OUGD603 Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot Evaluation

Evaluation

With this being my first brief I worked on for Level 6, I was happy with how it had come out.  This is quite possibly the first proper self-initiated project I have done based on my interests as I found in the first two years I was just doing projects to pass the criteria.  As well as this it got me interested in animating the Pixel art I was making which I would take much further and develop within the Pixel Transformer I created throughout this year.  Something that I was disappointed with in this project was never getting a reply from either the Megabot and Kuratas designers but on the bright side of this I had a very good response from people through Instagram which led to a live brief for creating a move poster in this style for the Iron Giant film.

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot Feedback

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot Taking the Project Further

Taking the Project Further

I wanted to send it over digitally, but felt like I wanted to add something before sending it.  After speaking with peers in Crit sessions, the idea of potentially adding motion to both bots was thrown about and I began to try and animate the designs.

As this was one of my first attempts at trying to animate a character, I didn’t want to be over ambitious with them.  After looking back at the 8bit games from the likes of Atari and the characters within them, each one had a very basic idle animation where it looked like they were just breathing on the spot and I felt this was the perfect way to animate my simplistic designs.  After creating a few frames of movement, I was happy with this small animation.  I converted it into a Gif format and uploaded it online to be seen by fans and creators alike.

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot Development

Development

I originally created the designs too complex which took away the feel of the 80s 8bit games.  To combat this, I restarted the designs to make them more simplistic whilst also being able to recognise the robots in this event.  Having finished the designs for both robots, I put them together on a square 20x20 print to send over to the creators of the robots by post.

http://suidobashijuko.jp/
https://www.megabots.com/

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot research / Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas

The very nature of this event feels like something straights out of a 80s moving and I wanted to focus on this element in my work.  For me, one of the staples of 80s culture was the Atari and Nintendo games which were all 8bit.  With this in mind, I felt like combining these two elements to create a piece of digital content to send over to these teams.

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot Target audience

Target audience 

Ultimately I would like my work to be seen by their Kuratas and Megabot teams to get their feedback.  As well as them, it would be for like minded people like myself who are interested in this almost science fiction event.  As this would be live streamed on Twitch, the age demographic would be spanned from 13 – 40 as a rough estimate.

Brief 1: Kuratas vs Megabot

Brief

The last five years, I have been following the development of both the giant robots Megabot, the USA bot, and Kuratas, the Japanese counterpart.  It has been fascinating to watch these two revolutionary designs grow and grow over the years.  One of the more exciting bits of news that I had heard about over my time at Uni was these two giant robots would fight in the world’s first international giant robot fight on 17^th October 2018.  As the start of this year was at the end of September, I knew I wanted to create something to celebrate this historical event and thought having a self-initiated project would be a great place to make some content for this.