By MONEY SHARMA and NEETI MEHTA
Brian Ettienne Ray
DQ Entertainment (DQE), in association with its educational arm DQ School of Visual Arts, recently organized a workshop on animation and gaming at Rangsharda, Mumbai.
Titled ‘Dare to Dream‘, the workshop was conducted by a team from DQE which included Creative Director Brian Ettienne Ray, Creative Head (IP) Siju Thomas and Technical and Gaming Division Head Subba Rao Vadapalli.
Kick starting the seminar, Brian conducted a session on storyboarding where he explained the types of storyboarding and its usage in live action and animation. Brian elaborated on the history of story boarding and their origins. On formal storyboard, he said, "Walt Disney developed a formal storyboard system in 1928 with the production of Steamboat Willy, the first animated feature film and the world‘s first sound film."
Siju Thomas
Brian also explained the script, linear and non-linear forms of story telling along with its technique. Talking about the future of storyboarding, he mentioned the following points:
Traditionally done storyboards are now simply done by using paper and pencil and a photocopy machine.
Digitally done storyboards are done at half the time and use modern equipment like the Wacom tablet.
New innovations are being developed to speed up the process of storyboarding and skip the layout phase by utilizing 3D sets
This is also enabling the creation of very detailed poses and showing all acting and expressions of the characters.
Subba Rao
Moving further, character designing genius Siju conducted a session on character creation where he explained about creating a character in a fast and efficient manner. This session was a very interactive one where students‘ choices were factored in creating the character. Siju designed, posed and detailed a Centaur creature within the short duration of the workshop. He firstly made a basic form of the character using a silhouette. Then the character was given a skeleton and its structure. Later on seeing the students‘ enthusiasm for the character and the flow of the seminar, a head and body turnaround was done. Students‘ queries such the decision-making in the process and the creative aspects were answered.
Towards the conclusion of the workshop, Subba Rao explained the gaming industry and career growth in the industry. Starting with the history of video games, Rao mentioned about how the video games evolved and the current and next gen gaming platforms which are available worldwide.
Rao also discussed the various careers available which include storyboard artist, effects artists, content programmer, game programmer, test tools engineer, network game programmer, audio programmer and game designer to name a few.
He concluded his presentation by saying, "There are number of opportunities lying in the gaming industry where one can make her/his career with having a various job profile to go in. In the days to come, there is huge growth expected in the gaming industry and a lot of artists are required to fulfill the demand of the industry.
