Yet, doing cyberpunk theme to me, is a great challenge. I did not have any experience in designing cyberpunk style concepts. It is risky for me to challenge myself and go into the unknown. I did not know if I would succeed in creating any convincing design. Despite the worries, I decided to carry on my ideas and start researching. 

With the topic in mind, I begin to develop more ideas. For example, cyberpunk led me to think of a dystopian city, cyborgs, hi-tech wear, and cityscapes filled with skyscrapers. This was when I realised, my ideas went a lot more complex than I anticipated. “Movement” to me, is no longer just moving images. It also stands for a movement against something by a group of punks. “Illusion” could also become the illusion of peace. A story of rebellion started to form in my head. 

At this moment, I started to research more on dystopian style design. For the environment designs, I referenced some photos from my trip to New York, and many from Hong Kong. As for the characters’ clothing, I referenced many from Techwear. It is challenging to merge all those references into one concept. 

I started with character designs. As I am not familiar with cyberpunk style, I struggled to decide what to add. I realised my first character draft of 01 was too plain. It was difficult to figure out what shape was interesting because there were too many things to decide on. Therefore, I tried to make everything into a silhouette, which made it a lot simpler. I used this approach for my second character as well. Then, I encountered another problem. I struggled with the colour scheme because I wanted the character to be different, but related to the first character. Therefore, I want some variation other than plain black. I tried using a line draft and grey base colour to try out different colour schemes easier. In the end, I used black as the main colour for both, but I added more tools with different colours to add more variation for my second character 02. 

The most difficult part was the cyborgs’ leg and hand. Although I love mechs, I was not experienced with creating them. After referencing many photos of gunplas and some screenshots I took from games, I started sketching them onto paper. This helped me to familiarise myself with how machines are structured and imagine how the mech leg and hand would move. I tried many times to make them look more interesting and convincing.

Meanwhile, I started to do an animation. I believe that to express “movement” better, animation is needed. For this animation, it was the most complex one I have done so far. It was risky because I did not know if I could convey what was in my head. I had only done animation a few times. And all the knowledge of animation I had was mostly through anime. I did not have a sound foundation for animating movement of a human figure. Also, animation could be very time-consuming. I had to finish the basic keyframes, clean up the lines, and colouring in the end. There were 156 frames throughout the 13 seconds of animation. It was a lot to work on. Therefore, when I successfully wrapped up the animation, I felt relieved.

Another thing that took many trials and errors for me was my environment pieces. I am not good at composition of large-scale environments. I struggled in trying to include too much information in one single piece. After realising I should have tied down what elements to put in, my drafts were eventually finished. And I took about 3 weeks to finally finish them off with the rendering. This was the most time-consuming, most challenging, and most difficult part of my project. In the end, I successfully finished them within the time limit.

In conclusion, I am glad that I got to finish such a challenging exploration and difficult goal that I have set for myself. In such a short time, I have done so much work. Despite that, I want to improve my efficiency in designing and drawing. I would bring the experiences I had during my trial and error process onto my future project so that my workflow would be smoother.