Animation Mini Project – Evaluation

The animation project overall was great in the aspect that I got to learn a new skill but in general I didn’t really enjoy the process of making the animation, I felt that it was way too time consuming and the final product didn’t justify the amount of time spent on creating the product, I know with practice the final product will become better, I just don’t feel determined to continue this type of animation in Flash but maybe there will other forms of animation the I will prefer that I can spend more time on learning.

Finally, I managed to create one more animation which concludes this project, as the last animation

Animation Mini Project – The Analysis

Today I started producing some animations, experiencing Adobe Flash properly for the first time was a very tedious experience as the animations that I started off with were separate drawings in each frame using the onion skin tool to help me keep the drawings similar but allow the movement to happen. To learn some of these techniques I just talked about I went through some simple tutorials to get a base understanding of Flash and how it works in relation to Animation, Below is one of the tutorials and this simply shows how to animate the movement of a circle and from these tutorial and experimenting I started to understand the layout of this program.

After researching I started to come up with some simple ideas that I thought wouldn’t be too complicated to animate. I decided that my animations would be themed around flat and limited colour palette style as it is a simple and flat style, this first idea for an animation that I produced was a music levels system where there is a set amount bars where each bar represents a different form of sound for example one would represent bass. This animation also fit into my theme as the animation used only a few colours and a flat design . As just an experimental piece of I thought creating these levels would be very easy but found out that I was still very time consuming and this was because each second is filled by 12 frames so to make anything substantial you have to fill out a big amount of frames. The finished level animation product is below:

 

Before I made a final product I decided to do another animation something a little bit more challenging this time I did a mini firework animation. I the process of making this animation I used a few more tools in flash like the motion tween. Even though I had already done an animation I didn’t really find making this animation any easier but I found the quality of the end product was slightly better. The use of different sized objects appearing at different times made it more visually appealing as you can see below.

Animation Mini Project -The Description

This week we was given a mini project where the task was to create small animations for our portfolio. For this task I had to the use Adobe Flash Pro, this piece of software allows you to create animations by utilizing the frame system, a frame in flash is miniscule section of the animation, therefore to create an animation you have to connect a series of images in these frames to make the final moving image/ animation.

First thoughts on the animation task is that I is a great way to delve into different types of digital production that I haven’t really experienced before, expanding my knowledge and repertoire of what I can do. At this stage of the project I didn’t really have any Ideas of what I wanted to do and didn’t really know where to start as I was new to this piece of software so, my next step is to go through some tutorials and start producing some ideas and small animations to practice.

Parallaxing Websites

Today I was going through some new ideas for my website and I found a interesting and cool theme which is built on JavaScript, and this is called parallaxing. The idea of parallaxing is that one part of the page scrolls faster then the other part of the page.

The type of parallaxing that I am particularly interested in is the background form and this is where when you are changing pages the page you are on scrolls slow and the next page you are moving to scrolls faster so it looks like its overlapping each other and creates and really contemporary looking website.

Below is some websites that use this teqnique:

http://journey.lifeofpimovie.com/#!/

http://hotdot.pro/en/#

And below is a video of someone explaining how the parallax works, the functions that run in the JavaScript and how it links the HTML and CSS

The Channel Project- Filming

Today we decided that we would film all of the episodes for our channel project, as we already knew what we wanted to film it was just about going through the motions of getting all of the film we needed. The idea of the episodes was to show the view of the ‘patient 268’ and how he is dealing with the testing that is been carried out on him. Through these episodes you can see the change of his physical and his personality parallel he physically looking more ill and sick but contradictory he says he feels stronger and his personality shows the change of strength in the form of anger.

To show the change in his body features we had a make-up artist apply make-up making him look more tired, the colour of his veins changing and making him look more ill. This was achieved from lightning and darkening different areas of his body, for example for the tiredness under eyes was darkened and to make him look more ill his face lightened to look more pale.

       

Another area that we wanted to target to put emphasis on this form of change in the narrative is camera angle and how the audience is influenced by the composition of the shot . As ” (Kraft 1987; Mandell and Shaw 1973; Tiemens 1970) in their assumption that when an object is photographed from a low angle, so it seems that the viewer would seem to be looking up at it, the object was judged more positively (e.g., larger, stronger, bolder) than when the same object was photographed from a high camera angle. When the object appeared to be at eye level, viewer‟s judgements were in between the two extremes.” Therefore we changed the angle of the camera every episode starting from a high angle showing his weakness of being a human to the last episodes where it is low angle showing power and this change in strength in comparison the previous episodes.

First Episode                                                                                 Fifth Episode

Props was also something we wanted to include as it can be used as powerful tool, drawing the audience away from the main person and bringing there attention to a prop adding depth to the scene. We used a couple props some of which were a set of beads which played a big part in the background story of the patient and the other was a small pool of magnetic fluid which was represented as genetically changed blood, and these props worked effectively helping us develop the story.

      

Prop 1- Magnetic Fluid                                                              Prop 2 -Beads

Overall, it was a successful day of filming we managed to get all of the video we needed to go into the post-production stage, and we achieved the theme that we wanted of development and got it all into the time limit that we had of 6 minutes.

Bevers, I. 2007. A change of perspecitive: the influence of camera angles on product evaluation. University of Twente.

THE CHANNEL PROJECT – LOGO DESIGNS

On Tuesday, we had a whole day where we worked with our whole group to design the logo for the channel project. Post the production of the logos we had to decide what type of logo we were aiming for. So decided that we wanted the name of the company  “Nano” in it and a simple and slick design. We decided that each person should created their own logo then in the end we will compare all of them and see which we liked the best.

Instead of going straight into the design of the logo I first searched up nano and nano technology to see if there was going to be any influences to my logo, then I sketched out some simple designs to see if the ideas in my head would have any design aesthetic and once I went through this process I went onto the digital design phase.

                 

This was my first idea I went for a neon metal look having the clean and simple font design with the texture and glow I thought linked well to the des-fi genre and the connotations of nano and des-fi is metals and neon glows as you see in many films the future is portrayed as this metal planet lit up with these strips of light.

The second logo I designed went for a sharp cutting edge felling. Where it featured the name of the company and a symbol which would represent the company.

This is the logo that everyone decided on, One of my team design members designed this logo, it fitted with the idea what we were trying to portray simple, clean has the name in it and has a generally nice aesthetic.

THE CHANNEL PROJECT

The channel project is a group task were in small teams we have to create a web channel which have to include episodes of video content the general theme that we have to brand our content around is Des-Fi which is the future of design. We deciding to go in the direction of gaming where our game would be based in the future and a massacre has occurred due to a patient escaping from nano technology testing facility. We decided the name of the game would be Nano linking directly to the name of the company in the game.

We decided the video content would be a video diary of Patient 268, the story behind how he got into the testing of nano technology and the build up to when he escapes and causes the infection that has to spread and cause a massacre in the city which is the start of the game. So overall the episodes is the chronological build up of before the game, the why, of what caused the tragedy in the game.

We also discussed ideas about the website which would be the Nano’s site the scientific company featured in the game and it would include all of the information about patient 268, the videos and other details about this character and there will seem to be other pages but will show up with restricted staff view only.

INDEPENDENT LEARNING 3 – “POST PRODUCTION”

Nicolas Bourriaud talks about the idea of post production in his book. Post Production Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World he describes this term as the forms of cultural art is not original any more, they are the processed, copy, remake or redesign of previous models. He says the digital age is the adaptation of previous times. an example of this could be covers of songs where an music artist sings another artist  in their own interpretation. Another example is a parodying heavily seen on YouTube and other video hosting websites,  This is where a person remakes a video usually exploiting the mistakes of the original video.

Bourriand and David Carson’s ideas of ‘Semionaut’ do fit together as they both analyse the idea as the relationship between the emotion and design, how slight changes in the design can have huge effects of the emotional message portrayed from the object changed. An example that David Carson made was the two garages which were painted exactly the same but the writing of ‘No Parking’  both saying the same message but giving two completely different emotional messages.

An example of post production would be the film Godzilla as this film has been remade may times but each time the story has been changed in the way the producer feels will excite the audience of that time. The outline of the film where a massive monster attacks in america has been copied but how the story pans out has been interpreted, which links to the idea of post production

Independent Learning 1 – “media-independent techniques”

1) Name one further Technique?

I believe one further media-independent technique would be compatibility, as now with new media and converged products software is now needed to work on a range of platforms so therefore it must be compatible with a most or all of the operating systems. An example of this would Microsoft office has to be compatible with many operating systems like Windows, IOS etc. 

2) Describe at least 3 instances of where these techniques are used/occur.

An instance of “searchablitily” could be where hash tags/ tags are used through social networking and blogs, allowing users to search content that would be linked to that topic or hash tag/ tags, for example this blog post has the tag of technology-convergence allowing it to be searched under that term.

A second instance of these techniques can be the scroll bar, when trying to find something on the internet you usually find yourself of going through the process of scrolling down the page looking for the item that you want, there are different way of using the scroll like clicking and dragging the bar, or using the arrow keys – up and down to control, but either way you are still going through the same process.

An instance for “linkability”, can be in most design and video editing software where you have some sort of layers for each of your elements, then you link these layers together to make bigger pieces of the product and then finally linking all of the layers creating the final product.

Website Development 2

I started developing the other pages for my website which are the contact page and the gallery page I have been focusing on my gallery page for now. I used light-box to input a fancy looking gallery that has some animation and is easy to understand how to use, for example the small addition of a hover effect allows the audience to know that they can click on that object. I also was trying to make my logo change colour on hover but I have not been successful with that so far.