Lecture: Prequel Sequel

The main intention of the lecture was to focus on the idea that nothing is in fact original, everything comes from inspiration and that you'd be very lucky to find something that has not already been done, in some shape or form, before. Furthermore, when we begin our creative process to communicate, we have to rely on what we already understand and know, and have seen before, to create this communication otherwise we wouldn't be able to make this write and connect it to our intention.

         "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." 

                                                                                                   - Salvador Dali

A lot of the lecture looked at the different intents of work that was created online - internet memes, for example, are funny to look at, but lacks value and actual intent because of the superficialness of the work. We also looked at the fine line between association with an previous work, and plagiarism - is intent not the breaking point for this?

The film 'Everything is a Remix' was the exact reasoning behind this. In the first part of this film, 'The Song Remains the Same', was showing different songs throughout the years that sound similar and the lawsuits (or not) they had to face for a few notes of song that could have made the exact likeness out of another. Although some people argue plagiarism, does it not just mean they've had the same creative output and come up with something similar out of pure chance? A lot of older, rock songs seem to all sound the same and have such come up in the first section of the film.

"Legal remixing is fine, illegal copying is not - if your work fails to distinguish itself enough then you must attribute!"

Looking at our audience type, we learned that having a pre-defined idea about the intent of the audience and what our audience is about allows us to create sort of a narrative about our work, and making an assumption, although sometimes a negative thing, allows a much more deeper understanding and the work to have a lot more meaning behind it.
The Marvel Cinematic Timeline, for example, have worked on this over numerous years which links most of their films together and in a continuous way. It has been presented commercially, with many characters starring in different films and having a set timeline of events which worked well as this is what the audience wanted to see - something that all connects together.

"Don't try to be original. Just try to be good. That sounds sort of naive, but it's true." 

                                                 - Paul Rand

The point behind the lecture was that, although tools and practice of the trade are extremely useful, an idea is the most important thing and can set you forward the most. This is what I wanted to create in my final project, research was the key, and something that was responsive to the audience was overall what I intended to do - as my skills in the software weren't the best.

Seminar: Research w/James

One of our final sessions with James included researching into our essays further. As we were half way, or near the end of our essays, the seminar proved quite essential to see where my peers were in terms of their work, and to receive any motivation, feedback or responses I'd needed from James and my peers.

The discussion for the work was quite a small one, I'd have preferred some more feedback but didn't bring my own essay to be assessed, this could have proved quite helpful as from my first hand-in there were a lot of errors in my work. I could have done with James going through the work with me, my main flaw in my work is that I don't make a lot of sense; I'm unable to create sentences that sound correct and flow naturally, as this is something I also struggle with whilst speaking out loud. However, hearing how other people had progressed with their essays really calmed me down, a lot of my peers were behind me in terms of where they were at, which relaxed me and proved to help me to finish my essay at the correct time.

Although the seminar was short it gave me enough confidence to continue with my essay - if I had brought a sample of my essay for evaluation, this would have proved much more better for myself, as I'd have made changes to errors and my feedback for my first submission would have been a lot more positive.

After Effects: Camera Positioning

My next workshop with After Effects took our skills to more of an advanced level; namely, we worked on generating the effects we created in previous lessons and stylizing them differently and making them look more complicated. In this lesson was the focus of using the camera tool to have the text/or other objects zoom in or out, move to the left or right, giving more of a 3D definition to the work than before.

We learnt how to use the camera tool on individual layers - by making them 3D objects by clicking on the small box near the 'fx' option, it would allow only the layers that were selected to be effected by the camera. You can also edit the amount of cameras you can have and create them on separate compositions if you want to overlay them all.

Inspired by Troye Sivan's "Wild" lyric video which involves yellow petals falling down on a cascade of lyrics, I took his other song from his new album, "Talk Me Down" as the pace was a lot slower than wild and I could work on using the camera tool at a slower pace. The intro and petals were created using the generate tool, and then I used an separate camera to make it sweep in at the end. Instead of changing the colour on the same layer I just duplicated the petals falling and changed the colour so they could alternate colours in a more slower transaction than sharp colours, which is what I envisioned more when listening to the song.

The colour changes are inspired by the video too, and work well together.

I also wanted to alterate the camera position on the text, so created that as a 3D layer and pulled the 'Z' axis on the camera forward so the text would jump out. When using the camera positioning tool you have to reset it otherwise it'll remain as zoomed in as you want, which I didn't want for the next layer.

Over all this was a really simple process but worked so effectively at creating what I wanted, although it took a while to get the hang of I now use the tool a lot and value it as it brings something else to a video which would otherwise be quite 2D.

Physical Process: Typography 1

Our next physical process workshop focused on typography. The task was based around creating a character-inspired font using the letters ANESG, then, eventually, creating a full alphabet. At first I was completely stumped for ideas - I've never tried to create my own font before, and found it extremely hard to think on the spot, but whilst looking through videos of different fonts and designers, thought that making a more complicated one for the 5 letters would suffice.

I chose to base these around monuments - A around the Eiffel Tower, using the internet to research buildings that reflected each shape (S and E proved difficult to find any for) and lightly sketching out in pencil first. I wanted the outline only, as this would be more simple to use and to integrate colour into if made into a actual font. When I was happy with the design I used a black ballpoint pen over the top to enhance the details and create something that was more finalised.

This took a long time to come up with as a lot of the session I was researching and developing the correct monument for the correct letter - I don't think this would be part of my final design of A-Z as this would take too long to do and not enough monuments create an actual shape, letters like B, S, H, F and Z would not be easy to find monuments for as they don't make practical building shapes.

My second character design I want to focus on was quick sketches using my own hand writing, using it in a italic way, outlined, or in a cartoon style. These were meant to be quick experimentations to come up with a solid idea.

For my last idea, I came up with the idea of using cats as the character's for my font. For each letter, they would be styled in a different position, either asleep, with another cat, or just stood up straight. Again I wanted to keep this as minimalist as possible, to make it far practical to use. This was one idea that would take too long but worked particularly well, especially for the N as the cat was stretching. Overall, I would probably take the most simple design and develop this for my typography project.