Research Proposal submission week

Friday the 13th of December was a Research Proposal document submission deadline.

This week was really stressful as I was still dealing with art aesthetics theories in my head and on paper. Overall I feel confident about some parts of the proposal and some not so much. Literature review part is probably ok as I have read a lot of books related to my topic however, the methodology section is probably on a weaker side. I think, I may have spent a bit too long on the literature review as I had to rethink and restructure quite a bit this part of the document which took longer than expected.  Therefore Methodology part did not get as much attention as I would have hoped for.

I had a lot of quotes that I have gathered from a number of books and just going through them and sorting out what is the most relevant and fits best was a really tedious part. I had moments when I felt a bit like I was drowning in quotes. But I got there in the end.

Also, my project aim has changed very slightly as I have added ' creative expression in' part in it.

So what are the idea, purpose and goal of my Honour year project? In short:

This project will attempt to bridge the gap between 2D game production as well as traditional arts and its practice domains and look at both of these topics through aesthetics theories lens by exploring how traditional art practice and traditional art media coupled with art fundamentals can inform and enhance creative expression in production of more aesthetically pleasing 2D game assets.

An expected outcome of this project is significant knowledge that could be of value to academic researchers and practitioners within fields of 2D video game production as well as artists working within digital media domain.

This project aim is to explore how traditional art practice and traditional art media coupled with art fundamentals can inform and enhance creative expression in production of more aesthetically pleasing 2D game assets.

Project objectives are:

• Examine and analyse traditional art practices such as use of media as well as drawing and painting fundamentals to draw conclusions on identifying aesthetics.

• Conduct iterative practical research by experimenting with implementation of gathered knowledge in to digital media production pipeline and evaluate this process.

•  Produce art assets for a game and discuss final results in relation to the project aim.

In general this research proposal experience was very informative. So much so, that at times I felt my head is about to explode from the amount of information that I was trying to cram in to it. However, the good thing was that, just by putting thoughts on paper seem to help with understanding some of the points in my project and how it all relates together.

Now it is just a long wait until after New Year to see what the result is. But I will not be bored as I have to prepare a Concept Development document as well as Pre-production portfolio for the 13th of January 2014.

So the pressure is not really off since I, just like the most of the students on my course, have not done much of practical work in the last few weeks.

A copy of my Research Proposal document can be found here.