Creative Gaga - May/June 2013 (Preview)

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VOL3/ ISSUE3

May/June 2013 the enthusiastic creative journal

Believable Fantasy of

Grafit Studio

Sandeep Menon does

Traditional Twist

Perceptive Visuals of Vajra Pancharia

Character Commandments

Cover Boss Va lor

by Grafit St

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by Vinay Vikram Singh rt

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Contents EXHIBIT

GYAAN

08____TrendFeed Inspiring design with potential to be influential.

46____Traditional Twist/ Sandeep Menon The designer revisits his traditional influences to come up with a novel visual.

12____NewsFeed Just concluded design events.

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15____Coupled Communication/ Subala The communication agency on how it crafted an innovative direct mailer-cum-visiting card.

16____Prank Project/ Bid for Bodoni Beard Design devised a fun project to celebrate April Fool’s Day. 18____SpendThrift Thoughtfully designed stuff that you can acquire.

FIGURES 22____Fable Figures/ Shyam Deshpande Characters are just means to depict stories in the game, believes the illustrator.

26____Character Commandments/ Vinay Vikram Singh The reputed gaming artist shares few doctrines of character design for gaming.

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32____Believable Fantasy/ Grafit Studio The secret of good storytelling is to make a beholder believe in everything you make up, believes the gaming studio.

38____Perceptive Visuals/ Vajra Pancharia What you create is directly a result of what you observe around you, says the filmmaker-illustrator.

42____Game Moves/ Wise Advise Leading industry practitioners discuss the past, present and future of gaming in the country.

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50____Dynamic Disposition/ Neeraj Menon The illustrator renders a character in a dynamic pose to bring it to life.

PODIUM 58____Dark Strokes/ Sujay Euphras Dark themes and plots inspire the illustrator.

59____What If/ Neil Gurung By adding these two words to an idea or a being, the storyboard artist tells imaginative stories.

60____Common Characters/ Devaki Neogi Characters that audiences can relate to can lead to stories that connect with the soul, believes the freelance illustrator.

DESIGN PLEASURE 64____Do Good Design/ Alaya Design Studio The purpose of design is to work for a larger social good, believes the design studio.

66____Paper Passion/ MaD A chance encounter with paper quilling got transformed into a design initiative.

68____Together Typo/ Typography Day An account of the sixth edition of the event that discussed various themes of typography.

69____Open Imagination/ Fan Club Selected picks for the latest issue from our Fan Club submissions.

EXHIBIT_NewsFeed

NewsFeed A quick take on the recently concluded events, exhibitions and workshops that explored a new dimension of design.

Visual

Voices

Showcasing artists and designers working in various visual art fields, Art Stack is a platform that encourages the young to open up their voices to the world.

An annual multi-media art event created and organized by Design Stack, a branding and graphic design company based in Mumbai, Art Stack showcased artists from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Toronto, Berlin and London. A night of art, live music and happy hours, Art Stack was curated to display new and vibrant works by Indian and international artists expressing themselves through diverse media like digital & video art, photography, sculpture and water colour. Displaying the work of creative professionals, Art Stack has moved from a small, privately held exhibition in the Design Stack studio into a more publicly accessible space like Blue Frog, making itself an annual event in the city calendar <

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May/June 2013

LocalAffair A socio-cultural festival, Wassup! Andheri is a cross-disciplinary event that offers a 360degree view of Mumbai and India, albeit with the suburban perspective of Andheri.

The four days of Wassup! Andheri organised by F5 Advertainment was held from February 28 to March 3, 2013, at Chitrakoot Grounds, Andheri. Powered

by Itz Cash, Wassup! Andheri gave aspirants of every art form an opportunity to interact and connect with biggies like Sudhir Mishra, Anurag Basu, Vikramaditya Motwani, S. Hussain Zaidi, Niharika Khan, Sanjay Chauhan, Amrita Raichand, Rajat Kapoor, Adhuna Akthar, Joy Datta, Amish Tripathi, Mukesh Chhabra, Arzan Khambatta and Dr.Chandraprakash Dwivedi.

From performing arts and fashion to literature and music, the Wassup! Andheri 2013 calendar kept up to its motto of ‘entertainment for all ages’. With workshops, street plays, readings and innovative acts, Wassup! Andheri exhibited some of the rare and fascinating art pieces and paintings by sculptors and artists from across the country. Packed with promise, the event not only entertained, but also ethnically and educationally enriched <

TypeTattles Addressing issues faced by type designers, type users and type educators, Typography Day, held between March 7-9, 2013, compiled workshops, conferences and presentations that were devoted to Display Typography - the theme of Typography Day 2013.

Organized by the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati in collaboration with Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay with support from India Design Association (InDeAs), Typography Day was one of the first of its kind international design conference in the Northeastern part of India. Planned across three days, the event focused on experiments and explorations in display typography design, display typography design with multilingual scripts, display typography design in native (indigenous) scripts, display typography design within local contexts and research activities in display typography. Sub-themes included typography in education, media, e-typography, environmental typography, commercial typography, vernacular typography and visual literacy. While providing a platform for students from varied backgrounds to interact with practicing professionals in typography and graphic design, Typography Day’s national and international participants together contributed in making the annual event interactive, educational and successful <

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EXHIBIT_ProjectShowcase

Prank PROJECT Beard Design has always associated itself with pranks. Every April, it comes up with some antic that reinforces its brand identity as a crazy and wacky creative house.

This time, it did something that put its fans, friends and followers at their wit’s end.

The premise Ever since Beard Design started, it has been doing an April Fool prank every year. It gave them an opportunity to engage its clients and acquaintances in general. This time, the creative minds thought of doing something radically different.

The plan What’s a prank worth of, if it’s not believably shocking?

Bodoni, the pet dog of the studio, had become quite known to everyone who knew about the studio. It even figured in the brand identity of the studio. This gave the minds at Beard Design an innovative idea. What better way to fool people than to tell them that it was selling Bodoni and inviting them to bid for her?

The project An elaborate website was created that described Bodoni almost like the product page of a company, complete with features, testimonials, demo video etc. There was also a wicked bidding mechanism! Anyone interested has to enter their name and bid amount. The moment they pressed ‘bid’, a message would appear, telling them, “Sorry, Abhisek just

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May/June 2013

outbid you! Try again, you fool! :-)â&#x20AC;? Abhisek is the founder of Beard Design and the one who has brought up Bodoni in his arms.

The pay off In just 2 days, hundreds of people bid for Bodoni, with amounts going into 10 digits!

At the same time, there were also lots of hate mail, messages on social media and even phone calls, telling us that we were really cruel to be putting up a dog for auction and even building a website for it! <

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FIGURES_IconWatch

Character COMMANDMENTS After doing BFA from College of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow University in 1995, Vinay Vikram Singh started his animation career at UTV Toonz, Mumbai. He spent a considerable time in the field of gaming art at Lakshya. Currently, he is the CCO of Rocksalt Interactive.

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Creating a character from imagination is most appealing to an artist. It is fun to see your thoughts transforming into a living being, with volume, mass and personality. While creating one for gaming, it is important to know the maxims of character creation. Ace gaming artist Vinay Vikram Singh lays down few of them.

May/June 2013 01 Untitled.

An unplanned exploration of a new tool, ZBrush.

02 Mutant.

His abilities are unknown to the creator as well.

Once free it can become a total chaos. Done at Rocksalt Interactive.

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FIGURES_InternationalView 01 Official.

Designed for Godsend game.

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May/June 2013

Believable Fantasy

A gaming studio with more than 12 years of experience, Grafit Studio has been working with reputed names like Zynga, Microsoft, Guerilla, EA games etc. It has also been part of many well known book illustration projects.

Realisation of your idea doesn’t have to be technically correct, but it has to look authentic and believable. That’s how your stories find their way to the heart and mind of the audience. Gaming Studio Grafit Studio shares tricks that make learning this art easier.

Almost all stories are alike.

That’s the hard truth, however creative you think you might be. Therefore, the challenge is to present them differently, make them special in some new way.

One needs to strive to make made-up stories come to life, to make a beholder believe in whatever is happening on the screen. This trick is not the easiest thing in the world, but it’s worth learning. As soon as you have an idea of how the details work, it becomes easier to ride the whirlwind.

Understanding the very core of the subject gives an ability to create believable lighting, surfaces, materials, etc.

The plot comes first.

No matter how great your character is, with poor idea, it is a lost cause. Even super-tough attitude and superhero outfit won’t conceal the weakness of a raw plot and poorly written dialogues. A good plot’s purpose is to reveal something about the characters, confront them with thought >

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GYAAN_MakeBelieve

07a Added some fiery/glowing edges to the bullet holes on his jacket and small wisps of smoke from them.

09 Moved back to the face again. Finished rendering the hair and added some cuts/wounds on his face.

Used custom brushes for some of these, which were mostly scanned splatter effects. Such brushes can also be downloaded online.

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08 Added in bullet impacts on his armour. Added some stitching on his armor which was a simple modification to the calligraphic brush and added some decals overall on his armour.

10 Added in details on the goggles. Used a pattern to suggest texture/material on the frame.

May/June 2013

11 Rendered the right hand and then moved on to the gun. Looked for references that would help.

12 Added light shade on the gun and added some screws and glowing bits to suggest it came from the same family as the goggles and armour.

14 Arrived at the final image <

13 Used some photo reference to get the swordhand right. Added some rim lighting around the edges and tightened up some details futher.

Removed the shell casings from the gun. Added a pattern in the background and some sparks with a red gradient in the foreground for an added visual boost. Also added a noise filter in overlay mode on the image for added texture.

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Gaming Art

workshop with

Vinay Vikram Singh on 25th May at India International Centre New Delhi

WE ALSO DO

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