To communicate your ideas to a wider audience you need to come up with a summary of your work. In most disciplines these summaries are called ‘papers’.
I expect you to generate a kind of ‘down scaled’ version of a paper. Here are some points that might be helpful to accomplish our second task:
01 Find a topic
- Based within the field of CGI you look for a topic that (truly) interests you.
- Talk to someone about your idea (your grandma, classmates, me …).
- Pose your topic as a question to be answered or a problem to be solved. Even if it is a purely ‘artistic’ idea you need a motivation ‘why’ you want to do it.
- Look for references, sources, tutorials etc. (For the sake of simplicity lets stick with the web).
- Narrow down your topic. – I will help you with that.
- Consider questions you need to answer like: ‘What is your topic/project about?’, ‘What is interesting about…’, ‘Why are you interested in…’, ‘What purpose/relevance does your topic have’, ‘Whats your thesis?’…
- At least you need a rough outline how you agitate: What tools, and methods you are going to use (painting in PS, coding, photography 3d modeling/scanning, or maybe pure research/writing etc.).
- A rough time wise estimation of your efforts.
- Describe your project within max. 5 sentences. Why/what/how…
02 Doing the work
- What are the foundations of your work? Mostly your topic will relate to some techniques, or artistic work, scientific theory etc.. Document the materials you relate to.
- Become an expert in your topic. You should know what you are talking about!
- Work on the body of your project, tools and techniques should be negotiated.
- Show the progress of your work, document some steps or at least the milestones. A common concept documenting computer generated content are so called “VFX break-downs” .
03 Conclusion
- Depending on how you work there is always some kind of conclusion.
- If you worked on some imagery present your final outcome (at least).
- In your conclusion you can summarize the experiences you made while working, the advantages or disadvantages of methods and tools you explored, recommendations, suggestions where your topic needs further research.