We were told to write a contract and sign it to sort of give an inclination into the roles we were going to adopt over the next four weeks, we will then evaluate the process at the end using these initial roles to compare against how it went. I'm looking forward to how monumental the change might be.
After this we filled in a concept statement, really ironing out our interpretation of the brief and finalising the direction and approaches we need to take, the deliverables were the most important thing here, I felt. Especially deciding upon the idea of using a scale model.
We then used the scotch egg example just to clarify what we were doing, before moving onto an action plan that will see us through to next tuesday, delegating tasks between us in order to have a good sense of what was going on. I think that the bits of research we do individually we'll get together, discuss and evaluate their worth and I'll post the sort of outcomes of that discussion on my blog, as I'm sure Vickie will too.
We've been asked to look at a brief we want to do and a brief we think is awful and evaluate them based on a set of questions, so here is the evaluation of the one we don't want to do, The Mutual Assurance Brief:
What's the brief asking for? -Extremely open ended/unfocused, the outcome could be an illustration or an animation or anything that communicates the idea of 'mutuality' clearly. -Promotion of mutual assurance to get people who might mistrust the banks etc. because of the financial crisis to begin investing.
Who's the Audience? -The Company Judging the work, -Over 30's with disposable income planning for the financial future with their families. The brief specifies for the work to be clear to a family audience.
Important Considerations? - The audience. -The company ethos in terms of customers owning the company etc. etc. - Potentially the logo but it's not necessary. What is non-negotiable/mandatory? - Has to be family friendly, tone of voice has to be 'real and meaningful' so informative and emotionally avocative, other than that it's so vague and open. Ted Baker, the brief we really want to do as a collaboration.
What's the brief asking for? -A shop window display, thats mesage and elements have enough clarity that you can take some away and scale it down for varying shop window sizes. -A bit of in store promotional material that might include give-aways.
Who's the Audience? -Middle and upper classes with disposable income, the brand is expensive and high end. It's got quite a classic and stylish look that appeals to a large age range and appeal to both genders.
Important Considerations? -Has to be inclusive to the large age range, so contemporary but with enough traditional elements to appeal to an older audience. -Makes use of 'Irreverant British Humour' -Would like use of movement and lighting.
What is non-negotiable/mandatory? -Must make use of the brand name/logo -In store promotional materials that tie in. -For Autumn, but must not use leaves and other traditional Autumn themes. Writing a brief, looking at other briefs, breaking down what they want/need to their most cynical: Hamley's -We want more customers -We deserve better -People are ignoring our shop -We don't know what we want to fil our windows -We want to re-brand as hipper/trendier.
Hewlett Packard -Appears open but is in fact a project where they have clear requirements they're not prepared to voice loudly. For example it says you need to produce 'anything creative' for anyone that is creative but then suggests a specific audience of photographers, graphic designers etc. suggesting they have something more specific in mind, that they're not willing to divulge.
Homebase -Clear concise brief that has a lot of specifications, whilst still having enough room for a designer to think creatively: -requirements, has to look different but still fit in the garden world section of homebase. Has to have a photograph/image of the fully grown plant as an incentive to new growers. Clear idea of their audience etc.
What I learned from this exercise... An open brief is a difficult brief and involves a lot of negotiating and re-writing with the client, in this competition brief, that would be impossible so it's easier to leave it alone and look for one with more specifications. It happens that the Ted Baker one is alot more concise than the Engage Mutual Assurance one anyway, giving us a clear choice.
Re-writing the briefs we looked at to start with in our own language: Me and Vickie then re-wrote the Ted Baker brief in terms that are easier for us both to get our heads around. Click for a better image.
OK, so today we started a new brief that's collaborative, so we spent today searchin for a partner to collaborate with. We did this by creating posters, firstly one, advertising your skills, and a second one advertising what you want in your collaboratuve partner. I spent a long time listing what I wanted as the scribbly list below will attest:
From this, I made these posters below: I had a few responses, but crucially, Vickie Simpson responded, as I responded to hers. I thought quite hard about what working with her would mean, we're both image makers, which made me think tht it'd be difficult, but then I thought about all of Vickie's work that I'd seen and her sketchbooks and though that she had some crucial things that I didn't: she has nice finishing skills, which is something I need, just someone to help polish the fine details. I also have some key things she's looking for, which are some knowledge of software with an ability to balance that with an organic illustration style. Anyway, we ahd a sheet to fill out afterwards that sort of evaluated our collaborative partnership, my skills, her skills, what roles will be involved. Heres a transcription 'cause the initial form is all scrappy looking:
Why have you chosen to work wiyh your creative partner? A combination of their needs: 'Image Maker', 'Uses software but is not dependant on it' etc. and my needs: 'Collage' combines nicely with my need for someone to experiment with papers and paper stocks really nicely. My need for someone to be hardworking and to generate ideas.
What specific areas of creative interest/focus do you want to explore during this brief? Print and Finish, something I enjoyed in OUGD202 but woul love to explore thoroughly,As I said before, I'd really like to look at paper stocks and how we could use those inventively to effect the way print looks. I'd also like to try something completely different within the area of design for print, an area we haven't really covered before. What specific design skills do you offer? How do you intend to use them? Illustration which I hope will be in some way integral to the final resolutions.
Knowledge of software, which I hope will allow me to bring the different styles of our collaboration together, as well as prep for print etc.
What Specific non-design skills do you have to offer? How do you intend to use them? -I'm able to organise people and make decisions when people feel indecisive, this will help in initial idea development etc. -I have good speaking and presentation skills which are helpful at crit stages to help my collaborative partner if they're not getting their point across as well as they would like. What do you see your roles being in the creative partnership? I intend to help be decisive at times where perhaps my partner might falter, but I also feel that in terms of the aesthetic of our work, I'll probably be taking quite a bit of art direction from my partner; I'm a big admirer of the aesthetics she works with and would really like to learn some of the skills she has.
What do you see your individual responsibilites being in the creative partnership? -Using my knowledge of software I can feed off of my partners knowledge of fine crafting to create really strong resolutions. -Using the knowledge I have of layout to help construct a strong and clear message. -The illustrative elements of the final resolutions.
This module has been the most steep learning curve, both in terms of learnign practical skills and finding about myself as a designer. Having never used After Effects before, a range of skills were needed, both when directly engaging with the software and in preperation, that I'd simply had no experience with before. I sturggled particularly with the idea of storyboarding and how to employ it. I ended up using it as an extremely quick and rough drafting technique, allowing the fine details to develop at a later stage when I put it into After Effects, however I feel that my animatons would have benefited with more attention to details at the earlier stage. I used a great range of new skills on after effects including the basic transformation tools and more complicated proccesses, like using multiple images in stop motion. In terms of the final result, I feel that I employed the new skills I'd used with reasonable competence, however, some of the finer details with the timeing of the music and transitions between images could perhaps of been tightened a bit, however, I don't think it was at a level that makes it distracting to the overall effect.
I also learned to use DVD pro in order to construct a menu system that presented all of my work. I found it easy to do this using the schematic system, creating menus and assets and dropping them into the system, however it was difficult seeing all the menus pixelate (as I'm told is normal) because they were hand drawn. I feel that it is perhaps a little unfair that my final resolutions are impacted that negatively through no fault of my own. I think my DVD menu's would have benefited from a transitional movie, however, I feel that given digital media is something I learned I don't enjoy, nor am I particularly good at, I felt that it would be better to make a set of menus that function well, allbeit simply, then try and do something more grandiose.
In terms of the research proccess, I made a much more concerted effort to record al stages of what I was doing in terms of both practical research and secondary research. I feel that I was able to keep my project from spiralling out of control by doing this, althought I found it difficult to keep track of my work through electronic means, as a pose to writing it down, thorough blogging helped em to overcome this, though there are bits, I'm sure, that I've missed out. I consider this a real strength to moy work, one I can only see as growing and becoming a real foundation for the conceptual stage of my work as I go forward into the next module. I also think that, because I've learned that I don't really enjoy this area of Graphic Design, I can become even more able to generate a strong body of work for the fields I do enjoy.
A real weakness to my work is perhaps the technical competence I have within this field. I found it really difficult to generate storyboards or think sequentially. I also found it really difficult to employ some of the highly technical methods that my peers around me seemed to use, I had to settle for what I learned from Mike and try my best with this. I found it a struggle not to be up to my usual standard, I take pride in my production, and it took alot of work to get to the point I ended up at, and I still felt disappointed by the work I had done.
Things I will do differently: - I will research using primary methods more thoroughly, like I did through last module. -I will use this largely difficult experience to thrive in fields that are more what I want to do when I graduate. -I will build on the good blogging practice that I started in this module and become even more thorough and maintain them with even more precision.
Attendance 3 Punctuality 5 Motivation 3 Commitment 4 Qauntity of work produced 4 Qaulity of work produced 3 Contribution to the group 4
Firstly I brought in all my assets allowing me to see what I needed to connect where in comparison with the original schematic I did. I began creating buttons on the menu, and linking them out to the appropriate other assets. A massive pain for me was realising that I needed to create two versions of the menus in order to have the overlays appear from invisible to white, rather than black to white. This created an extra hour or so of work, but it was worth it, I was really happy with the way it looked.
I made it ensuring that when the Menu changed, that it automatically went to the first button, allowing for easier access.
And here are a couple of screen grabs that don't really do justice to how long this entire process took.
I realised that the menus transiting from one to the other with no effect was quite uncomfortable to look at. Rather than creating menu animations that I've seen other people do, I had to work with less technical competence. I used the standard after effects transitions>fade out, which created a very simple but very effective way of getting from one menu to another. I added fade outs to all my videos in order to create an effective transition from menu>asset>menu. I also created slideshows of early storyboards and final storyboards, I set them so the space bar /next button needs to be used in order to view them.
Below is a screenshot of me previewing my dvd, it seemed to work effectively on preview so I burned a disk of it using the build tool and then putting the folders into toast.
Evaluation of the actual burned disk:
I have a few issues with the actual burned disk. -The 'white overlays' for some unknown reason look more of a greeny-colour which can't be helped but doesn't help with the aesthetic of the menus. -The pixelation of the DVD menu it'e self means that the nice hand drawn fonts have become a lot less legible, although they are still readable, it's more of an effort than it was in preview. -The fade outs from all the movies worked perfectly on the preview section, on the actual DVD, for whatever reason, this isn't the case, it gets to a certain point of fade out and then just cuts straight to the menu, which is a little jarring, however, I guess it'll have to do for now. -I forgot to create a play all option for my idents, which means they can't be seen as a sequence, which was rather stupid of me but nevermind.
I started by using the schematic I put up on my blog to work out exactly what text assets I needed. I then began drawing them out and scanning them in, using illustrator to change the colours so they'd work thematically with my Ident content. Here are some examples:
I then began creating my DVD, I have to be honest, preffering print, I actually designed my case first, I used the colours I'd chosen at that stage to provide a little continuity between the case and the menus.
I realsied that the Silent movie brief needed a slightly different look to it in order to have some continuity between menu and videos. I based it' look on the favourite of my disperse movies, disperse 1, and kept the circle emblem that seems to have become a theme of this project. I used a rubber tool to create the weathered effect, But I had a few issuse with this, firstly, the white abckground seemes like it would be jarring when contrasted with the old paper background of the rest of my menus, and secondly If I over-weather the circle, it'll make any menu text hard to read and legibility is the key. Here are the final menus with text overlayed, I chose green because it seemed to fit, thematically with everything I'd been looking at in the silent movie brief.
I started with a simple concept, creating idents that advertise a season of John Hughes movies, I identified two key audiences, the current crop of teen to twenty-somethings wo are into John Hughes movies, and those that were of that age at the time (especially given that these films centre around people this age and cater to them). As such I needed to have elements in my Idents that would appeal to both audiences. I looked at contemporary teen films, how they were advertised graphically through posters, dvd menus and title sequences and came to quickly realise that theres alot of hand drawn, hand crafted style that goes into it and felt that this aesthetic would be something worthy of exploring. I looked at several key elements from the movies themselves to create an element of nostalgia that would appeal to an audience from the 80's. Crucially I joined a forum where the users were predominantly of this audience and asked them what appealed the most about the movies. Almost unanimously, dialogue/qoutes and soundtrack were discussed as key points, so I honed in on these as parts of my content.I gradually wittled down my content to fit the time constraints and adopted more of the contemporary visual elements whilst keeping a few knowing references to the movies and an ultimately nostalgic playlist.
In terms of the DVD, I began by using the circle motif that was so prevelant in my Idents, this allowed for consistency right acros the board, I even customised the silent movie menu to look more aesthetically like my favourate video from this section. The packagin followed suit in this way.
So with the scale, I tried to deal with as little detail as possible, creating a simple pictogram of a hairdryer, the details I included were the fan and the on/off swithc. As the scale reduced, I decided to slowly remove these elements as they became more of a distraction than an aid to decyphering what it is. This is a few different experiments with the colours, they need to be high contrast to ensure the eye can extract as much detail as possible. I quite like the orange but it doesn't stand out enough. Pink is garish, avoid. I dislike the teal/green, it doesn't provide enough clarity. I quite like the violet, but it needs to be darker and bolder to create enough contrast for maximum visibility.
I added the numbers you traditionally get when you see an eye test and changed the colour to a navy. I think that the numbers are more of a distraction than an aid to the composition. Navy seems to work well, it's that or black and I'm not a fan of using stark black backgrounds. Bearing that in mind, below is my final piece for print.
Ok so based on my final storyboards, I started to generate my final movies. here is a photo of the ridiculous amount of drawings I did to ready my compositions. This was so time consuming:
Here is my progression on The Ferris Bueller Ident. I looked at the way Ferris Bueller looked in the stop-motiony bit in the video I put up for my final crit, I realised that potentially the fact that it looked reversed out made him quite unrecognisable, so instead I put it the right way round and used a white outline round his head to seperate him from the red circle.
So here is what I planned pretty much, except I cut the third 'bueller' form the sound file because it was too long, I don't think it takes anything away from it having it just twice, infact a third time would be too repetative.
Here is the standard 'John Hughes Season' text, I'm going to use the same one for every Ident for two reasons; it creates a continuity between the ident and it also saves me alot of time that's becoming an increasingly precious commodity at the moment.
This is just to demonstrate something I need to remember when exporting or I'm going to have some dire looking movies, I forgot to change the render from third to full quality when exporting it.
Here I've added the Film 4 section, I tried to make it move, however, I think that that, combined with the motion of the stop motion just makes it hard to read the text because your eyes are focusing on the lines zipping everywhere.
Here it is, not moving, however I realise that it looks wrong and the lines need to read as a 4, which they don't with the horizontal line going right across the circle.
I asked both my housemates if they could read this as film4, thankfull it passed the test, and here we have a final Ident.
Here is my progression for the Breakfast Club Idents:
t.
Here is my attempt to use that eating motion as a replacement for a fade out or a motion out of the circle. I thought that it was quite a nice clever Idea, however I thought the Molly in a loveheart at the beginning was starting to seem flabby and unneccassary.. I also thought it might be a little confusing, even to those who are familiar with the films, just incase they arn't familiar with John Hughes icon Molly Ringwald.
I initially started trying to use the last lot of storyboards I drew to sort of create a summary of the film almost, but I realised 2 things, firstly that it was incredibly dull to do it this way, and also th epeople who would be interested in this season already know the plots so it's not exactly interesting for them. So I thought a little whle, and using the components I already had, i decided to make a series of pictograms that represent the films, so following on from this video, I began focusing in on the breakfast,a nd using the experiment I did for my final crit with the breakfast being eaten, I thought that would be a nice little image to create a quick, simple and to the point ident.
And Here's how I progressed with weird science: These are again, like the early breakfast club and sixteen candles videos, attempt summarise the plot points of weird science i.e. science (symbolised by test tube and conicle flas, frankenstein and a bra that symbolises the sexed up nature of the film. On the storyboard it seemed to work but after some progression with ti, I realised that I detested the way Frankenstein's head looked and that the Bra was uneccassary, arriving at a similar sort of Pictogram stage that i did with the other idents. I used an arcade game sound effect to soundtrack the changes in frmes, which ended up being the only thing I liked about the initial videos.
Here I looked at the Icon and the way it could move out of the way for the 'Weird Science' text. I didn't like this one above because it seemed too slow.
I tried using the technique that I'd used at the beginning, having the text shoot on from the bottom of the screen, I thought that it gave it a dynamic kind of feel that seemed appropriate to the film and so I stuck with it.
And here's a quick pr0gression on 16 Candles: Again, I diligently started putting in all the compoistions I would be using to represent sixteen candles, when it seems kind of redundant and unnecessary to my concept.
I quickly thought about how effective it would be to use the candles as a pictogram for it. Thinking to the way the sounds worked in the Breakfast Club and Weird Science, I was hit by a wave of inspiration and thought that the sound of breath blowing out the candles could be really interesting, unfortunately the sound I got wasn't quite right but it was the only one I could find. I tink it still works effectievly enough and the fading out of the candles sort of eludes to the candle going out slowly.
And from here, my entire plan for the John Hughes Movie Season section changed, after I realised that having symbols summing up plot points looked a little weak, I realised that it was best to have a summary ident one that carries all of the information in the other slides, allowing the viewer to know what every film in the season was, in one showing, here it is: Initially I started by putting in the components, using the other Idents to inform the layouts, theres no transitions on this one like a fade out etc, which makes it quite difficult to follow because eveyr change is jarring.
I added fade ins and outs because I needed to see whether that would make the animation run smoothly, it was a success and I decided tostick with it because I really enjoyed the way the circles sort of changed colour slowly, over the next few I tried to exaggerate this a little bit more. I chose the Beatles twist and shout as the accompanying music, I was initially going to use Don't you Forget about me, like in The Breakfast Club, however, I decided not to for two reasons, firstly I didn't want to repeat myself, and secondly, I didn't want something that slow, I wanted more of a celbration of the movies. Twist and Shout is from the iconic Parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Listening to the song, I though the break down bit was perfect, the way the harmonies increase works beautifully for the visual changes, every time the film changes, the harmony changes and I think it has a nice synchronicity.
It came together pretty quickly and quickly organically, here I've tweaked timings a bit, mainly with the fade ins and outs which youtube has thoughtfully cut off, thinking them unneccassary, as is there want.
