After Effects: Stats & Infographics

 

This process and production session was a lot more relaxed than previous ones, owing to the fact that I'd learned so much about After Effects in my spare time, and could easily mess around with the tools on my own. I'd prepped a lot of work before hand and played around with shapes/strokes and effects, similar to my Shape Workshop, and incorporated bits we've been told to do in the lesson.

My aim was to make something that was very me-like, and although I'm not girly in the slightest, my website at the moment currently is yellow themed, so I stuck to my signature "colour" as such and incorporated pinks in to make the yellow pop. Owing to Sara's teaching I also added in things I'd learned from previous workshops, like CC Page Turn or using stroke's in different ways.

I'd still say I was a novice at After Effects, I had to sit patiently and work around how I wanted something to be achieved slowly and it did take me a while to perfect anything, however I felt so much more comfortable in the programme then I'd ever previously had before.

Ideas came from the fact that a lot of the information may not be aesthetically pleasing, so my idea was to make it stand out and pop with the use of colour, motion and texture, adding them to give depth to the piece, and sort of more of a rustic feel. One thing Sara suggested would be to consider pacing in my work, as a lot of it is extremely fast paced and doesn't allow the audience to absorb the information quite as well as I'd have liked, and I agree. 

The process for creating my work is simple, which is to mess around until I'm happy with the outcome. I still have a lot to learn with the software but found it increasingly easier to navigate around, I knew how most things worked but was still coming to grips with how to make certains things to what.

I was really pleased with the outcome and would love to continue creating it, maybe as an introduction to my about page for my webite (I'd also have to change the location of Manchester, too!)

Physical Process: Type Stencils

The second session back proved quite daunting to begin with - huge boards filled with different typography; especially since I hadn't done this in a couple of years. Despite my initial set backs (with Nick asking me to refine, and constantly add to my stencils) I was still happy with the work I produced, as it was quite reminiscent of my Art Foundation diploma. The way we had to work, with just paint and some pencils, took me back away from the technology side of design and allowed me to play with how far I could take just a simple medium. For my first piece, I kept it relatively straight forward and clean cut, using the 'e' as inspiration I made the stencil shape out of the inside of an E. Their were many interpretations of what the E could look like - the London underground sign, a burger, STOP signs, or even the internet explorer logo.


It was quite fun that my design unintentionally looked like something else, I couldn't see a lot of the things my peers were saying about my work, as I hadn't gone out of my way for it to look like anything at all. I was quite pleased with the repeating pattern - it would be nice to make some half tone work out of it, or make something like a postcard or cards out of them.

My second and third piece took longer to create because of the abstractness of them - the second piece I did was using the same template as before, and working with the paint to create more tones/textures. I used water to dilute the paint and create the splatter and drips, something that I thought worked quite well.

I really liked the flowy feel to the workshop - nothing was meant to be perfect, in some of my work there's lines where the lines aren't straight or pieces of paint have gone over their templates and made splatters across the work, but I like the tactile feel of the piece and how it reminds me of my time in Art Foundation.

Cinema 4D & Design

My first taste of Cinema 4D this year was a really successful one. Last year, I struggled immensely to get to grips with C4D, the pace of the workshops was too quick and I gave up quite quickly, which lagged me behind even further. This year, Jay told us to place our phones away and pay attention, which helped immensely with how I got to learn the ropes of C4D (even so much that my next project would use Cine 4D)

The hardest thing was keeping up with Jay; after using illustrator for a little bit in the previous project it made it much easier to sketch out the shape I wanted. After playing around with the software for a while, the interface was quite easy to understand, morphing together all the Adobe Software tools (key frames, colours, textures) - one of my favourite parts of the software was creating the colours and textures you'd wanted for each shape; for example, if you wanted a textured look, then you could insert an image of your choosing to create something that wrapped around the shape.

When I'd first started creating my design, my peers told me it looked similar to the shape of a chicken - hence why the text I'd chosen was "cluck cluck", I liked the shape, but afterwards thought it looked slightly tacky, though it was a nice start to Cine 4D that I initially wasn't confident in.

My favourite session so far was definitely this one, the relaxed atmosphere behind the work and the pace was a comfortable position for me to keep up with (I'd managed to learn quite a bit of transferable skills that I could retain and use for future projects)

The hardest thing I'd learned about the session was creating separate layers fro each of the shapes if I wanted to alternate the colour, as originally the entire file was pulled together, so I had to separate it and change the "extrude" to apply it to all of the separate layers.

Overall, I'd loved this session - I was quite surprised at how much so, and my previous distaste for C4D had gone away, as I'd thought it was quite complicated, but, actually, it was quite an easy to get to know software, and involved a lot of experimentation. I even applied it to further tests for my next project, Hyperrealities, shown below:

(The canvas was 360 degrees, rotating around the center object, in this case, a figure)

After Effects: 3D Camera

Illustrator progress, creating work outside of the canvas for the camera.

Our next session using After Effects evolved from the previous workshops we'd already done, combining easier techniques and using After Effects to create a piece of motion from an illustrative file.

This was one of my first times using illustrator, so it was nowhere near as perfect or as detailed as I'd like (I struggled to begin with initially even making a shape properly) so, despite this not being as high quality as my peers, it was still an accomplishment for me to even use illustrator and making the file at some remote detail.

I wanted to capture Manchester in how I interpreted it; with football, and the bad weather that plagued the city, so I used my skills I'd already garned from previous workshops to change the scene from day to night at the end. What I lacked in detail in the illustrator file I tried to make up for in what I'd already learned in After Effects and Photoshop, adding textures to the piece to give it some more "rustic", or "inperfect" look. 

I'd done the session outside of the dedicated hours so had to insert a few things that was learnt in the session at the end, because of this, I feel this is not my strongest piece, however, I'm incredibly happy with what I learned in Illustrator and managed to produce something that I was quite fond of, and I could make up for my lack of illustrator skills with other things, like fonts, texts, effects, etc. Creating a camera and moving it around was quite easy for me, simply changing the keyframes and dragging the camera in and out using the zoom.

3D Camera V2 from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

Physical Process: Acrylic Printing

The process - using a roller over the stencil with acrylic paint

Our first session back with Nick was one of my favourite ones - creating a stencil to then print onto an A3 paper. I was really surprised, throughout the entirety of the year, with how thrilled I was with Nicks' sessions - completely out of my comfort zone and stuff I'd never done before, but it was so enjoyable to sit and relax and go back to simple designs with just small drawings.

The propaganda-esque posters inspired me to do work for the Women's March, outside of my work time and to do something empowering with bright colours that stand out from the crowd. Because of the way the images were given to us at random, it really pushed the creativity out from me and how to work them together with little information given to us. I was best pleased with my first one, the factory design, it was so basic yet so effective.

I'd really love to do this project again, it was so simple but enjoyable for the entire group to do, and didn't take too long to create. I'd also created posters in response to my designs; changing the colour, adding texture, for more impact, and they worked quite well with different schemes.

My favourite part of the process was getting the chance to create the print, it was messy, almost like being back in Primary School, but it was enchanting and fulfilling to create work which was so tactile and imperfect. Because of the fun aspect of the session I also couldn't resist to add a pun into my work, which, despite Nick sort of half-groaning at, I really enjoyed, it made the work way more light-hearted.

Physical Process: Zines

Photography of my zine

One of our last sessions of the term allowed us to explore the making of our own zine, using images of ourself and numerous tools to create a self portrait. Each section of the zine had a different task; one out of emojis, one out of half-tone patterns, one using a scanned in image of ourself... etc. I was pleasantly surprised at how I enjoyed doing this - I was thinking it might be a bit embarrassing creating content based around your self, but I found it quite light-hearted as everyone was doing the same.

I chose to keep my drawing minimal as I wasn't comfortable drawing people, so kept something that was based around my project at the time, in a very similar style. This way I could create something cartoon like and insert detail in my clothes, what I was holding (I drew myself with a make up brush and my stuffed toy)

Although this wasn't my speciality in any sense, it was nice to sit around and cut out different emojis, bits of paper, to create a portrait of myself and see everyones interpretations of the brief.

In response to the zine, I created postcards/business cards around the designs I'd done. Using a colour scheme similar to my website and something that really stood out, they'd be very minimalistic, textured, which was exactly what my work was. My favourite one was one of the last ones I did, using the cartoon sketch of myself to create a pattern and keeping the text as basic as possible. I actually really loved doing these, and considered making them official business cards, as they had a quirky, yet professional sense to them.

InDesign: Project Presentation

This InDesign Session looked at creating presentations and PDFS for our work to present upon. I’d already created my own pdfs several times before, for previous projects, so felt quite confident creating something for my posters.

Initially I wanted to look back upon what I’d already created, so chose to find the PDFS I was most happy with to go off a basis of research. 

The most successful work in my opinion were the most minimalistic designs. My favourite one is the one I’d designed recently, for ‘Cybernetic Self’ with a small pop of colour to draw attention to each page. I’d always chosen simplistic, sans-serif fonts and my layout would always have as little as text as possible. What I’d learned from creating a PDF was to make it as simple as possible as it’s meant to be as presentation as such.  For my more recent PDFS I'd started adding the logo I'd designed for my website and placed upon my CV, to give a cohesive layout to each work, and to sort of put my own "stamp" on it as such. This was a nice way of creating a layout that was quite simple but adding an arty flare to it. I also looked back at my final year project, which was one of my most successful projects to date and why it worked so well. I decided that the long line which breaks up the page would be something I'd keep using it, sort of to create my own mark on my work but also because it worked so well last time at splitting up information. 

The issue behind this project presentation was that I'd always create it based on the appearance of work and not to conform to the same layout, as this was something I'd enjoy making as much as the work. So it would be quite hard to say if I'd actually use this presentation for all my further projects or not just as practice to add the posters into. Either way it would still be an exercise for me to create to. 

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.