Graphics pathway week 3- degree projects

BA Motion graphics project

At the beginning of the week we were instructed to create a story board for a channel's ident this could be to advertise a particular tv show, time of year or theme, such as the ones for BBC2.

My initial ideas included having fireworks explode in the sky and then a "2" appear in the centre, perhaps for a fireworks night theme or new years.

For my other ideas I experimented with reversing video and speeding it up as at this point I had not previously done a giff or stop motion piece before. Alternatively I planned to film the real thing.

My first more developed idea consisted of making a clay "2", breaking it apart under a camera and then reversing it to make it look like the clay was reforming.

My second idea consisted of melting a candle shaped like a "2" ontop of a cupcake, filming it, reversing it and then speeding it up to again make it look like the 2 was reforming. This could perhaps be a Great British Bake Off themed ident.

I decided to film the second one of the two ideas.

To make the shot seem more interesting I added collared streamers from party poppers in the background and on the floor. Unfortunately the wick of the candle only carried on half way down the wax so I didn't get to film as much footage of the candle melting as I would have liked. However this project gave me the opportunity to work with iMovie for the first time, which after having watched a lot of youtube videos on how to create certain effects, I finally was able to produce something that I was proud of.

BA Graphics project

The second project we were given to do was to design a cover for a book written by a Nobel Laureate.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck was the only one I had read on the list as I had studied it for GCSE and so I decided to do that.

My study of the book for English literature became useful here as I could pick out particular quotes and their hidden meanings from the text and base my design ideas on them. As I am leaning towards doing illustration for degree I decided that I would illustrate some of my favourite quotes from the book and those which I felt are most important to the story and illustrate them.

Here are a few of my ideas:

When we were given the project I was a bit worried that I would not be able to produce a well designed book cover as I had never used adobe InDesign before. However after watching a few youtube videos and experimenting with different tools I was able to produce a simple design.

If we were given more time I would have liked to have learnt how to cut my illustration out on Photoshop so that it isn't sitting in a plain white square but is instead fully surrounded by the background.

For the background I also tried to go with the theme of earthy type colours that are present on the cover of my own copy of the book as I feel they go well with the story line. However my water colour wash seemed a bit too pink and perhaps gives out the wrong message. So if I were to improve it I would include less pink in the wash.

However given the time frame for this project and my previous limited knowledge of adobe programmes I was proud of how this turned out and the final layout of the product was better than I expected it would be. This was true for both of my outcomes for the projects.