Lili Schuett ~ Character Designer

Continuing from my recent blog posts, my main goal is to create an animatic from the book ‘Fourth Wing’ by Rebecca Yarros. I’ve chosen a book that is new and yet to have a media adaptation (which one is currently in the works with Amazon Studios), this way I can have my own interpretation without being influenced by existing media. Beside the fact that I am doing this from something currently popular in the romantasy (romance plus fantasy, seems to be what they are calling it these days) genre, I’m using this to hone my skills as a storyboard artist and go for something bigger. There are a lot of people that know Fourth Wing, I can seek them for any kind of given feedback on my work. How does it fit into the larger media landscape of similar projects? This project easily fits into the larger media landscape as storyboarding is used for most current media, including animation, film, and video games. It visualizes a selected scene from a script narrative or making on-the-spot thumbnail s...

How you plan to take your role project output and have it be an effective means of self-promotion for your specialist practice. A few months ago, I had already described how I was going to post updates on my selected platforms. I’m going to do it the same way again but with a different flare. The best way for me to showcase my practice is by posting here as blog posts, and describing the process of my workflow. The next one is Twitter which has such a large art community now, I’ve noticed a lot of pages pinning their link trees, portfolios and demo reels. Instagram and TikTok doesn’t really give you the option of creating threads and explaining tidbits of what you have done. Blog posts and Twitter are the best ways to show my specialist practice as an effective self-promotion platform. Discord servers are another great one if I want to receive some constructive feedback on my art and animatics, there are a few servers I am a part of like Ethan Becker’s for example. They include a WHOLE...

Investigate the audience/s that you will be targeting with your proposed role project idea. Over my break from school, I spent a lot of my time scrolling through Booktok and eventually came across the currently relevant Novel 'Fourth Wing' by Rebecca Yarros. It took me a while to scout this book in local stores as it was sold out everywhere! I really wanted to read this book and see what the fuss was about. Eventually I found one last copy in Big W and snagged it as quick as I could, it didn't take me long to finish reading the book. Come back to the beginning of the new trimester, I need to further improve my specialisation; which is character design and storyboarding. So, to save me more time on the development of an animatic, I went with taking a scene from Fourth Wing instead of coming up with an original story. Animators are generally given a script to then visualise into a storyboard, but as I do not have that; I'm taking as much information I can possibly grab fr...

Right at the beginning of trimester, I was invited by Lucas to join his idea on the Environmental Storytelling project. I was onboard with the idea as I liked the premise and setting, the only problem for me was that it was going to be created in a 3D environment which is out of scope for my specialisation. I didn't need to think too in-depth about what I was going to do, after all; the assignment is environmental storytelling. There are multiple options where I can implement my specialisation into the project as a 2D artist. Once more students were invited into the group we had a discussion on what roles we were going to undertake. I could implement my specialisation by doing storyboards and visual storytelling, this left me in charge of the overall narrative for the project. Before I even began sketching any of the visuals, it took a few revisions to get a written narrative that was suitable for the assignment. I received feedback from the other group members to see if there was ...

We want to show a narrative in a horror setting by using the environment to do the storytelling. After all, that's our aim for the trimester. We want to convey a story about a family that has fallen apart in long-term isolation, the audience may not get it at first unless they explore. How much will the limited amount of vision compel the player to keep on exploring? Shadows and fog lurk in the environment causing an uneasy atmosphere, it is fear of the unknown. We created our project for any consumer to experience fear as fun! This is heavily the reason why horror games are popular, we know in the back of our minds that we are not in actual danger. So experiencing the fear in any type of media form is relatively fun. A good kind of scare will leave you in an adrenaline rush, out of breath, excited, and perhaps all this energy has come seeping back into you, it weirdly feels good. Although there's one difference between horror in video games and movies, we can't control the...

I put more of a focus on researching into walking simulation games and the horror themes, our environmental storytelling project falls into those two categories. I’ve been looking into how indie game developers approached marketing their games since we are starting off on a small as well. I’ve touched lightly on the subject from the previous blog post; when I talked about game studios engaging with their audience on social media platforms, the same tactic applies here.  It was difficult to find a developer talking about how they’d captured their audience’s attention in the same horror genre we are striving for. So, I turned my attention towards finding information on how indie developers promoted their game on a smaller scale. Big named studios would not be a beneficial reference to our project, as we are starting from nothing. I researched into two indie developers; David Wehle and Concerned Ape, the two of them had similar tactics on getting traction for their games during develo...