Sari Pagurek

Independent Project: Unreal Engine

Creating the game:

My first attempt at setting up a level: Creating a platform out of a box and forming walls to avoid falling off. Ultimately I learned this method would not work to create natural looking landscapes as the box cannot be sculpted in the way an actual landscape within Unreal Engine can.

Creating an enemy character: As this project had a timeline of a week, this character is a royalty free asset from Mixamo. Creating the character involved importing the skeleton, material texture, and glossiness; linking it to a running animation; linking it's skeletal mesh to an AI controller; and giving the AI the objective of seeking out the player.

Character movement: Linking the 3D character to it's running animation, and adjusting controls like speed and transitions.

Programming Character: So far, this character has minimal programming other than the objectives of it's AI controller. At this point I realized the character would chase down the player within the environment, but would only face left. This is the event graph behind the character pawn to make it face the player.

First Level: This is what my first level attempt looked like after trying to add landscape sculpting abilities on top of the prexisting box platform I had made.

Second Level Attempt: After learning more about how to use the landscaping mode, I decided to ditch my first attempt at an environment and start over. This allowed the creation of much more realistic looking hills using the blueprint brush tool. The lime green surface is the rendering of the enemy character's navigation box.

Adding details to the landscape, and updating the character.

In the finished game (a standard first-person shooter style video game), you are spawned in a rolling forest landscape with a mythical dog-looking creature. The creature will seek your character down unless you find it and shoot it first. WASD keys are used to move, plus space to jump, and click to shoot.

Vector Composition

Vector composition graphic made by illustrating royalty free photos with different techniques.

Techniques used: 2D illustration, Stroke Only, Gradient, Typography, Shilouette

BEHIND THE SCENES STEPS:

-layout assets in Adobe Photoshop and plan use of techniques.

- choose bright colour pallette.

- vector trace shapes and add in details.

- add final touches: pattern background, gaussian blur, gradients.

Typography Portrait

'Imagine', typography portrait graphic of John Lennon using his lyrics to "Imagine". Different typographic techniques such as clipping masks and warp perspective used to create dimension and pattern.

BEHIND THE SCENES STEPS:

- find recognizeable photo of John Lennon.

- plan colour pallette and areas of highlight/shadow.

- shape hair with unwarped 2D text.

- warp coloured text to match curves of face.

Com Tech Career Paths

Infographic about Product Design career path, information from provided Kahn Academy interviews.

Animated Gif

Cat gif created using the puppet pin tool technique in Adobe Illuatrator. Movement is displayed by creating different frames using art boards, and exporting as a .gif through Adobe Photoshop.

Double Exposure

Double Exposure photoshopping technique: I used this layering technique to combine a photo of a cat with a scenic photo of a lion to create a storyful double exposure.

Below: The first result of following a double exposure tutorial.

Adobe Animate Gifs

Rotoscoping technique to animate a short video frame by frame.

First: My first test run using the rotoscoping technique in Adobe Animate. I filmed a simple video brushing a canvas and traced the shapes frame by frame.

Second: My final animated gif of a human movement using rotoscoping. I used a short clip of myself from a dance practice (as seen below). Exported at 450x450, 24FPS.

Kinetic Typography

"If You're a Bird" Kinetic Typography & Animation created in After Effects.

Animation of two birds to poetry by Shel Silverstein, recited by Dave Pagurek. Background music "Mockingbird" composed and recorded on flute by Sari Pagurek.

Process: Before creating an After Effects composition, I created sprites of my bird characters as well as backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator, and manipulated the layers in After Effects using keyframing and the puppet-pin tool.

Stop Motion Animation

The office supplies on my desk come to life as I try to work from home.

Created using the Stop Motion Studio app on my phone, and editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Behind the Scenes setup of filming at home:

Genre Shift Trailer

Stranger Things Genre Shift Trailer edited by Sari Pagurek and Lena Wang. Visuals by Sari, Audio by Lena. Season 3 of Stranger Things (a sci-fi horror tv show) edited as a trailer for a Rom-Com.

BEHIND THE SCENES STEPS:

- collaborated and selected a tv show with a strong affiliation to a certain genre (horror) with hints of another (romantic).

- created a folder with assets and the project file.

- went through all video assets (season 3 of Stranger Things) and planned story/sequence of scenes for trailer. Added accompanying visual effects and titles.

- shared the zipped folder with group member to add audio and background music to the visuals.

Coded Bias Documentary Reflection

“Coded Bias” Documentary Reflection Coded Bias illustrates the issues of personal information and privacy as well as the racism and sexism that is integrated within the evolving industry of artificial intelligence and facial recognition software. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini starts by demonstrating how a sample facial recognition software quite literally requires her to wear a white mask to be fully detected. Hearing this, I was quite surprised by how blatantly racist the system was, but upon her explanation it makes full sense. Artificial intelligence learns from the data it is given, and since the technological industry is dominated by white men; women, people of colour, and minority groups are recognized with the lowest accuracy.

In another real-life example given, a high-tech company using AI as a first scan through resume applications was shown to actively reject female applications from continuing on in the hiring process. This just goes to show how a system learning from societies flawed ways skews itself and continues on the cycle. I don’t believe that these softwares are inherently bad, but without societal change in the way we view roles within the industry, the “coded bias” will continue to discriminate.

Coded Bias also addresses the personal profile of information gathered from all people on the web. Before watching the documentary I was aware of how many large companies collect personal information, like social media and google, but I think it’s important to recognize how these companies share your information for things like targeted advertising. The film definitely highlighted how little I know about company’s data policies and their terms and conditions.