Final Project: Research 2

My next title that I wanted to research more in-depth was True Detective. I'd always been inspired by this even from my college work, where I'd done a huge project on Double Exposure. The technique was something I'd always loved, as it allowed you to convey messages from a still image and reflect the story of a person or object by overlapping it with another - it also created a beautiful image if done correctly.

True Detective was also inspired by Christoffer Relanders work, which I'd researched for my Photography project, so I was quite familiar with how he'd done his own style - this was all on one image on a singular piece of film, no photoshopping was done for the images to come out.

When pitching their concepts, True Detective used the work as a visual reference, marking this as their main inspiration.
"Visually, we were inspired by photographic double exposures. Fragmented portraits, created by using human figures as windows into partial landscapes, served as a great way to show characters that are marginalised or internally divided. "

True Detectives pace of the introduction is also something that inspires me, it matches the beat in a perfect manner and allows the audience to view each of the frames clearly.

I also integrated the research for True Detective into my own research. They focused heavily on researching the styles they wanted for their introduction, which is what I intend to mimic for my own project, as this is a good way of visualizing what you want out of your title sequence; 

Final Project: Research

After narrowing down my chosen theme to Chernobyl, I opted to begin research into my favourite introductions that would prove as inspiration for me. The main favourites that immediately came to my head consisted of Narcos, True Detective, True Blood, The 100, Making a Murderer and Outlander; quite a few of the list came from the same company titled "Elastic", the vibe they all generate is establishing the story and characters in the introduction in a clever way.

I wanted to approach this brief as professionally as possible, so after discovering a website called Art of Title, which gives interviews and shows design concepts for title cards in film and television, I researched into my initial favourite introductions and read about how they came about to create them.

For Narcos, the designers wanted to delve into their research as much as possible, shown above, is the design boards and visual references that they came up with to get the exact appearance they wanted. In my project, I took about doing visual references very similar to this, as it was a way of showing individual features that I wanted to go into my introduction. I used Pinterest, Google search and deviantart to research into textures, imagery and colours that would reflect Chernobyl well.

Narcos kept to the theme of the show very well, researching into old pictures of the title character they were concentrating on, using film textures and planes as the focus of their research. I love their use of colours as this also reflects well on the intention of the programme, and the abandoned concepts (2nd image) was my inspiration for my own project. Although it doesn't convey the message that they wanted to for the title sequence, it reminds me of my own work and what I wanted to create, so became one of my main points of research, especially the use of texture and colour, the smoke being something that I would later on use in my own work.

"One thing that I wanted to really focus on was getting away from the traditional tropes of narco culture. Talking with the guys and really understanding Colombian culture and some of the more bizarre aspects of Pablo Escobar’s rise really gave us an awesome footing for ideation."

After Effects: Final Project

For our final project of the year from Sara, we were set a collaborative task to put together 22 videos all made by each person in our class, which, when played together, would show sea creatures swimming in and out of the frames and would make one consecutive piece. Since being absent from the character After Effects project, I initially struggled with coming to grips with making my animal have individual layers on a PSD document. I chose an Axolotl - thinking this would be easier to do as it just swims along. I use block colours and went over a base image in Photoshop, separating out each layer.

I learned throughout the entire process to make the image as simple as possible, as I found it really difficult to subtly move the legs without showing where I'd cut around the older image, so it didn't look quite as realistic as I intended - I chose to make the animal blink, and instead worked on things that would make the piece more realistic instead of re-doing the animal; this involved me generating bubbles on After Effects and using a layer to create the light shining into the sea. This made the whole piece a lot more realistic.

When creating the moving Axolotl, I chose to create something very fluid and give the animal some life by making it move, the animal needed to be "scared" by something because of the jerky movement half way through. I then created more bubbles to generate, and added fish quickly made in Photoshop and used key frames to move it along.

Overall, this utilized all the skills I've learned in After Effects so far, it didn't take as long as initially expected, so was able to add a lot more effects and spend more time focusing on the smaller details. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, however I probably would have used more detail on the animal itself and fixed the issue with the legs not being able to move as far as I'd have liked, as he looks quite still/frozen. The overall presentation at the end was really interesting for me to see as it was nice to see everyone's styles come together.

Physical Process: Typography 2

My next typography session was going off from the last session we had, focusing on creating my own typeface. As I discovered in the previous workshop, my typeface had to be as minimal as possible to prevent it from being over complex and unable to be read.

Whilst I coloured my original alphabet idea - the monuments, I concluded these would be too difficult to make a full alphabet out of, although the idea behind them I liked, they were quite difficult to make out the actual letter shape and took a considerable amount of time to draw out. They would be perfect for a presentation or something to "promote" the monuments, but concluding the amount of time I'd have to focus on the alphabet, I decided this option wouldn't be best in a practical way.

I instead came up with a few other ideas - to do something based on my interests, or something that I'd liked - a cat. I'd be able to create the animals leaning over, arching their backs or using more than one to create the shapes that I desired, and if I kept this as minimal as possible then it would be much easier to draw and create.  I also liked my original idea of creating a font that would cohere to the block layout of grid paper, each one fitting into one tiny block. These looked quite futuristic, using straight lines to join the letters together.

Overall I'm happy with how the letters came out, whilst they're simplistic, they're also quirky and something I enjoyed drawing, especially the cats as it was quite challenging to draw them in different styles whilst retaining a bit of character to them.

Final Project: Self-Negotiated

For my final project of this year, our task would be to base a animation or graphics piece around the themes found previously in our essay. Whilst I am a graphic student myself, after nearly completing the year I really wanted to try out Animation again and see how far I could push my skills in After Effects, thus, I selected to create an intro for a fake documentary of my choice.

My first exploration in coming up with a theme for my intro was to pick my essay subject - Apple. After some consideration and research, after seeing how many Apple documentary's and biopics there are in regards to Steve Jobs, I didn't want to create something for an overly documented subject. This led me to start documenting my interests and writing down things that I would find appealing - I feel this would make my project easier to get into as I'd be creating something about thing I'm genuinely interested about.

My interests are mostly to do with the weird and conspiracy theories. I wanted to do something that, whilst interesting to me, wasn't something that would be considered upsetting to some people - at one point I considered the Holocaust, but thought this would be too sensitive of a subject. After talking along with my peers and flatmates, I came up with these three things based around my interests:

• Ancient Egypt
• Chernobyl Incident
• Jack the Ripper

These all have the same theme to them; they consist of conspiracy theories behind actual real life events, which motivates my interest behind them. I wanted to do things that were talked about before and the subject of interest, but not anything that had recently been done. As well as this, subjects who'd documentaries I'd previously seen and had poor introductions were also the target of what I wanted to do, it would be really interesting for me to recreate and compare them to the titles.

I've started a sketchbook where I'm heavily researching into each incident, watching documentaries and finding styles on Pinterest, Behance and other websites to get a feel of what documentary I want to give off to the audience. I particularly like "Making a Murderer" and "True Detective" which both have neutral colour palettes and quite a rustic, paper feel to them. This would work well for Jack the Ripper as of the time set.

Overall, I've not done a massive amount in the two weeks that we have been set, just garnering ideas together and creating a sketchbook - I really want to spend time researching and looking at different possible outcomes before going ahead with any starting point.