Third Year Minor Project - The National Television Awards
My minor project at the start of third year was a light entertainment project. Our brief was to design the set for the National Television Awards, to include a Main Stage, Audience Seating to seat at least 250 people and a Green Room.
My inspiration for this project came from an image I found of a theatre stage, which used a Proscenium Arch to enclose a New York City set. I decided to take this theme, and "British-ise" it. My initial idea was to use London monuments, however following input from my lecturer and fellow students, it was decided that I should include monuments from around around the rest of the UK. This proved a little more difficult as it was hard to find more monuments that were recognisable to people whom didn't live in that area. However, I managed to include Wales Millennium Centre, The Angel of the North, York Minster, Stonehenge, The National Monument of Scotland, Blackpool Tower and Giant's Causeway.
The concept of my project was to take all these British Monuments, and build them in white, so that textures, images and coloured lights could be projected onto them.
A major part of the project was the design for the Green Room. I decided to set mine in a London Eye pod. Inside the Green room, I decided to go with a black, white and gold theme, including white and gold helium balloons.
In my design, I also decided to include a performance stage, on which I included The National Monument, Giant's Causeway and Stonehenge. This was therefore named "The Rock Stage." Performers could enter through the pillars of The National Monument, use Stonehenge as the main performance area, and use the lower parts of Giant's Causeway as performance rostra, whilst coloured lights would shine out of the higher parts.
I have been really proud of this project all the way through, from initial concept to final design, in particular my final model.
The Technical Drawings for the project are worth 40% of the overall mark; a rather large amount. I decided to create my drawings using AutoCAD, as I decided that this programme best suited this kind of project, not to mention that Computer Aided Design, is more often used within industry than hand drawing. CAD is also a strong point for me, and I decided this was the best way for me to show off my skills.
Another big part of the project is the final model; also worth 40%. I was particularly proud of this as it turned out really well. I decided to have a go at introducing some colour to my model, rather than sticking to the usual white card models, and I think this worked out really well for me. The model is built using a mix of card, foam board and Fimo, with materials such as sticky-back vinyl and Fablon to give the model it's colour. I also decided to introduce some fairy lights to the model, using tracing paper to resemble frosted lighting gels, in order to be able to internally light some of the buildings, and I think this worked beautifully.
A smaller part of the project was to produce some visuals for the project. I used 3DS Max for these as I decided that the programme would produce clean, slick visuals, and I knew that I could include a fair amount of detail, as my computer modelling skills are fairly strong. Unfortunately, the computers I was using didn't have materials packages downloaded, so I had to work with flat colours, as if the items had plain coloured lights projected onto them, along with a bit of photoshopping to add some textures.
