Major Project

University Brief

“The Major Project is the culmination of the Art and Design undergraduate practice courses.

In this final project, you will need to demonstrate your capacity to work to a planned schedule, research your options imaginatively, take account of current thinking on the issues your project raises, develop your work in convergent and divergent ways, respond positively to criticism and arrive at creative solutions.”

The Idea

For this project I focused on encouraging museums, galleries and gardens to become ‘digitised’ in order to engage, excite and entertain visitors. The influx of people visiting these places is important for their survival, as repeat visitors and tourists are essential for the funding of these organisations. In my project I want to highlight key ways that museums, galleries and gardens can engage and delight their visitors in a way that will keep them coming back and spread positive reviews to others. Therefore, boosting the overall popularity and profit of the establishment.

Transitioning to digital and making exhibitions interactive is becoming vastly popular due to the ‘online’ nature of society. Therefore, I decided to choose the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens as my main focus as they have none of these current techniques on their grounds.

Digital Drawing

Small Painting 2 :
Anemopaegma Chamberlaynii

Small Painting 1 :
Arrowhead Dawn

In order to create a digital experience for the Botanic Garden visitors I decided to create a series of animations that showcase plants blooming and growing, so that no matter the season, guests are always able to see what the beautiful plants look like as buds to fully grown flowers.

I ventured into Digital Painting (with the Wacom Graphics Tablet) and began drawing plants whilst trying to capture their true essence.

Small Painting 3:
Helleborus

Drawing to Animation

After completing the above paintings I created hundreds of individual drawings for each of the three paintings. These drawings capture, frame by frame, the plants growing over time. I placed these drawings in an After Effects file on a layer above its corresponding painting, and began animating to show the plant growing/blooming.

The main idea is that a visitor will be able to scan one of my paintings with an app which will trigger the paintings to ‘come to life’ - through the playing of its corresponding animation. These animations will not only showcase the growing process of that plant but will also provide some interesting information such as; the plant’s name, its height and its blooming seasons.

This digital experience will be educational, interactive and visually pleasing. It will hopefully teach the visitors a little bit more about the plants at the gardens as well as leaving them happy and entertained.

Virtual Reality

Artivive is an app that I used to incorporate virtual reality into my project. This app allows an artist to upload content, it maps images to videos and I utilised this video in order to make my project.

The following are screenshots of the animations, using VR, in action so far.