the project duration (following standard working hours and role hierarchy) and it culminated in a exhibition last night to launch our soon to be updated online version here.
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I initially begun as the concept team lead, and our team had a lot of pre-production meetings with the director, Joe, in order to find a clear and direct application of all the previous rooms. We were able to agree upon an idea pitched by Joe the weekend before the first production week, so we begun writing up the various documents and profiles for the engine and production teams including sound and illustration. On the Wednesday in the first week I was able to disassemble the concept team and move them into other teams to help lessen the workload. Lily and Jennifer went to production to help construct and texture environments, Blake went straight onto doing the music and foley for almost all the production, and I begun the illustrated cut-scenes with the very talented Danish who had previously been preparing the storyboards.
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Danish and I shared the workload on the illustration and created an efficient work process. For the majority of the week on illustration he line-worked and I cleaned-up/rendered, although we interchanged roles on occasion. We managed to finish off the cut-scene illustrations the Wednesday before the end-date, so while he worked putting the images in an animatic I hopped over and gave Blake a little bit of help with the sound (as his task was gargantuan), making a few segment soundtracks and foley.
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It was a very interesting project to work on, and although not one I would pursue as personal interest at this point in time (in terms of online interactives), I found myself entirely committed to the work and enjoying the hurdles and teamwork. One of the more prominent experiences I gained from this is you make the work you want to do. Before this project begun I knew I wanted to be tangibly involved in as many aspects of this project as I could, but still have a handle of it’s direction. By pushing for the things I thought would be engaging elements and expressing my interest, I was able to involve myself in things I really enjoyed working on and continue to learn and improve my skills in those areas as I went. I found working with Danish on illustration worthwhile to trade our own work methods in the same way I was able to do with Blake on sound production.
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All in all, it was a very interesting few weeks, and well worth the experience. The interactive will be uploaded mid 2010 – you can find it at http://substituteforrevolution.com/.
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