Lecture: Design

For my final Monday morning lecture presented by Stephen, we looked at the concept of design and thinking, the thought process behind design and how this can benefit us in our current and final project. Firstly, we looked at the Design Council, who developed a diagram that is a simple graphical way of describing the design process. From looking at the diamond in the lecture, I could see how this would feedback into my own work, it seemed very relatable to me.

This is something we looked at in the first few weeks, the first section of the diamond starting the project and then leading to the definition stage, the developed and then the delivery stage, when the product is finished. This process is what I've always followed, at each stage I can go back and relate my project to it. The lecture was useful in terms of thinking back to what I've done in my project so far, and allow me to tick off if I've done the right design process.

We then looked over the 7 stages of the design process:

• Refine
• Research
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Select
• Implement
• Learn

"Your job isn’t to make everyone happy. It’s to make your target audience happy."

The lecture reminded me that, with my current project, I need to focus on the target audience: when I've based my work around a certain audience it becomes a lot easier to produce content, as you can narrow down your intentions, design and the writing to suit the best audience - with my current project I hadn't considered this before, so this lecture was a good refresh to go back and consider my intentions for this project - I also felt a lot more confident and content because we'd have to look over the development for our project, plan out the design properly and make sure there is some intention behind each slide. This is what I'd done with my project.

Intro Cinema 4D

In one of our last introduction sessions with Stephen, we were given an intro to Cinema 4D, a software used for 3D animation which is meant to be intertwined with After Effects.

At first were were shown examples of how the software can be utilised, from professional people to more simplistic designs that we ourselves were capable of recreating. I really did struggle with getting to grips with Cinema 4D, as the interface is completely different to that of any other software that I've seen. However, I found the work shown to be really interesting and enlightening to the capabilities of how clever Cinema 4D can be - it also made me realise how, when intertwined with After Effects, the work produced could be at a professional level, something that I'm looking to re-create myself.

We looked at the tools of the programme - this, again, proved quite difficult for me as I struggled to get to grips with remembering what each tool was for, although generating shapes by using the top tool, and scrolling along the design board were things that I could pick up, and proved quite easy to get to grips with, some things that were more about editing the shape and even creating the animation itself just confused me at the over-complexity of the software, which I didn't like at first.

I struggled to get to grips with Cinema 4D in it's entirety, I think after a lot of practice and playing around with the software, which is what I normally do to get to learn a software, will prove better and mean that I can experiment and play with the software at my own designated pace and can discover things we were not taught in the session. Overall though I was really impressed with the work shown in the session and some of the things we could produce very quickly, although I still believe the tools are hard to get to grips with.

Lecture: Gentle Ease

One of Sara's final lectures, titled "Gentle Ease" was concentrating on the use of After Effects - an Adobe Programme I've been using throughout the year, particularly on my final project, looking at the graph editor and the use of drawing and animation put together. This lecture was of high interest to me because of the topic, and this could be research for my work. A lot of the lecture included visual material, my favourite were the more graphic-based motion pieces, that focused on After Effects to create them, and less of the drawing ones at the start of the lecture.

One piece, "Just One Day" was something of amazing interest to me. Although created via by hand - Stop Motion, it was placed into After Effects and scaled up. Mixing both mediums of the by hand elements and software was something I found interesting - because the objects were all scaled up simultaneously, they don't line up correctly, which he could have done a lot more quicker and efficiently in After Effects, however, the method behind his work took a lot longer to make - it was his own choice, and made the piece move a lot more. The work is really simple too, I love the style that Kelly has created, it's simplistic and shows off the work well.

In contrast to this work, title sequences for TV's - even my own project, is usually done within a few week time frame, and although this is quick and sports a far more professional appearance about it, particularly with the use of the graphics and software they use (it's designed to look sleek, and as professional as intended, without any errors in it) it lacks any exploration. Usually the research for the project is so minimal in the time frame given that they cannot explore their research as thoroughly as they'd like, and thus, maybe not produce the most creative or thoughtful results.
     This made me think of our work currently and I'm glad that I separated out a few weeks just for the research, as it made me understand the piece a lot more and create a huge understanding of the work and the topic of choice. I'm glad I followed this route, with Sara's explanation it made a lot more sense to me and made me feel more positive in my choice to neglect creating the sequence at first.

recipesforbakingbread.blogspot.co.uk
Sara's blog and collection of documentation of her work was insightful; currently her focus is to document unbranded products and collecting objects that sort of fit into that. Some Soviet Salt packing, that she only bought a few days before hand, looked unbranded, with green screen printing technique used. It looks extremely aged because of the printing technique used, and without any recognizable branding, in just an old paper form, it ages the work well; although this process must be extremely inefficient at the cost of it - as it looks printed out with screen printing, this wouldn't be a practical way of making products due to the cost.
Sara told us that she was trying to do the same in her work - bring language into the work she is making, by using different methods to create unbranded packaging and something that looks aged, although it is brand new, and throughout her blog documents things that remind her of this process and allow her to research the work very efficiently.

The final video of the seminar was by Drew Tyndell, who's clientelle range from the Carton Network to General Elektriks - he has artist creativity and the main focus for his work is drawing, particularly intertwining the two together to create a colourful moving piece, one of my favourites from the seminar.


The process of the video is called 'romoscoping', a frame by frame concept where you trace from an original image, usually hand-drawn, which gives a beautiful effect that is slightly off-frame for each second, giving a lot more movement to the piece; however it is extremely labour intensive, given how long (3 minutes) the video is, it must have taken Tyndell a long time, a true labour of love. The piece is very light and fresh, and although it hasn't been made very quickly, the energy in the work and the colour shines past the technical process and allows something that looks very vibrant and modern.

Overall this lecture was really interesting tome, intertwining both drawing methods and animation is something that I admire greatly as the work takes a long time to produce ,although the work is defiantly worth it.

Final Project: Samples

For the final project, I began developing animated samples based off the still design boards I'd created that were reflecting the theme of what I wanted my intro to look like. Taking inspiration from Narcos, True Detective, I wanted to focus on double exposures and intertwining several images on top of each other. My main reasoning behind this was that I feel it conveys more of a story than just a plain image, so I took about researching the best way to do this; I also used free stock videos of smoke, ink and other objects that could be easily overlay-ed using the screen blending mode option. I wanted to use ink and smoke to reference back to the accident, and also to represent that this accident literally took over these peoples lives, as this was only meant to be a few days of repercussion - however they never managed to get back to their own city. 

My first sample was taken directly from this design board:

I wanted the map to be the focal point of the double exposure originally, but after finally coming up with what I wanted the purpose of the documentary to be about, I opted to use images from Chernobyl of people, whether they be from new or at the time of the accident. I wanted this to become more of a "emotional" documentary about the lives of these people, and how they were over-run by this incident, as there's plenty of documentary on how the accident came about. I love the way the ink runs over the face of the child in the original sample, however, I also wanted to reflect the "radioactive" side of the incident, so opted for a different colour palette in the second sample.

TestChernobyl from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

TestChernobyl2 from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

TestChernobyl3 from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

For one of my first final samples, I changed the ink dripping to smoke, to see what the effect would look like differently and played around more with the colour tone. I chose to go with red, sort of inflicting a "warning" sign and red reflects the danger of the situation these people were in. Out of all samples, this is definitely my favourite one, I added a lot of grain to the footage to make it look as old as possible, and inverted the colours of the girl to give it more of a horror/fear look. Although this is my favourite one, I would definitely slow down the smoke next time as I feel it's too quick for an introduction, and would work on the "Directed by" text to animate it a bit more, which is something I was planning to do for the introduction anyway. 

Overall, though, I definitely want to integrate Sample 3 into my work as this is clearly my strongest sample, and works best in my opinion at conveying what I want the accident to - I may play around with different colours and textures, and even go and take textures of my own to give it more of my own look about the work. I'm overall very happy with what I've come up with so far and it's inspired me to create many more samples to put together for my introduction.

Seminar: Essay Feedback

One of the latter seminars with James was looking back at the feedback we'd received from the submission of the first draft of our essay, I'd received a 54/100, which although I'd aimed for much higher, I was quite happy with because after looking over the feedback given by a teacher it made a lot more sense why my grade wasn't as high as I'd intended it to be; I'd started the essay with a completely different intention to sort of what it came out as, so ended up re-writing the introduction to make it suit the essay more.

Thanks to the feedback, I was able to make a lot more sense of the essay - as I've previously said, I struggle to make sense and form sentences properly, this is something that when vocally speaking I also don't do very well, so to have two submissions was extremely helpful to me. I was able to take the grammatical errors in the first submission and flip them, and confidentially get together the correct topic throughout the entire essay. It was nice to have another pair of eyes looking at my work as I'd clearly missed quite a big chunk of errors that were around the piece; I'd made many grammatical errors and wording corrections that needed changing because it didn't make a lot of sense.

James sessions allowed me to view my feedback and discuss it with my peers, particularly it was useful for when we were all struggling to meet the same deadlines - my peers reassured me that I'd done enough and was on track, which allowed me to worry less and concentrate on my other ongoing projects at the time. I found that although I didn't bring my essays in to view for feedback, I could still gain a lot of feedback via the first submission so it made me feel a lot better, instead of doing just one finalised submission, I was able to go back and make the changes that were needed to potentially push the grade of my essay up from a 54.

Film: Helvetica

Today's lecture would be around the film 'Helvetica',  a documentary by Gary Hustwist (who also created the documentary Urbanized) The film was released in 2007, which was to co-inside with the original release of the typeface.

The 80 minute documentary main focus is the history of the typeface and how it was created, the practicality of the font and the unique differences between creating a typeface now and in the time (1957) the font was formed; having interviews with famous graphic designers and type designers who all give their views on the font, as well as the fact the profession is not very well known - one artist cited that someone didn't know what the profession was when told about it.

Arguably a long film, the documentary in my opinion lacked any interest to me as it was too in-depth for me. Although I love the typeface itself and have used it quite a few times in my work, I disliked the way it was presented and the in-depth knowledge about it, as it sort of became quite tedious over the time of the film. The font itself I love as it can adapt to quite modern times - although made in 1957, it's still famously used today and looks very in-style still, the font is so modern and its flexibility made it one of the most popular fonts of it's time.

The documentary also focuses on the differences between modernist and postmodernists, the post not appreciating the font face and gave it a lot of negative reception. This proved quite an interesting section, as to me, it's just a font, and works very well, so it was interesting to see from a different view of why someone may not like it.

Overall, although the documentary was long, I liked the meaning behind it - with graphic design, a lot of people forget that there is people behind the work and that a lot of it has a personal response to it. The font was created for a reason, and when just seeing it on screen, you forget someone spent months, even years creating the product.