After Effects: The Hand

Working on hand-drawn projects has never been something that I felt strong at. Because the majority of my work is digital based, it was quite a change to using my own drawing style and scanning it in to incorporate with my work.


Inspired by the latest Planet Earth, I chose to create content that was directly in response to this - using animals, a quite free flowy style that I used; the documentary itself was a huge influence over the beautiful cinematography, stories and animals that were extremely interesting to withhold, and David Attenbouroughs commentary.


I was inspired by watercolour and paint splashes, to create something that was quite hand-designed which is what the workshop was about; looking alongside Pinterest, as well as Sara's examples, I began to drew up what I wanted my idea to visually look like.

 Creating the work itself was quite an easy concept, but the majority of my work would be based around the style of graphics I chose to use, I always wanted to use basic drawing and make it complicated digitally. Using Photoshop to place brushes around the drawings I wanted, I imported the layers manually and used after effects to stylise how I wanted to look like.

Originally I wanted this to be savannah colours, but chose a more dark theme based off looking through the title cards for Planet Earth - which was dark, inspired by the shot of space looking upon the earth.

I was so inspired by Planet Earth that I continued this project outside of the allocated time, creating drawings in my sketchbook which I hadn't done in a while. It was nice to create something that was drawn out and was quite relaxing to create something whilst watching the programme I was inspired by. I really loved doing this as it was just applying skills I'd already learnt in my free time, perfecting the stroke tool and pen tool... This was one of the first terms I'd started practiced the pen tool.

Though the outcome wasn't as perfect as I wanted due to time constraint, it would be nice to go back and improve (work on timing and colour etc) though this was a relaxing workshop to work to and something I'd always wanted to created.

 

Personal Work

Inspired by The Walking Dead

Commissions for students in their projects.

Website for my portfolio and work.

 Inspired by recent project PDF.

Presentation Development 3

I’d presented my first PDF to Tracy. At first, I really struggled to find the confidence to present this - I write in incoherent language, not making sense in long sentences, and I’m not very confident at all at presentation. Following on from lots of rehearsal and making sure the work was as minimal as possible, to ensure I’d be quite confident at writing, the PDF went well (or so I’d thought)

The problem with theory is it never made sense to me - I could never seem to gain clarification on what exactly was the right way to approach this topic, and sort of the relevance behind it to my course. Despite this I still managed to come up with a subject that gained some approval from teachers and also something that I would find interesting enough to be able to write an essay on it. Last year, this was my weakest grade, and it still is - I’m not perfect at english nor gaining the theory behind anything, I’m more of a person who’s better at designing and focusing on making something just look nice. 

This would then gather me a few issues with trying to create meaning behind my work, such as the current brief or the PDF work. I’d always try to heavily research what I wanted my work to look like but could never grasp the concept quite as well as I wanted.

My feedback from Tracy consisted of the following:

• You provide an overview of each ident, their target audience, identity, nostalgic references, and Britishness. Very well prepared and presented, clearly delivering your personal insights into the perceived identities You take quite a personal approach and consideration of the elements, you demonstrate a level of analysis and understanding of the elements at play here…. To reach a direction of enquiry - Do idents help the channel branding? But I feel you are misinterpreting a fundamental understanding of the role of branding and the techniques and influences involved – you can take this further – By investigating how idents originated – the impact they have and why they work – deconstruct branding and what makes us desire, prefer or choose a particular channel More indepth and coherent case study examples will add breadth, depth and insight and a clearer direction of enquiry and a more coherent question to explore Consider some theorists and experts, their opinions will help you gain a fuller understanding of the influences.

What I’d garnered from the Feedback was that my general overview of each PDF proved successful, however I needed to look more in-depth at each of my chosen subject - I understand what my topic was, but the insights proved quite personal (which is what my chosen idea was, I thought this would be more to my advantage instead of a negative point) and I needed to take my research further and gain a full understanding of why indents are created, why they work and a coherent study of the theory behind idents. 

This was quite a hard concept to come across for me - I still needed some clarification as to what this would entitle as this was quite hard for me to understand. I wanted to start creating how idents originated, the impact they have… so this would be the next form of research for me. I’d probably end up asking Poilna again about how this would make sense and how I’d create something that would be more cohesive for me, and make something that would me easy for me to understand and not overcomplicated theory behind it.

In Design: Posters

My next In Design session with Aidan looked at creating posters using a limited palette. Specifically, we were limited to using text only - no images or anything from Google. The first poster I looked at I found quite easy to create; Acoustic Club. I started by sketching up any ideas I'd had - the poster was to create something that was for numerous musicians and not just a set of one person, so I chose to create instruments from a typeface that related to many different musicians. Again, our colour palette was limited - we weren't to focus on this, instead the position, font face and size that created the poster.

For my first poster, 'Acoustic Club' - I looked at creating something that easy recognisable to musicians, but to entice different types of musicians - for example, I used different text such as 'O' 'I' and 'J' to create different instruments without using already pre-made images. I found this to be quite easy to do with music, but as each poster had a different meaning later found it quite hard to create something I'd like. The Acoustic one was one of my strongest posters; I feel it created the exact mood and intention
for the club and was also one of the easiest ones to associate with what it was created for.

The next poster was the 'Craft Beer' - This was a lot harder than I thought and overall I'm not too happy with the outcome, I want to go back and improve it. The idea behind this one was to have the text sat in-between a beer created out of shapes on Photoshop. The colours I feel work well, but not for the beer feel - though I've tried to make it look as professional and modern as possible, using the same font before and making it look as if the B in Beer is a beer glass. This way it's still associated with the topic.

Overall I did like this workshop, though found it really tested me. I did like coming up with different ideas but it proved difficult to limit myself so much, but found that I could still create something that I was happy with (especially with the Acoustic Poster) so it was still nice to create work that I was proud of, even though I didn't think I'd achieve it. I'd still like to go back and improve some posters as I feel they don't look as great as the first one, and don't look 'creative' enough for me.

After Effects: Rotoscoping

For our next session with Sara, we looked at developing real life footage into After Effects and cutting out figures (specifically myself) to create something modern, inspired by music videos and to develop our skills in After Effects further.

The first task was to create something to cut out - I chose to use myself and to jump, something that would challenge me further than one second of walking around, as I thought this would be too easy to do - I wanted to push myself a bit further so tried to make something that would require a bit more skill to cut out. The first thing would be to trim it down to a second - although this took a long time, I enjoyed doing it because of how relaxing it was - instead of using a mask tool, I used the rotoscoping brush, sort of like the eraser; to gather a style that wasn't as "perfectly" cut out. The slight movement of the brush and editing gives off something that is quite rustic and un-perfect, which is the style I was intending to go for.

I found the most challenging thing out of the concept was to make sure my arm was cut out properly - because of the quality and the angle the film was shot at, it was quite hard to cut out the hands based on how small they were in the video. Similarly, my scarf which at first I thought would look good in the video, was difficult to cut out because of the way it flailed about and made my body look bigger than it was. This is why I then chose to change from a silhouette of the cut out to the contrasting one - removing the background and keeping the detail of my body in.

Overall adding the background and detail was actually the most challenging part of the project. I found that it was hard to come up with a style I wasn't familiar with, particularly textures/colours I'd never used before. Whilst it was challenging to design and do, I do like the piece overall and found the session quite interesting, to learn something I'd never done before.

Personal Work: Website