This past weekend I went to see Detective Pikachu. i was really looking forward to watching the movie as its the first live action Pokemon movie and the trailers have looked very reasonable. I was both happy and disappointed with the full movie.
Does it live up to all the hype? No. The movie has a convoluted plot backed by a script that sounds like it was put through Google translate several times. Much of the acting (outside of some small moments with the main protagonist and Pikachu) is forced and feels ridiculously fake. This isn't helped very much by the script which stresses plot points as many times as possible in order for Pokemon's younger fans to keep up with the needless plot twists that can be seen coming from a mile away. With the unique cast of characters we already know and love in the Pokemon universe, it feels weird that we see none of them in this movie. Sure it's probably a good idea to keep Ash and gang quarantined in the anime world, but there are many evil teams that have cooler (and more understandable) objectives than the villain of this movie did. Additionally it would be cool to see nods to popular characters from the video game franchise. In particular an appearance of the mythical Pokemon trainer Red would be a perfect inclusion as he is rarely talks in the games but holds a special place in many of the series' fans' hearts. Despite all of these setbacks, there are many hidden gems in this movie. Whenever Ryan Reynolds seems to have been given a little more leeway in the script, the resulting jokes are funny and land a lot better. The relationship between the movies' main character and Pikachu is well developed and the scenes where we just get to see them interact are some of the best in the entire movie. Finally the animation is frickin' beautiful. The movie is honestly worth the watch simply for the live action Pokemon world it creates. The few sweeping shots we get of this world are breathtaking. I can feel the young child in me yearning to live in the world of Pokemon. Whenever we see Pokemon in this film they don't disappoint. Their reactions are equally life-like and unique. I simply wish the movie was longer so we could spend less time on the terrible plot and more time on the cool visuals of the world. Overall a terrible movie but an enjoyable experience. -Watching Detective Pikachu -Problems in the movie -Enjoyable parts of the movie -Final thoughts
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Recently for many of my portfolio images, I've been exploring the limits of what I can do in Photoshop to create images that are weird and fun. It has been exciting to explore areas of the program I haven't used much before and see what I can make out of them. This has led me down paths I would be too scared to go down for a normal project. I've used weird brushes to create painting-like images. I've messed around with the blur tool to soften lines and create weird atmospheres. In the future I'm planning to dive even more into these tools. The more I use tools in a creative, experimental manner, the better I can use them when creating an actual piece of artwork for a project. Already I feel excited to put the brush tool to use sprucing up the basic polygons I use to create the main bodies of my Photoshop works.
Continuing to experiment and evolve is one of the things you always need to be doing as an artist. Most of the time we are unmotivated to break outside of our comfort zone. It's hard to start a piece of art that you know isn't going to look great. However, the tools I've used while creating my last line of works in PS have shown me unique ways to make things look good even if the works themselves look less-than perfect. For every great masterpiece in PS there are at least too or three failed abominations and that's beautiful in its own way. In the coming weeks I look forward to finding even more tools in PS and getting to use them in a creative and powerful way. -Exploring creatively in Photoshop -Why it helps me grow Just before spring break started at our school, I traveled with my school ITS theatre troupe to the North Carolina state competition. I brought my sound design for Dead Man's Cell Phone with me to compete. This was a very new experience for me as I had never competed with a theatre tech presentation before. I knew what I had was good work but I worried I wouldn't be able to present it all properly within the given time frame. Our school has a lot of great tech people and I wanted to put my name up there with them by getting a superior score.
thankfully I was very prepared going into the room. We worked the night before with our teachers and fellow tech students to put the finishing touches on our presentations.When I went into the room I was relaxed and ready to show them what I had. Everything went smoothly as I quickly went through my sound plots, cue sheets, and played cues off of my bluetooth speaker. In the question portion I didn't get any questions that left me at a total loss which I took as a very good sign. At the end of the competition I got my scores back. i received a perfect score and critic's choice (an honor given to the best person in each field). While I will not be taking my sound design on to nationals, (due to my ability to only compete with one event and a critic's choice in duet acting) presenting my sound design at State's was a valuable experience. It helped me learn to explain the choices I made in the show clearly and concisely. It also gave me even more appreciation for the technical side of creating a working sound system as I had to explain the challenges I faced in rigging up speakers and creating a working speaker chain. These are skills I will be sure to take into the future as I continue to do sound work. -When and what competition I went to -The competition in summary -Important takeaways If you've read my past Pokemon and game related blogs it probably comes as no surprise to you that my favorite Pokemon game is Pokemon Black and White versions. These games have a riveting story line backed up by an interesting cast of characters all packaged in what is still one of the hardest Pokemon games to actually defeat. All of these would be great on their own but up until recently I hadn't realized just how deep this game truly goes.
The land in Pokemon Black and White is based off of the real-world location of the USA. I've written blogs in the past about how GameFreak brings this world to life in the Pokemon and characters of the game. However the deeper I look, the more I see that there is an elaborate comment on the way American society functions as a whole. The main evidence of this is the two main legendary Pokemon in Black and White. Zekrom and Reshiram are the legendary Pokemon of ideals and truth respectively. The legendary Pokemon of each region usually represent the heart and soul of that region, the core values of the real life people who live there. In different regions we might see a sun God Pokemon or a Pokemon that controls time. Instead we see in America that ultimately we pursue our own goals. Instead of deferring to higher gods or powers, in America the ultimate power is your own will to get things done. The legendary Pokemon also reflect this aspect in how they follow humans. Most legendary Pokemon are found in far off places. They avoid humans or actively seek to destroy them. Zekrom in Reshiram however follow humans by nature. Even in their Pokedex entrees it claims that they follow a trainer with strong truths/ideals. Could it be that GameFreak is making a larger comment on American society by doing this? We can't be sure. However, one thing is certain, these Pokemon games are much deeper than many people give them credit for and deserve to be looked at in greater detail from time to time. -Why I like Pokemon Black and White -What is GameFreak saying about America with Reshiram and Zekrom? For the past several weeks I've been focused on making a working UI system for our VR horror game. There have been plenty of ups and downs throughout this process and I wanted to take a brief moment to talk about the important takeaways I've gotten from the past couple of weeks.
The first of these is that creating UI in Unity is really easy. Unity makes it super easy to create buttons and sliders that do things and are easy to access from scripts. Once I got my buttons into place for my menu it was far easier than I had anticipated to make them load new scenes. This saved me a lot of headaches and for that I give the Unity program two large thumbs up. The second takeaway is that putting UI into the actual world space is really difficult. Due to our game being in VR it doesn't make sense to project our UI right onto the eyes of our players. This would probably just blind them and hurt to overall game experience. In order to avoid this issue, we need to put the UI a little bit in front of the player in the actual world space of our game. This of course leads to a whole host of problems in order for the menu to work. The menu can't be too far away from the player or too close. You have to work with the scaling of the graphics to make sure the menu doesn't accidentally stretch across the sky. We need to disable player movement around the menu so they don't accidental wonder off and can't find their way back. All these things need to be taken into consideration and sorted out slowly through mostly trial and error. There is no quicker way to make the UI work than applying some parameters and seeing what fits. These are the two biggest things I noticed while creating UI. You need to have patience when setting up your menu to work in VR. Thankfully once you find those perfect parameters the rest should come easily thanks to Unity's fantastic UI system. -What I've been working on -The joy of Unity UI -The patience of creating UI for VR Recently Nintendo has announced the next mainline series Pokemon game: Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. We haven't seen a lot about this game yet as there is currently only one trailer out however I wanted to go ahead and give my opinion on what I want to see out of the new set of games.
I have always been a fan of the mainline Pokemon games. I remember saving up to by my first DS and then using the extra money I had to buy a used version of Pokemon Diamond. The challenge of searching for where to go next. The rush of success when I defeated hard opponents, the sharing of strategies with my friends whenever we were having trouble defeating certain areas of the game, these are some of the most precious memories I have of playing Pokemon. The first thing I would like to see in the new games is a return to the more challenging side of Pokemon. The past couple of games have been fun but lacked the challenge I felt as a grew up playing pokemon. The puzzles in Gyms have gotten shorter and easier, victory road is now a mostly linear path without any of the maze-like qualities of past games. I want to be able to feel the rush of having accomplished something hard in a Pokemon game again. I realize that Pokemon's fanbase is largely made of younger kids but I hope that with the release of easier games such as Let's Go Evee and Let's Go Pikachu, game Freak will be more willing to up the level of difficulty in their main games to appeal to older fans. Many people who grew up playing Pokemon are now young adults and I think it might be time for a Pokemon game that's aimed at pulling some of them back into the fold. Another big item I would like to see in Sword and Shield is an emphasis on good story telling. My favorite Pokemon games to this day are Pokemon Black and White purely because of the beautiful and interesting story they told. I would like to see something similar in Sword and Shield. Sure battling and training Pokemon still has to be the main focus of the game. The player still needs to battle through all the Gym leaders in order to become the champion of the new region but that doesn't mean there can't be an interesting plot behind the core game mechanics. I loved in the Unova region when you tried to challenge the champion only to be suddenly surrounded by the castle of team Plasma bursting out of the ground. Twists like that make games interesting and keep players on their toes. Ultimately these are the two biggest changes I want to see in the new region. -The new Pokemon games Sword and Shield have been announced -Why I want harder games -Why I want a better story line It has been a short while since the last show of Dead Man's Cell Phone ended and I wanted to talk about what I learned during the process of creating the sound for this show. While I think I did much better during this show than when I did Anne Frank there are certainly still stuff I could improve on. So let's cut to the chase and talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Dead Man's Cell Phone sound design.
First let's talk about some of the things I improved on from my last time doing sound for a show. I was much more organized this time. I kept everything I was working on in one centralized folder which I mirrored in an updated google drive folder. This meant I spent a lot less long looking for assets and could instead work on what I needed to do. My teammates could also find the work I had done easier as well as add there contributions to a place where I could find them. My editing skills have also gotten better over the past year. This time I had to edit an entire song to be filled with voicemails and phone sounds. I was able to do this quickly and easily the first time. This song was also set to choreography which i was able to time some of the sounds within the song to. There are of course things I should still work on. Setting up the speaker system involved a lot of trouble. We couldn't get sound at first and once we got sound it only came out through a certain model of speakers. What this came down to was simply the unfamiliarity of the hardware we used to me. I needed to do more research on the sound system we were using so I could more effectively create a working speaker array on the first try. All in all the show went well. I'm looking forward to doing more sound design in the future and continuing to get more familiar with setting up the actual speakers and running the sound board. In the blog post: -Debrief from Dead Man's Cell Phone -Better organization -Better Editing -One thing I should work on for the future There are many things one can do to convey messages in video games. The fact that we have an art form that is so versatile gives us a wealth of ways to toy with player's emotion, thoughts, and actions. My personal favorite is how a good game artist can use sound to affect the mood of an area and set the tone of a game. However there is another even more basic, but incredibly important, way game designers set the scene in games.
Character art is one the the most important ways to convey information to a player. They will often spend hours of the game play staring at the graphics of their player. What better way to show the person playing your game something important about the game's atmosphere. In an apocalyptic game for example you wouldn't want your character to look like a cartoon anime girl. Instead you might want to take that cheery model and muddy it up somehow. Ordinary objects like footballs turned deadly with added spikes for example. This tells the playing that something has gone wrong in the world. It says yes this may look like the world we once new but it is far more dangerous, far more deadly. Another example of this is seen in the Pokemon franchise. Pokemon games are often based off of specific regions in the world. To highlight this fact, the designs of pokemon in each new region often reflect the attitudes or defining characteristics of the place they represent. Alolan Exeggutor looks like a tall palm tree making it look more pacific islander than its normal, squatter cousin. The garbage pokemon Garbodor was introduced in Pokemon Black and White a game representing... well America. As you can see there are many ways to use character design to convey messages of tone and place to your player. By utilizing this you can make your games unified in theme and even more immersive for your player. In this Post: -How to give subtle messages to your player in games -The advantages of using good character design -Examples of how to utilize good character design in games First I would like to say that I don't want to sound ungrateful in this blog post. There are many schools both in Durham County and elsewhere that don't have as nice computers as we do. We are lucky to even have a game design program at DSA. However before working on a school computer there are certain survival tips one must master. These machines are completely inadequate for running the programs they are expected to run and thus must be led through the process gently. Here are a few tips on how to use a piece of public, educational machinery.
The most important thing you need to know is that you will never be able to do research on these things for games. Between the tight security network banning any forum where questions could be found to the lovely tendency for all tutorials to be restricted, there is no lack of lack of research material. If you can't find the answer to a coding question on the programs main site, (some of which are banned under the shopping category) you might as well give up until you have time at home to look. Youtube videos are banned willy-nilly with almost no seeming regard to their content. You can expect to be able to watch an episode of Bob Ross or even a do-it-yourself make-up tutorial, but anything that you might need to learn how to code is assuredly completely shut down. Beyond this you may not even need the internet to find the limitations of these machines. The graphics cards and RAM on the computers here are laughable. When we use programs that are known for needing good graphics processing and that leak RAM all over the place (looking at you 3ds Max), There's simply no way these poor machines can keep up. Even if I wanted to manage my RAM usage while I work, I find that i'm blocked from the task manager by admin privileges. All this while my computer is practically giving off smoke trying to figure out how to bend the knee of a 3d chicken. Therefore you must always remember to save every two to three seconds. That way as the computer tries to force shut a non-responsive program you can at least show your teacher that you have gained a little ground during the roughly hour-long period. I hope these tips helped. I hope these hints were taken. -A quick disclaimer -Internet "security" -General computer specs Recently the main thing I've been focused on is creating sound for our upcoming production of Dead Man's Cell Phone. One of my responsibilities in doing this is to find the program we will use to run ques during the show. I have used QLab in the past and was pleased with the results but I knew this show would require a lot more our of the software. I would need to learn how to cue cross fades as well as run and stop multiple ques at once. There isn't any starting tutorial when you boot up QLab so I was unsure if I would be able to figure out everything on time.
A brief word on excellent customer service. Even if your program isn't super intuitive (not many pieces of software that deal with sound are) a lot of this can be overcome with a good network of customer support. We emailed QLab late on Sunday evening and received an email back within the hour which had shortcut suggestions and tutorials to watch. I was so impressed in fact I decided to write a blog post just to commend this software. Beyond just that customer service feat we have found that this program does everything we could want and more. You can even edit cues minimally within the program to set them to start and end at certain places so you don't have to go back and forth between audio editing software and QLab. The full program is quite expensive but we've found that the free items included with the basic download gives you everything you need to run a basic show. I'm actually looking forward to running the show because of the ease I'll now be able to navigate with. I fully recommend this program for anyone who wants to run a sound for a show. -What is QLab? -Customer service goals -Should you use it for your show? |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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