On Show

Julia Malinowska

BA [Hons] Animation

Hi! I am an animator based in Dublin, freshly graduated from the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. My wide variety of interests includes animation for 2D and 3D film and games, as well as 2D illustration - with my graduate project being a 3D game about a dog in a museum. While working on the project I was focusing on the dog's locomotion, which helped me realize that I enjoyed the animation aspect of the project the most. Having said that, I am very flexible and would love to potentially also work on 2D films! I've helped with several projects, such as the short on anger management for Jigsaw, doing some backgrounds, character animation, and cleanup.

My project for my final year was a game rather than a film - and making a game requires some planning.

Some initial character designs for Cucumber, the dog, and Peter Ickles, the security guard.

Some story behind the game! Originally I intended to have a cutscene at the beginning of the game, in which we find out that the dog is a guard dog in a museum. One night he has a terrible accident involving one of the new exhibits, which crushes him with its weight. Unfortunately, one of the key members of my team left during development, and I decided to focus on the dog's movement instead - leaving the cutscene unfinished. The work you see here was done by myself and Saoirse Mitchell, with help from Niall McNally and Naoe Timbang.

And here is the finished product - it took a lot of learning to get to this point, but we pulled through! The engine I used was UE4. You can find all of my progress work on my Vimeo!

Apart from 3D animation I am also strongly interested in 2D - this is a short I worked on with Aoibh Foynes, Ellen McCullough, and Abigail Webster for Jigsaw, focusing on anger management.

Last, but not least - I always have and always will love illustration. I've had a lot of time during lockdown to explore new styles and techniques, and really develop what I would like my style to be. This is a continuous journey that I look forward to pursuing.

BONES - The Game

For my final project, I have decided that making a full film was not a big enough challenge for me - I had to learn several new programs and make something cohesive with them in order to be satisfied - and hence BONES, the game, was born. Having no prior experience in coding I dove straight into Unreal Engine 4 with its easy-to-grasp blueprint system, and made a game about a museum's guard dog wandering around his old workplace. Granted, the game ended up being more of a demo for a dog character's movement and world creation, but I still feel like I have gained an invaluable amount of knowledge that I will hopefully one day use again.

Interactive Media: Investigating Narratives in Modern Video Games

My thesis focused on the aspect of interactivity in games, film, and everything in between. It serves the purpose of discussing the debate between narratologists and ludologists when it comes to storytelling in modern games. My aim was to discuss whether it is possible for an interactive medium, such as video games, or virtual reality, to coexist in harmony with an ingrained plot, a narrative. My initial assumption was that well of course they can - plenty of games while being games, also tell fantastic stories of witchers and towns floating in the sky and divers trying to survive on an alien underwater planet - but it turns out the matter is not as simple as that. I go over the history of interactive films, from the old to the new, and discuss what exactly made them interactive pieces, how it was achieved, and how our approach to interactivity has evolved over the years. I dissect the feeling of agency we get in many modern video games, where exactly that feeling comes from, and how it ties to pure interaction and narrative. I go on to talk about how interactivity ties in with narrative within the realm of video games, what unique storytelling tools games have that not many other forms of media can boast of, and how genre can affect what story is being told to us. Finally, I discuss an example of masterful storytelling within The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt using two quests as examples that show off two different styles of storytelling that can be commonly found in games.