BA6 - Research

What is and was my intentions of building a graveyard scene with a church? Here’s my learning agreement to sum it up.

After focusing on creating the small shed I just wasn’t happy enough with what I had accomplished, I felt like it wasn’t enough and didn’t really fulfill the scene that I had in mind. So I want about creating a church, my mistake really from the start was creating it from my head, it’s not always necessarily a bad thing to do this but with a church is technically set in the middle ages I just plunged into creating a church based off memories and ideas. I have reference photos of many of the churches around Norwich but of course not all of them are from the middle ages and as my lecturer Mark pointed out whilst the Norwich cathedral may be 900 years old another Cathedral, the Catholic one was built around 1920. So after this I went to the library and searched for books that help point me in the right direction to the medieval architectures of churches. Luckily I managed to find a book on the churches in Norwich; this has proved helpful in studying the smaller details on the churches such as the windows or the towers. Both these books are from the university library.

For this project I really need to look and why I am doing what I am doing and mostly the architecture of the church as well as the textures. This important in recognizing and understanding what it is that I am doing but also the church that I creating. So far the church is made up of little snip its from the various churches around Norwich, this is because I don’t like the one set style that each church has, I really like the different parts of them and so I have tried to implement this into my building whether it be the tower, the windows or simply the basic shapes and style of it, I really want it to look like it’s from the middle ages but I also want the player to keep looking at it and hopefully finding something new and intriguing with it. My main focus with this scene is try replicate what we see grave yards as today, that being creepy and scary. Realistically I don’t feel this is down to the architecture or even the textures, I feel this is down to how we portray them through films, books, tale and other media. Psychologically we see them as creepy (especially at night) because that’s just how our western culture has portrayed them but in reality they aren’t really that creepy at all, in fact they are quite harmless and safe. Sometimes this feeling of fear can also come from the feeling of being unsure of what is to be expected after we die, the unknown and of course the typical 'ghostly' sightings in graveyards. Of course I hope with the right textures, style and scene I can recreate this feeling of being scared or feeling uncomfortable.

Looking through the books from the library I came across a few helpful images that helped to create my church.  

After having a feedback session with Nigel about what I have done he gave a couple of places to visit and since I wanted to get more reference photos for textures this was a great opportunity to do so. The first place I visited was Rosary Cemetery, just near the train station I took a bike ride down to it and took some photos. The greatest thing about this cemetery was how old it is and the way it sits on top of small hills, the grave stones were old, crooked and overgrown in some places also.The next place that I visited was a lovely well kept church along the river on Yarmouth Road; The Parish Church of Thorpe Saint Andrew Episcopi. This had some great architecture and textures.There are lot more photos so here are a few from the collection. Most if not all textures I use for the graveyard scene will be my own textures used from the reference photos.