Animation

To work with Animation I had to begin using Adobe Flash. I have never used Flash before so the program and workspace was completely new to me.

Our first task to start in Flash was to create an animated alphabet. At first I just made letters go from side to side, but this quickly built up to more complicated techniques, including changing colours of letters, making them spin and rotate, making them change in size and moving them around the screen.

Shown above is the workspace in Flash. I took this screenshot after doing a lot of work on my project, which can be seen with the amount of scenes and library items on the left.

To make letters usable in animation you have to convert them to Graphic Symbols. This makes them fully customizable and controllable in animation. After doing this you can start creating frames and altering the motion of the animation.

For simple animations like this, Motion Tweening is used to fill in the space between the frames and 'complete' the animation. This means the frames do not have to be created individually and makes the animation a lot smoother than it would be if every frame had to be created manually.

To start creating a more complicated animation I created a figure, in this case a robot, in Photoshop. I created each part of the robot individually on separate layers so I could animate them one-by-one later on.

When I imported this into Flash each layer was added individually. I turned each one into a Graphic Symbol so I could control and animate them more easily later on.

After spending some time animating my robot I decided I wanted to change the look of it to make it look more interesting. To do this I changed the textures of different parts of the robot, and edited some of the shapes slightly.

I also added music to my animation, a background, and later added two smaller robots either side of my main one. These touches finished off the animation and made it more visually interesting.

Album Covers

In this task I had to create an album cover/sleeve from scratch. I had a very basic template to start with, including just the album title and song names.

For this project I could use whatever medium I wanted. This included choices from digital photography, traditional fine art work using pencils, paint, etc, or creating a collage using various different sources. I could use any or all of these methods in creating my cover. I focused on using digital photography in my work as it is my main interest.

I also looked at different photography websites including Flickr to explore different photographic ideas I could explore. I was frequently drawn to photography utilising different light sources at night and decided I would try something similar using a globe lamp that I own.

I also had to work heavily with typography on this brief. I downloaded new free fonts from DaFont.com. I found the typography to be the hardest part of this brief and spent a lot of time experimenting with different fonts, sizes, placements and spacing.

After completing these two covers with this theme I went on to experimenting with other styles of covers. I also experimented more with spacing and kerning in my typography, utilizing the Character Palette. 

I created a third cover using a different style of photography. This cover would probably be used by a fairly different band to the first two. 

Overall in this task I thought I produced some good work but I did find it difficult to get inspired in the beginning. I worked a lot with typography in this brief and think my skills in that area definitely improved. 

Giants Project

In this project I had to create 'giants' in photoshop. This involved taking background/landscape images as well as photographs of people, so I could combine them in photoshop.

When taking photographs for this task I had to be aware of how my models would later fit into the images. This meant I had to be conscious of having enough space for my 'giants' and making sure they would look realistic in the environment.

Once I had posed my models to fit into my landscape images I took my photographs into photoshop. My main task was cropping the model photographs. I had to work very neatly, making sure I cropped and selected my models down to select details. If I did not do this my giants would look too obviously photoshopped.

One of the new tools I used in this project was the Mask tool. This is another way to edit selections and offers more freedom in experimenting with selections and making mistakes.

Overall I thought I did well on this task and understood it. I produced five different Giant images that I was pleased with. I found the process interesting and felt confident using different techniques in Photoshop. I think the results I gained from this project fit the brief description well.

Collage

I created a collage to later on use for screen printing. I struggled to find a theme at first but the idea developed as I began to research and create the work. I found some examples of collage using natural images and geometric shapes and began to form ideas with this inspiration. 

I arranged my collage in a fairly neat way, focusing on shape and contrast of images. I chose images with some action and movement in them, including crashing waves, cracking ice and explosion.

After my image was scanned I turned it black and white, increasing the contrast heavily so it could be used for screen printing.

Advertising Photographs

For this task we were asked to recreate an advertising campaign for an object of our choosing. We chose a guitar and a motorbike. Our challenge was to recreate an ad campaign for these objects in the studio, including choosing the set-up and lighting.

This is the advert we based these photographs off and were trying to recreate:

Pinhole Photography

These are some different examples of pinhole photography I have found on the internet that I liked. I gathered these images as inspiration for my own attempts at pinhole photography. These images are by various different photographers and display a range of different styles.

Colour pinhole photography is less common but I think it has an appealing dreamlike quality to it.

This particular image (above) utilizes multiple exposures. 

Pinhole cameras are a very old form of photography. The original name for this photography process was 'camera obscura', which means 'dark chamber' in Latin. The term pinhole has come into use because of the literal pinhole light filters through to form the image.

Pinhole cameras are very simple and something that anyone can make. They are very cheaply made, only requiring a tin/container, tape, black sugar paper, some kind of foil and photographic paper.

Here is a diagram of an old 'camera obscura' camera:

Typography In The Landscape

For Unit 23 I took my camera around the college, exploring the environment and trying to find typography in my surroundings. Rather than taking photographs of text on signs or posters, this involved finding shapes and objects that created typography in the landscape.

I used my Canon 550d around the college to take photographs. Finding typography outside of the more basic letters (T, L, O) was a challenge and getting I could see to translate to my camera was another obstacle.

I chose these pictures in particular as I think they show a wide range of typography in the environment rather than just the simple, easy to find letters. I made them black and white to remove distractions and to best showcase the basic forms in the photographs.