My animation

Animation Evaluation

There are a few things with this animation that I am not completely satisfied with. Had I managed my time better I would have focused my attention on the movement of the characters, as it is through body language, the most effective way of portraying emotion. Viewing my animation after completion it is clear to see that the characters are both very static, without the voice-overs that I made for both characters it is much more difficult to defy the emotions that each character is trying to convey.

Having said this it is obvious when listening to the sound as well as watching the animation the emotions each character is trying to display: scary (snake) and terrified (tortoise.) I am impressed with how the lip-syncing came out. There are only the odd couple of frames where it is slightly out of time, this is down to the speed in which the voice-overs were recorded causing problems with key frame spacing in Flash. The line drawings although simple, look professional due to their development in illustrator. The backgrounds that I designed give the piece a nice finish and were quickly and easily created in Photoshop.

Unfortunately, looking back on the brief and the outcome requirements I think that my animation was a bit miss-directed. I spent far too much time trying to create realistic looking cartoon characters and although it has a professional animated feel, the overall piece is let down by the lack of movement. If I were to do this project again I would have made a 3-Dimensional animation using Maya. I regret using Flash, although it gave me a nice quality finish and was easy to import sound, I was let down by my expectations of the capability of motion tweening. This was the only part of production that didn’t go according to plan resulting in the time consuming task of drawing each individual movement out in Illustrator.

Final Crit

The main critism i recieved on this piece is concerning the text layout on the left hand side, i have decided to alter this to three columns rather than four. I am also going to change the contrast on the picture as it doesn't stand out enough from the background.

PPD Exporting Illustrator layouts to Flash, What's new?

This article found once again in the Digital Arts magazine, suggests that since Flash has become part of the Adobe package with the release of CS3 that exporting illustrator files to Flash has been made much simpler. I'm sorry but I beg to differ, I've been using CS2 and Proffessional 8 for over two years now constantly dropping illustrations i have made into Flash and I've never had any difficulty doing so. This three page article is absolute rubbish, I can't help but wonder why it was written. So to answer my own question not a lot is new, well if there is added features they didn't publish them.

Website; Image Development

I took the outline I had used for the magazine imagery and duplicated it putting them back 2 back and upside down. In all honesty i wasn't actually trying to create this but i actually ended up with a nice kaliedascopic pattern which i find very pleasing on the eye. I think it's quite an interesting style, it's something i haven't come across much but i plan to research it and try it out with images i have taken.

PPD How safe is your Design

This is a double page spread i found suggesting different ways in which you can protect your work, most of them are fairly obvious like images you put on the web making sure they're 72dpi watermarking and adding metadata to Photoshop and Illustrator files. But who in the class actually does it? I know i will be more careful when protecting my work from now.

PPD The worlds smallest HD camera

Has anyone seen images taken by the Iconix HD-RH1, the smallest HD camera ever made it's the size of a golf ball and weighs in at just two ounces. Its footage is supposed to featured in the CBBC series smalltalk diaries, can't say i'll be watching it. Anyway I came across this aricle at the front of Digital Arts magazine and was most impressed with some of the images shown. It displays close up images of insects in so much detail i couldn't believe my eyes.

Seeing this article reminded me of when i was a kid, looking at some old black and white photographs of my grandparents and comparing them to some pictures i had taken using a standard polaroid. I couldn't help but ask my dad how long will it be until photograph quality is better than our eyes, to which he replied. "that will never happen because if they're better quality than our eyes we wouldn't be able to tell."
Well i challenge you to see something that small in that much detail!

The Life of Larry by Seth Mcfarlen

Seth Mcfarlen is my favourite animator, i got my inspiration from such adult cartoons as Family Guy and American Dad. It's the clean cut line drawings i find most impressive and makes me want to recreate a similar style. Here's some of his early work, in which he has created an old fashioned vibe to the film and animation, the whit remains the same however.

The Life of Larry

Magazine; Image Development

Transfering the image into illustrator i used a tool called the live trace tool which creates outlines around an image. I changed the outline to blue so it would follow the same colour scheme as my other image.

Magazine; Image Development

I took an image of one of my mates DJing and decided i wanted to create a sketchy outline around it. First i turned it black and white then turned up the brightness and contrast in Photoshop.

Magazine; Image Development

I wanted to find the colours that worked best with this image, it was taken in black and white with a digital SLR. To make the image stand out more i decided to make it Duotone, this is the process i used for selecting the best colour for the job. This is quite an important stage in my magazine development as it will determine the colour scheme for my double page spread.

Communication Design for Print and Digital Media-Website structure

I needed to look at how websites and online articles were structured. I created guides then added coloured lines to show were i thought boxes were used for dropping in text and images. I decided to use relevant websites on DJ articles.

Communication Design for Print and Digital Media-Website structure continued

Communication Design for Print and Digital Media-Website structure continued

Communication Design for Print and Digital Media-Website structure continued

Magazine; Collecting Images

In these first couple of images i was experimenting with a technique my photography teacher taught me when i was in ND Graphics, it involves zooming in and out whilst the lens is open. It's quite difficult to get the hang of and the results are often unexpected. For the last two i stuck to conventional point and shoot methods from which i got some quality once in a life time images of the crowd.

Magazine; Collecting Images

I set out to collect imagery of DJ's, because this is relevant to the topic in the double page spread i plan to design. The last to picture taken at a bar didn't come out as well as i had expected however some slight tweaking of colour levels in Photoshop should sort this out.

Magazine; Collecting Images

I love taking photographs in clubs, the long exposure time due to the lack of light causes the main focus of the image to come out fine whilst all round it has a sort of light pollution which tends to blend in to the image i find this helps capture the atmosphere like nothing else i have photographed.

Vinyl or CD debate

Website layouts

I wanted to see how other designers created websites, this is the best way of developing initial ideas.

Website layouts continued

I needed to see how people animate the movement of a snake, I acquired a few different examples snake movement although none of these were quite what i had in mind.

Snake movement continued

Snake movement