24/09/15 - Meeting with Ryan

Today I met with Ryan Locke to discuss the ideas and thoughts I had for my project. I explained how I wanted to create a strong portfolio piece, predominantly 2D concept art/visual development for film and games. I also explained how I was interested in different visual cultures and how they were used in current film/games. We discussed how a lot of cultural overlap happens without the viewer even noticing, and how it is used to create depth and help build a world.
An alien bar scene would seem bland without prethought to the worlds that each alien belongs to, and dressing them accordingly. Adding symbols and glyphs invented or borrowed from other cultures has been used throughout entertainment history, with most movies paying homage or referencing to other, older movies pretty much all the time. I found through experimenting with patterns and layers, I could add depth to silhouetted characters almost instantly.

So combined with my drive to produce concept art and my interest of cultural influence, I have composed a bunch of questions to do with my project:

• How does cultural influence improve depth within concept art?
• What IS culture?
• How is a culture defined?
• What is it that we as the viewer recognise as "culture" within a piece of art/concept/scene
• Which cultural traditions and visual iconographies are most present in current media (film/games)
• How does one "build" a culture in order to create character/world concepts?

What is culture? - A definition

Culture can be defined in a hundred ways, and my aim is to narrow this down to the barest of ideas and learn to build it back up from there. When I think of culture, I imagine textiles, patterns and dress. I imagine being able to look at something, whether that is a place or a person or a vehicle, and know it's history or location of origin by aesthetic alone. This is my own visual bias. Culture is more of what makes up a group of people, not singularly how they look. Culture forms from a group of people, and their traditions, religions, beliefs.

According to an article by Livescience, culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people. This is defined by language, religion, attire, music, art, and everything else that makes up a "people". We can see this in modern day. As many different cultures emigrate from their homes and travel across the globe, larger countries become more culturally diverse. Even in Dundee, I see different ethnic groups, different collections of people. Each of these groups belong to and possess a "culture" that makes up who they are. This culture is past, present and future.

My goal currently is to properly refine and categorise all the aspects of what makes a "culture", and to create a list of subcategories that I can investigate in detail.