Graphics pathway- week 4

Stop Motion Workshop

This week we carried on with our workshop rotations. On the Monday I had the stop motion workshop. I had never done anything like this before and so I didn't know what to expect. Luckily we got to work in pairs which was useful as I am not that good with computers.
However the introduction was very interesting with some fun examples of how stop motion can be used to produce creative videos with strong concepts.

Procrastination John Kelly

What I love about this piece is how he has used many different animation techniques to illustrate an amusing and relatable concept.

We had to base our animation on our continued global warming project and the United Nations climate change conference held from 30 November to 11 December 2015, in Paris, France. The animation also had to be an ident (like the previous week's project) so we decided that our audience would be children, where the ident could appear on a children's TV programme, such as "CBBC", to inform them about global warming.

After brain storming some ideas, we came up with a story line that included different factors of global warming which all linked together. However we were told early on that it would take too long to do all of what we planned in one day so we just chose two sections of it.

We were told that to create a seamless animation when working digitally you have to produce 25 frames per second. As we were instructed to produce a 10 second animation, 250 frames seemed like a lot for one day.

However after drawing up our ideas and putting the frames together we realised that they go very quickly and in order to keep the image on the screen for longer, more pictures needed to be taken of the same thing or with it slightly altered.

After we produce all that we wanted to do we realised that it was too short so we added more frames in-between making the animation more dynamic and easier to understand as each topic was on the screen for longer.

We then added sound effects to it, for example the sound of an explosion and the sound of a car's engine, however unfortunately these sounds did not transfer with the video when I copied it to my laptop so they do not appear on the video above.

Overal I was happy with the way it turned out but if I were to improve it I think we could have added more of our previous ideas to the animation because we ended up having spear time afterwards.

InDesign workshop

In the morning of this workshop we were given next week's brief of creating a logo for a brand to work with in InDesign. We learnt how to create different mood boards to help develop our ideas for our final design, such as colour, theme and research mood boards.

Having little experience with this application prior to the workshop I struggled to get the hang of putting pictures in the different boxes and moving them to the places I wanted, however I soon got the hang of it and found this a really useful way to gather ideas together.

After lunch we worked with type layouts which was fun to experiment with, however my knowledge of the different tools was limited so I did not produce anything that spectacular.

Calligraphy workshop

In this workshop we were given different styles of calligraphy to experiment with copying which was fun as sometimes as it didn't always go to plan...

Despite being told that it was better to draw lines as guides for the letter sizing and form, I found it easier to just go with the flow of the paintbrush and let the eyes guide the letter forms. I also found that the outcomes turned out more interesting using this method.

We also used our practice and inspiration that we found on the internet to write lyrics or poems in a calligraphic way. We could illustrate them and decorate around them to enhance their meaning. I found this exercise very enjoyable.

After lunch we experimented with type layout and how the positioning of letters on a page can be used to illustrate the meaning of the word.

Using examples from a book as inspiration, these are a few of my designs and outcomes:



I didn't find this as enjoyable as I felt that it was very restricting having to stick to the exact letter forms.