Jose Deschamps

Thesis

February 4, 2019

Reflective Essay

Feeling, Thoughts, and Experiences

As I began the new semester, I have been having a very difficult time developing a continuous rhythm of production from where I left off last semester on how the end goal of the project should look like. Since the beginning of the project I was focus on creating a story-board map so that I can know the actual length that I’m aiming for. The problem with this is that I ended up being stuck creating multiple version of story or ideas while also letting my mind wonder to endless possibilities which is great but as time goes on didn’t contribute to great results. This issue made producing a prototype difficult since the experience began to be much larger than aspected due to the constrained that I set upon myself with being “text-less” or in other words no dialogue whats so ever. This shifted my whole thought process that I had on story-boarding and had to figure how do I tackle the problems of how do I showcase emotion, relationships and depth in a world without words. This left thinking for days on a possible solution that I could not answered. So I started back to the drawing board and began researching media that have interesting concepts or ideas that relate to a no words project, I found amazing animation films like “Belleville Rendez-vous”, “Anomalisa” and “Pixar – Chess Game” that creating beautiful pieces of art work with no words. These films express emotion and visual story with depth and character building technique. I’m hoping to use many of these ideas and concept as I’m currently working on level design aspects as I move toward a playable demo. Once I finalized the designed for all of the levels I can begin to incorporate these animation principles to bring the story to life.