Prototyping and feedback

Dec 12, 2025

Prototyping

Early prototypes shared with the class have been short scenes rendered in Blender illustrating small moments or visuals I personally found significant. The earliest iteration of this concept I made was a short film of a singular robotic figure, walking through an assortment of scenes, ranging in scope from a city square, an endless desert, rolling hills, to outer space and the rings of Saturn. I called this film “Long Way Home” and it was meant to represent the humanoid character experiencing all sorts of different, surreal worlds as he makes his way home, taking the long way, so to speak. Only retroactively did I realize that I was attempting to illustrate certain notions of the sublime, landscapes that may awe in their vastness or surprising endlessness.

I researched more about the Romantics as I worked on subsequent iterations, because I realized a lot of my personal values and ideals resonated deeply with them: the intense focus on beauty, emotion, and individuality. In fact, for another class I made a book of Romantic art and literature supplemented with my own analysis, and printed it in a magazine format at a final length of 84 pages. I think of this as another thesis prototype because it gave me a deeper, intimate understanding of the art movement and proved rather influential in how I began thinking of my work. In my next 3D art prototypes, I experimented with creating a sort of ‘modern sublime,’ i.e. scenes that attempted to create the sense of overwhelming awe and terror associated with a grand scale, but with modern artifacts, like old televisions, as well as elements of nature, like a small being in a huge garden of flowers, or an underwater scene filled with huge fish. These were more just visual experiments that helped me determine what I liked and didn’t like—I found from this that I like when my work has a more surreal and dreamlike feel, rather than simple inflation or deflation of size and scale.

For my midterm prototype, I attempted to create some sort of narrative while still focusing on small scenes of beauty. I first created a few short vignettes of themes/motifs that I associated with this sense of beauty and wonder: a view of a full moon at night, coming into focus as it’s viewed through the rustling branches of trees. A set of small blue butterflies flying in scattered paths against a starry blue night. And finally, a luminescent, glowing flower on the surface of a lake, glowing particles or perhaps fireflies circling around it. Then, I created a scene of a girl in her room, modeling it after a position I often find myself in: lying in bed, scrolling on Tiktok, watching YouTube videos in the background. My goal with these scenes was to create a juxtaposition: first, a sort of gray, desaturated mundanity of the modern world, doomscrolling, a high-pitched chattering noise of random people’s voices droning on, just another evening of wasted hours. Then, this scene contrasted sort of glitch-like with a different world, one with more beauty, a world of dreams—this is where the flower, moon, and butterflies come in. The initial goal was to create a very obvious and jarring distinction between these two modes, in order to highlight the beauty of the more natural elements.

However, I ended up creating something that did not achieve this goal well, mainly because I did not succeed in creating a scene representing the ‘dull mundanity of modern life,’ rather I ended up making even that scene feel sort of otherworldly, by placing it in a surreal state, a room with tall ceilings and huge windows opened up to a heaven-like world of clouds. I learned two important things from this prototype, which I think was also confirmed by my peers’ feedback: one, I’m not really interested in spending my time designing or modeling a scene that I have already deemed as boring or dull. The thing that drives me is creating beautiful and magical things, so I don’t really care to create the opposite just for the sense of contrast or juxtaposition. Two, I honestly don’t even believe that modern life is represented by ‘dull mundanity’ anyway. I think this exercise really illuminated to me how much I think the world is beautiful, even in the most mundane moments—so representing it any other way would feel dishonest to me.

Feedback

I find the feedback for my prototypes this semester has been generally quite positive. Some of the most important pieces of feedback and takeaways I’ve received are listed below:

  • A narrative is more interesting than a series of vignettes. Think of some kind of story you want to illustrate and focus more deeply on the story aspect of it, rather than multiple individual objects
  • How can I make it feel more recognizably “me,” while still depicting universally beautiful things? I think the most important thing here is in stylization and defining my personal style when it comes to things like colors and textures.
  • ‘The only way to access universal themes is through the minutely specific’ – don’t optimize for being relatable or universal. Being extremely specific about yourself, your VIEW is the only way to ever make someone else out there feel a sense of connection. Trying to be broad, general, relatable will ensure you will never create anything truly resonant or great.