SOT Activity 7: Visit to Shanghai Science and Technology Museum

Task: Describe 2 exhibitions in more than 200 words

Exhibition 1: Evolution Exhibition

The Evolution Exhibition consists mainly of showing how prehistoric animals evolved during the years and what happens to the dead carcasses of these prehistoric animals. When I entered the exhibit, it has many figures of these prehistoric birds, fishes and other animals displayed, showing how wildlife were like a long long time ago. When walking further into the exhibition, the fossils of these animals were displayed, showing the structure of these animals. Then deeper into the exhibit, it shows how the present people convert these fossils into our everyday fossil fuels, how they dig out these fossils and oil that are stored deep within the ground and process it to the fuel for our daily usage afterwards.





Exhibition 2: Strange Atoms Exhibit

The strange atoms exhibition consist mainly of exhibits about how different materials react when something happens to them. One example would be the black liquid on the first picture. When the magnet is activated, the black liquid will be attracted to it and form spikes around the surface of the magnet and around the liquid.

SOT Activity 6: Visit to Shanghai Expo, Toy Exihibition

Task: Take pictures of 3 different toys and identify the forms of play of each toy.

Imaginative Play
The children who are playing these toys may relate all these familiar characters to the cartoons they watched on television, and thus are able to pretend that their toys are the characters from these cartoons. Personification.

Object Play
The people who are going to play these pianos are usually just going to treat and use it like a piano, thus object play.

Creative Play
The people who are playing with the sand are able to use their imagination and create anything they want to make by using the sand.

SOT Activity 5: Trip to 3E Studios, Shanghai

-Still no pictures-

Task: 300 word review

     

      The studio visit today would be 3E Entertainment Studio, Shanghai. Unlike the other studios we visited, 3E Studios is an outsourced studio. Outsourced studios are simple studios that do not make their own games, but instead, help in the making or completion of games from bigger companies. 3E Studios had worked with companies like Ubisoft and created award winning work. Despite being an outsourced studio, 3E Studios had been quite successful in the past 8 years.

     The tools that are used in 3E Studios would be 3D Studio Max, Z-Brush, MAYA and Photoshop. These are the main programs that the artists working in the studio work. The studio is actually split into many sections that specialize in a different field, such as environmental creation / level creation, character creation, animation, props creation, etc. With only 100 over artists, 3E studios currently work on 7-8 projects at a single time, and around 20-30 projects completed in a year.

     3E studios mainly work on AAA games, the really big games for consoles. They also work on mobile games sometime and then. Some games they worked on would be the Tom Clancy Series, and the Gears of War Series.

    If one wants to work in the studio, he/she just have to pass a test that is made by the studio. How good an artist is in the studios will depend on what rank he/she is. In the studio, each artist starts and are ranked from level 1 to level 12. Usually level 1 artists will work on small items such as props for the environment. As you advance up the ranks, you responsibility gets higher and higher, which also means more pay.

    An advice from the manager of 3E Entertainment Studios, Shanghai, if you want to be a successful game designer, always start out small. Take any opportunity you can and use these opportunities to create relationships with other people and try to grab even larger scale opportunities. All the effort that you put in will pay off someday.

SOT Activity 4: Visit to Dreamworks Oriental Studios, Shangai

-No pictures are available due to Dreamworks Oriental Studios privacy agreement-

Task for the visit: Write a review, at least 700 words long, on the visit.


     Dreamworks is a company where they made famous animated film such as How To Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda and many more. Dreamwork Oriental Studios, Shanghai, the studio we visited, were actually one of the main makers of these films.

     During the visit, we are able to see how these films were made. Each film starts off with simple as simple as a storyboard. What is a storyboard? A storyboard is basically a few pictures that explains what is happening in the scene. A single film is made up of hundreds or thousands of storyboards (most of the time thousands). These storyboards are then carefully reviewed and only a few were chosen to be part of the main film itself.

     Then we get into the making of the film. Each film starts with just a powerpoint slides of storyboards. After everything is confirmed, animations will be made. The animations just feature the main happening of the storyline, very little till almost none of the animations require good aesthetics. After all these animations are done, then layer and layers of aesthetics are added into it, special effects, background and stuff like these. Each different aesthetics added will be in layers. A fight scene from the present Kung Fu Panda itself can consist of more than 20 layers of effects added into it.

     After everything has been added in, the whole animation will be rendered to make it into a film that is theater ready. Every part in this film making process takes a very long time. It is so long that when a new film is released on the theaters worldwide, the Studio already had or even started on films 2 sequels after, yeah, it is that planned out. These sequels are then made, and will get released as long as 8 years later, thats how long is it to take to make a film. But of course the studio doesn't just focus on one film only, it is working on many films at the same time, so there is sure a new film to be released from that certain studio now and then.

     During the visit, we also get to see what was inspired to the making of these films. So apparently, I am not too sure about the other Dreamwork branches, but Dreamworks Oriental Studios, Shanghai, their films, one of the reasons why they are so successful is because they take good concepts from different types of successful films out there, and try to complile these good concepts and making something similar like that. For example if you only watch action genre of movies through the ages, you will find many similar, but yet still different action movie moves implemented into films from Dreamworks. It is actually quite a smart concept in my opinion, you take many different great things, and compile them together to make something even greater.

     While walking around the studio, I get to see many familiar film titles, and a couple, around 1 or 2 new films that Dreamworks Oriental Studios plan to released soon. Stuff like how the staff work there wasn't explained much in detail, but what we know that Dreamworks Oriental Studios is not only a place of work, but at the same time, a place of inspiration. Many materials that are donated by the staff in the company, such as books and film, are available for access for the whole studio, so whenever someone like the storyboard writer gets stuck and ran out of ideas, they can take these books and films for references, and hopefully help them generate new ideas for the film.

     Honestly, I'm not really the art kind of person, but what I noticed at least, from the films made by Dreamworks Oriental Studios, would be that each scene in the film are able to evoke a certain emotion due to the theme of the background and stuff. No matter how little it is, we can still feel a little something when watching parts of these films.

     Ok and to end off, the same as the Ubisoft trip, do look forward for good future films as Dreamworks Oriental Studios are planning some really good movies that are coming out soon in the near future.
   

SOT Activity 3: Visit to Ubisoft, Shanghai

-No Pictures due to Ubisoft's sharing agreement policy-

Task for today- 500 word review on the whole visit.

     The first stop today would be Ubisoft Studios, Shanghai. Ubisoft is the worlds fourth most solo distributed game companies of the whole world. For people who doesn't know much about Ubisoft, they are the company whole makes well known games like the Assassin Creed Series and Tom Clancy Splinter Cell Series. Two of their games, namely I am Alive and Tom Clancys End War, were award winner.

     So how does Ubisoft works? Every project will come from the main management building in the main branch/headquarters, Ubisoft, France. The main building will select a number of the studios located all around the globe, or a just a team of people in a single studio, to make a game. The games could range from a AAA game- large title PC or console game to something small like a mobile game.

     What makes Ubisoft games successful? If you are a gamer, and you are searching for games that focus more on gameplay experience more than everything else, games made from Ubisoft will never fail to deliver. Unlike many other companies, Ubisoft tend to focus almost everything on the gameplay of each game, unlike Square Enix, which is a company that rather focus more on the storyline of the game instead. Many game designer have this concept of- A good game must first have a good storyline. I would say that this state is not wrong, but yet, it is not totally right either. Ubisoft proved this from many of their games. Lets take Far Cry 3 for example, Far Cry 3 is a open world single player FPS game, meaning that it is basically a one player shooter game where you can run anywhere available in the game. The storyline of this game is just- You play as a character named Jason, you are your friends were skydiving towards this island. After everyone had landed, you all were captured by pirates on the island. You then have to find a way to escape this island with everyone you can take along with. Yup, that is pretty much the story.

     But what makes this game so good would be because it gives the player choices, and somehow still ends up with the linear storyline. What i mean would be that the player is able to run anywhere they want, do anything they want, and explore the whole island at their own pace, which gives them choice and freedom, but yet at the same time, the main quest that the character receives will  set the player back into the story's direction. Ubisoft believes that allowing the player to craft their own story from the way to play is key to making a game really fun. More games like that, and also made by Ubisoft are the Assassins Creed series and Watchdogs.

     For the people who likes to play games, not because of the storyline, but because of the gameplay itself, I strongly recommend a game by Ubisoft to start with. And for those hardcore Ubisoft fans, or at least if you are following the games that Ubisoft makes, fear not, as many great new projects are going to get released in the near future that will not fail to disappoint! 

SOT Activity 2: Visit to Pikatoons Studio

Training area of Pikatoons where the people in the office trains freshmen to be industry ready.

During the visit to an mainly arts studio called Pikatoons, we were asked 4 questions to find out.

1. What is Pikatoons?
2. What are any 2 of the softwares they use?
3. How did the studio survive till now?
4. How can anything we learnt in the visit be applied to real life?

Answering all the question in a review.

     Pikatoons is a animation/asset making small company in China, Shanghai. The company specializes in creating assets for games, making animations for characters, creating game levels, and lots more. The company not only makes these assets and stuff for projects, they also trains fresh local interns to be industry ready. The picture above shows the interns learning the different feels they get when a character animates different. For example they analyze the difference between the running animation of an ordinary guy, and a ninja running while holding on to a sword.

     As for the programs they use, they use many programs. The main programs they use would be MODO and 3D studio. Some other programs would be Photoshop, Unity, Z-Brush, and lots more.

     The studio got its name from the character from the Pokemon series, Pikachu, and the fact that its a cartoon, Pikatoons was the final result. One of the reason why this studio is successful its cause it applies one of the concepts that was made by famous businessmen, like Steve Jobs- Make a system that runs by itself, a self running system. Pikatoons also takes the initiative to find available projects from all around the world, and try to get a place in these projects. The competition of studios similar to Pikatoons are fierce, they pretty much have to work on anything they can get at the start. After that, their hard work paid off as the people in the company got well known due to their work, and connections begun forming, leading to more work opportunities. This led to the success of Pikatoons.

     What I can apply from this visit to my work as a game designer would be what one of the production managers of Pikatoons said. He started off as a nobody, what got him into the place he is at now would be his passion in his field of specialty (and luck played a part too of course). So apparently, he made an animated movie during his free time, and it got really famous. Things started to snowball uphill for him as opportunities started coming by and he became pretty well known, from just a single film he made, due to his passion.

     So back to the question on what I can apply, what I think is to be successful, you must have the passion to do that something that you are interested in. Do not be afraid to show the world what you have done, publicity for your work in anyway will benefit your work, even if its bad publicity. Go to the depths of what you want to do, don't just create some half-assed work that looks like another ordinary piece, be creative, explore the unknown and put it into your work. Most importantly, don't give up before you even try. Try to at least finish a piece, and see how well it does. Hard work will pay off eventually. 

SOT Activity 1: Trip to Ancient Village

Objectives: Search the shops and find the relic ring.
                  Don't get caught by the local police

Winning Conditions: Grab the ring
                                Reach the rendezvous point safely

Character:

Map:

References: