In Steve's lesson we had to create our own brand/logo in our sketchbooks and using the computers. We were originally told to create a mindmap showing what we're passionate about, what makes us unique, and what our strengths are. Then we had to create a short 6 word sentence describing what we do, to help us identify ourselves as a brand.
Next we started drawing. We first started by creating a logo without taking the pen off the paper. I came up with some simple logos using my initials, and a visual logo featuring someone looking through a camera. I settled on the visual one because it looked better than initials in my opinion and stood out as a logo.
After this we moved onto the computers and had to create a logo using Adobe Illustrator only using the Helvetica type family. I played around with strokes and effects and in the end came up with this logo which I thought looked impressive. I chose primary colours because they're bold and stand out.
Lastly we moved back to the sketchbooks and had to make a logo which had no text. I decided on the idea of a silhouette in front of a computer to connote post production and design work, then tried to further evaluate my idea and created a logo with a minimalistic figure in front of a camera, whose head acted as the camera lens.
Overall I thought that this task was helpful in me developing my drawing skills and presenting myself as a brand or company.
For the past term with Steve we have been learning all about animation and how to use the program 'Adobe Animate'. Over these lessons I have learnt a lot about the program which I had little knowledge on before, and created many digital animations. We started by learning the basics of the program and understanding what it does for the first few lessons, then advanced onto learning it's specific tools and features. Since I started I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge about digital animation and Adobe Animate. There's some things which I can still improve on like making longer animations or learning even more of the programs functions such as the bone tool, however I'm confident in making small animations using the variety of features I've already learnt.
One more thing which I learnt was how to incorporate my animations together into an interactive product using Adobe Muse, giving it the ability to become a functioning website or app. This is useful to know and produces a professional looking product.
This is the first animation I made in our interactive lessons when messing around with the program. As you can see I had some basic knowledge of the program prior to teaching. It's fairly clunky and could be improved by adding more detail or making the movements more realistic.
This is an animation I made in Animate to experiment with motion tweens. Again it works but could have more detail.
This is an animation I made frame by frame to experiment with the technique. It took a fairly long time to do however I was pleased with the rough style result.
I made this animation experimenting with shape tweens, something I had no idea how to use before these lessons. It was easy to do and created a unique looking animation.
I created this scene using symbols to duplicate the penguins as opposed to drawing them out repeatedly. This was a new skill that I learnt.
This is a reference sheet I created for my character 'The Blob'. I learnt how to do this in Steve's lessons and it turned out very helpful for when I came to make animations for this character.
This is an animation I made of the Blob eating for the final interactive product I made. It's smooth and is a big improvement from the first animation I made. It could be improved however by making it a little slower.
Lastly for our character we had to animate it sleeping. I started off by using it's starting frame from the blank project and from there used frame by frame animation to make it's eyes close. Then I animated the blobs body with a motion tween to make it slowly get a little bigger then return to its original position. I then repeated the frame by frame animation of it's eyes and it was done.
In Steve's lesson we were set the task of going out into Bath and sketching a few locations related to Mary Shelley - the author of Frankenstein. She wrote the book when she was living in Bath so in our groups we went to certain locations related to her residence there. We then had to present these sketches in the form of a map (below). We also had to draw our own Frankenstein which didn't follow any stereotypes. I went with a long haired male monster with a missing eye and two belly buttons.
Carrying on our task of creating a character, I had to make mine eat in this lesson. As always, I started with the same position so that this action would loop seamlessly. I also drew a slice of pizza for my character to eat.
I started off by animating the arm frame by frame into a position where it could catch the food. Then I animated the pizza as an object to fall into the blobs hand. After I had animated these first two movements I accordingly animated the blobs face to look at the pizza as it falls, by animating the position of the eyes, nose and mouth. I then carried on animating. Again, using frame by frame animation I made the blobs hand reach up to its mouth (moving the pizza along with it) and it's mouth. Once the pizza reached the mouth, I made it decrease in size and fade out.
My timeline for this animation. As you can see I used keyframes to keep things in the same place at times.
An example of me decreasing the blacks in the pizzas cheese colour to mimic fading out.
Making the pizza fade out proved quite tricky in Animate, so in the end I decided to make the colours get progressively blacker to mimic fading out.
Once I got to this point I needed to make the Blob return to its starting position. I did this by copying and pasting the frames I had already created and reversing them.
For our next task, we had to make our character 'play'. This meant that it had to perform a short and quick action to represent it playing. I made mine smile and wave, then return to its original position so it looped seamlessly. This was fairly easy, as I separated my character into separate layers so that I could animate the parts I needed and leave the rest to stay put. I animated the arm frame by frame, and the face (excluding the nose which stayed put) frame by frame also. I used keyframes to make the other parts stay put. This is the end result:
For this task we had to use motion tweens. I made an animation of 2 cars racing. Motion tweens are a simple way of animating an object which is fairly effortless compared to frame by frame animation. To do it, I drew a car and duplicated it to make a second in a different colour, then converted them both to symbols. Then, in the timeline I right-clicked the frame with the car on and chose "Create Motion Tween", then I moved the car to the finishing point. I did this for the other car and drew a background. Lastly, I double clicked on the motion tween in the timeline and added 'ease' so that the cars sped up smoothly.
In Interactive we had to learn about symbols and use them in our own Animate document to make an image of penguins. I drew a penguin with the brush and filled it in with the paint bucket, then used the selection tool to draw a box around the penguin to select it. Once selected, I right clicked the penguin and converted it into a symbol. Then, I was able to drag the penguin in from the library onto the stage, so I ended up with 4 penguins. Lastly I drew a background and resized the penguins to give the image perspective.
Today in Interactive Steve gave us the task of drawing a range of expressions. To have some reference, we had to take pictures of us showing these different emotions using Photo Booth, then draw a simple representation of these emotions. I used photoshop to draw with and these are my illustrations:
This is a frame by frame animation I made using Adobe Animate.
It took about 30 minutes to make which was fairly tedious, however it was satisfying to see the frames all come together into a moving gif. To speed things up a bit, I animated half of the frames for the circle shape of the head, the copied and pasted them and reversed them in the timeline to make the animation loop. I also added colour to make the gif look more interesting.
To make the frame by frame animation easier I used the full stop and comma keys to go ahead/back frames easily, and converted all of the frames in the timeline to blank keyframes. I also turned on onion skin so I could see what was drawn in the previous frame and make sure everything was in place.
The timeline in Adobe Animate is similar to any other timeline such as one in Premiere or After Effects, as it works in frames. However it can contain multiple layers of drawings and animations. This means that each layer can be dedicated to a different thing, such as one for a character, one for a background, one for an object and so on. Additionally, as well as working in frames it can contain tweens for things to move slowly without frame by frame animation. Similar to this, there are keyframes in each frame which represent what is going to happen in comparison to the previous frame. There are also different tools in the layer pane which can make a layer visible/invisible, show a layer as an outline, and lock/unlock layers. The timeline can contain drawings, symbols and audio.
In Interactive with Steve we watched this animation made in flash about Pyramid Schemes.
The video showed how to spot them and had some drawings in to help demonstrate what is being narrated. The animation looked professional and helped towards putting across a message.
A pyramid scheme is a way of making money that involves promising people payment for enrolling other people into the scheme or teaching them how to take part. The many people at the bottom of the pyramid make hardly any money whereas the few people at the top make vast amounts of money. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud and are therefore illegal in many companies (including the UK), however by renaming them and slightly changing aspects of the scheme, many companies get away with it. One big giveaway is that it's too good to be true and one example is reselling aloe vera products. This type of scheme has been in existence for at least a century.
In Steve's lesson this week, we learnt about a program called 'Adobe Animate' (previously Adobe Flash). He gave us a brief idea of how the program works. It has a timeline which is made up of frames which can be drawn on. I learnt that a lot of big companies start out in this program or programs similar to it, which helped me realise that it can be very complex, despite being easy to use for simple frame by frame animation. Programs such as 'The Amazing World of Gumball' are animated using Adobe Animate.
After we had learnt a little bit about the program, we were allowed to have a mess about on the program ourselves. I had used this program before to make a short animation for my entertainment, so I knew some things about it already. As we were short for time, I used motion tweens to make different background layers move to create perspective, instead of drawing them repeatedly for each frame. I also drew a character that looked uncannily like a dorito which I converted to a symbol so I could move it with a motion tween too. I animated it for 3 frames and looped it so that it gave the effect of him wobbling around. This is the .gif I made:
I thought that this was a very creative animation. I liked the use of string to make characters because of how unique it was and how it was made to fit in with the story. The animation was effective however in my opinion the faces of the characters looked a little childish and creepy, but this didn't affect the film much.
One thing which I thought was really clever was the story and use of numbers to represent the status of a character. It's clever because it can be related to our lives and be seen as an extended metaphor. I also liked how by putting two O's together, the "zero's" make a "∞", the highest number. This gave the dark story a happy and feel good ending. Overall I think that the story was moving and effective in putting across the message not to judge people by how they look/come across.
The technique of using string to animate is too fiddly for me to try out myself, however it does look good so I might try something similar if I end up doing stop motion animation again at some point. My favourite thing about this video was the use of numbers to represent status, and my least favourite thing was the strange faces of the characters.
How Will You Die?
This was very different from the first film we were shown, the biggest difference being that it was made digitally using computer animation. I thought that it conveyed the public health message effectively and was fairly comedic in doing so. The animation was colourful which is eye catching and used a cartoon style character to represent a human. The film used a scratchy grunge texture for the background which I thought looked a bit out of place and scruffy, but apart from this I thought it looked good. It used repetition and comparisons for comedic effect and to further emphasise the message of the film that people are dying because of things which are seen as luxuries in richer parts of the world. One last thing which made me appreciate the film more was that it was quick and to the point, which made it more pleasurable to watch.
If I were commissioned to do this project, I would take a similar approach and use cartoon characters that aren't very human like to represent humans, so that the film isn't too realistic and saddening. One thing I'd do differently however would be to give it a sleeker more professional look, as I thought the film we were shown looked quite scruffy and homemade.
In Europe, stopmotion started as a means of storytelling and was seen as magic because it gave the illusion of objects moving around by themselves. The first use of stop motion was done by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton in 1898, who made "The Humpty Dumpty Circus". The US didn't pick up on it properly until 35 years later however. As it gained popularity it was used for entertainment such as cartoons, as well as for visual effects in films and television. By the 90's, CGI got more popular so stopmotion wasn't really used anymore for professional purposes and got less popular.
Because it stopped being used much in film, it was more impressive when used as it takes a lot of time to do and looks handmade and real as opposed to computer imagery. It is a very versatile means of filmmaking which can be done with a range of different materials or techniques. One which stood out for me which I'd maybe like to pursue is stopmotion done with pictures as a sort of collage, like this video:
I like it because it looks visually appealing and bright. It also has a retro, abstract quality which I think looks unique and cool.
Ident
This short video is a dark animation that follows the routine of one individual. I think it's trying to show how people put on a 'mask' in everyday life to change themselves or act in a way which is expected. It also shows other people and how they can change this 'mask'. Overall I liked the style of the animation and it was fun to watch, however it's hard to understand what it's really about as it's abstract and there's no dialogue. Darkness, Light, Darkness
This short video showed a human body slowly being made out of plasticine, by its hands. The animator used real meat in the animation which was unique and strange to look at, and overall the video was abstract but had some humour and was creative. For the whole video the setting stays the same, a small room which after a quick google search shows that it could be representing a cramped style of living or something similar. I preferred Ident to this video. My Own Stopmotion
Lastly, we worked in groups of two to have a go at making our own simple stopmotion using iMotion:
Throughout my first six weeks on this course, I have learnt a lot and started to develop many new skills in a range of areas.
Firstly, in Moving Image and Media Theory I have developed my knowledge about film and the history of film. I've discovered how films have changed over time and how different shots connote different moods and feelings to an audience. I've found out how sound helps to tell a story and make it more effective, and the process of how it's done in the real world, which I didn't know before. Through this I learnt about foley artists and how to use a sound recorder to get my own sounds for my films, and how to edit them accordingly. I've also learnt how to effectively use Premiere Pro (which I had some knowledge of before) so that it backs up my project as I work, and lays out my footage in an organised and effective manner.
In my Audio lessons with Tom Grey I have learnt about audio and sound in more detail. He helped us further understand about sound in film, and how to use Premiere with sound design and music, so that the sound is mastered and doesn't clip. He also taught us about making photomations, and how to edit them in Premiere by importing photographs in a group called an Image Sequence.
Publishing with Ty has helped me learn how to be more efficient with photoshop, as well as develop my knowledge about graphic design and film posters. I already had basic knowledge of photoshop before these lessons, however he let us experiment with the program and discover new things individually. He also taught us a range of keyboard shortcuts and techniques to make us more efficient with the program. In these lessons I've produced some of my own film posters that I'm proud of, and gained some useful knowledge and skills which will be helpful later in the year.
Film Poster Mashup made
in publishing (Design 1)
Film Poster Mashup made in publishing (Design 2)
Sprited Away Poster (Made in Publishing)
Final Design of Spirited Away poster
Lastly, Interactive lessons with Steve Spicer have been really useful in helping me develop my knowledge in design and how I look at pieces of work me or others have made. In these lessons I've learnt a lot about very important parts of Media such as colour, text and design. Steve taught us about colour theory and colour harmony, typography and connotations of typefaces which are very useful to know about, and have helped me in other lessons when designing things. I also learnt the basics of Adobe Illustrator which is a complicated program, made simple to understand in these lessons. Using it I have made infographics as well as gained knowledge on how to use it for making posters and 3d graphics.
Colour Wheel made in Interactive
Image made in Interactive showing different parts of a typeface
Overall I think that in this first six weeks I have learnt a lot about programs and theory which will be very helpful as this course goes on, and now I feel a lot more confident approaching tasks with this knowledge. I still have things to improve on however, one is being more effective at planning and putting more time into planning before getting into a task. Another improvement I could make to help my learning is to spend time doing independent research and work (i.e. outside of college) and giving evidence of this. In the next term and half term holiday I will definitely try to act on these improvements, be it watching a few films mindfully, reading a book or getting outside with my camera and experimenting with it.
This blog shows all examples of all of the skills I have listed, as well as the video below, which shows some examples of skills I have developed:
There are many ways that colours can compliment and work with each other, each one has a different
name and rule that it follows.
Complementary
Complementary colour schemes are two colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel. They give a lot of contrast but work well together in most circumstances, if the saturation of the colours are at their fullest.
Here complementary colours have been used and a high amount of contrast
is created. This makes the piece stand out a lot.
Analogous
Analogous Colors are groups of three colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel, with one being the dominant colour. They look good together because of how close they are on the colour wheel and are balanced well.
Triad
Similar to analogous colours, a Triad of colours are three colours that are evenly spaced around the colour wheel. They are balanced, but contrast a lot so stand out a fair bit.
Here we can see that the Burger King logo
has used a triadic colour scheme, which
gives it it's vibrant appearance.
Square
A square colour scheme takes 4 colours that are evenly spaced around the colour wheel. It's similar to a triad but with one colour added, so therefore it will produce quite vibrant results and will work well with bright colours.
Split Complementary
Split complementary colours are similar to complimentary however it takes the colour opposite it and uses each colour which is beside that.
The Firefox logo uses a split complementary colour scheme of blue, yellow and orange.
Tetradic
A Tetradic colour scheme is made by drawing out a rectangle on the colour wheel. It gives four colours, 2 each which complement each other.
The word 'Gamut' simply means a complete range or scope of something. However when colour is concerned a gamut means a range of colours available on a certain device or platform. For example, a computer or tv screen displays colours by mixing RGB light, so the gamut is fairly large (as shown by the diagram below). A print based piece such as a newspaper or magazine uses CYMK mixing to display colour, and therefore the gamut is smaller. A gamut is useful if you want to preview how something is going to look when printed, as it can show the range of colours available on the device being used.
