Reflective Diary Post

I'm posting this here are a summary of my Reflective Diary. Easier to access.

Week 1:

•  Tuesday: Examined 3 readings based on wellbeing, did an excercise involving learning about one of them
• Friday: Teamed up with Liam, and chose our project, we went with stress in the city. Exploring the idea of user personas and trying to empathize.

Week 2:

• Tuesday: Research based work, contacted my parents who live in Singapore which is an incredibly stressful city, as well as contacting family and friends in Auckland, as well as talking to friends in Wellington.
• Friday: Continuing with research and use profiles, enjoying creating characters and their problems. Having trouble coming up with meaningful insights, need to sort through more research.

Week 3:

• Tuesday: As per the advice of Jason, take a stab at how we're going to present, and then fall back to refine the idea. I'm getting frustrated with lack of fruition, but it's early days! We're thinking about a comic book style presentation.
• Friday: Tried a new approach at a different persona at the request of Liam. Back and forth is frustrating, and I'm incredibly sure there's potential in the work and research we have, but we've yet to uncover it.

Week 4:

• Tuesday: Sick day, sent a few sketches, but overall not much accomplished.
• Friday: Back in the saddle with a digital reiteration of my comic sketches, a little more humour and little more flow. After a mini-critique with Alfred and Ryan as well as Hamish and Micky, have decided to go for bigger cells, less on the screen to read while presenting.

Week 5:

• Tuesday: Finally had a breakthrough with our idea after a conversation with Jason, we were over complicating the needs and oversimplifying the how might we, as well as putting some of the points in places where they didn't necessarily belong.
• Friday: Attempted with less cells on the screen, but still feels far too wordy, am going to attempt to make the presentation extremely visual, and talk to it a lot more.

Week 6:

• Tuesday: Prepping for Presentations, illustrating each slide as its own pane, with small amounts of speech bubbles and (hopefully) amusing jokes. Jason suggested the slideshow act as more of a narrative, and as an illustrator and storyteller I'm really digging the idea.
• Friday: Presentation day, decided to throw the notes. It's more fun without them.

Break: 

• Had a discussion regarding where we might like to go with this and had a chat with some people regarding collaboration. Also went to Singapore so that's dope.

Week 7:

• Tuesday: We decided on picking up Bobbie and adding him to the team, he's a hard worker and a talented digital painter. We need all the talent we can get because we wanna go for something really big here. Also decided we'd be tackling a different brief regarding a young Syrian Refugee, and trying to help him through his situation.
• Friday: Tossing around ideas with the boys, the popular ideas seem to be a story book and a TV show (unsurprising considering it's 3 illustration nuts in one group). Fixated on animals as characters.

Week 8:

• Tuesday: After having seen and talking to/working with some other groups, it's kind of bothering me that the idea of a cartoon or a story book isn't ground breaking. I was helping Alfred toy around with the idea of a virtual connect the dots wall that replicates itself in two homes, as well as watching Micky and Hamish try to challenge the norms on the subject of communication. Everyone's heading in a groundbreaking direction, and I don't want to miss an opportunity to do something awesome.
• Friday: Talking over with the team we all agree we should be pushing our idea further, we like the animals, and we love the idea of bringing Kiwi kids in as part of the brief, a two way street type deal where we really get a sense of empathy and connection.

Week 9:

• Tuesday: Prototyping an App that allows kids to use different animals, representing different countries, to communicate in different languages. I'm not quite sold, but it's the best idea we've got.
• Friday: Continuing to push our translator, adding games they can play to unlock new characters. Jason doesn't get it. Neither do I at this point.

Week 10:

• Tuesday: We changed our idea again. The lads have been pretty keen on a story for a while, so we're doing an interactive one, I'm still coming off the app idea and think there's something in it. Have been looking into Toys to Life games recently (Skylanders and Disney infinity), there's definitely something in it. A sense of magic I'd love to capture. Think we're gonna use toys are characters in the story.
• Friday: Interactive story with characters based on toys you connect to the computer is in full production, the lads are painting up backgrounds, I'm working on character designs.

Week 11:

• Tuesday: with some though and feedback (And after one of my famous moments of frustration) I kept pushing for us to take the idea further, and we've ended up at a game where you can explore different worlds together based on what characters you are.
• Friday: Everyone's hard at work in production, I'm whipping up animation cycles and everything we need for the in-game characters as well as roughing up ideas for UI.  Bobbie is working on environments, and Liam is finishing his Models.

Week 12: 

• Tuesday: Some last minute illustrations being done for presentation, I really wanted to tie it to our first presentation (despite the different subject) and go for gold on that narrative aspect of the whole thing, which I think is the best way to go after all the feedback we've received.
• Friday: The big day, I think it went really well. Was chuffed to have some positive feedback from classmates. Super impressed with the standard of work from everyone. Thankful for the guidance of the lecturers, shout out to our main man Jason for getting us through the shit ideas!