Stop Motion Inspiration

Quite a cute little clip, a little slow but I love the use of the cardboard and fabric in a real world environment. It has helped me identify techniques to help me mesh people and objects into a real world animation.

Stop Motion Inspiration

This animation..... is amazing. The interactions with the water and the use of th sand to give the appearance of movement really make this animation for me. A very quirky storyline and so effective for such a short clip.

Stop Motion Inspiration

I love this animation for the way the characters move in the video, appearing to glide after each other instead of walking, and also the quirky interactions they have with their surroundings. It's also animated with real people which is the style I intend to use for my animation.

Brainstorm - The Clip

This is my individual brainstorm for "The Clip" on the topic of Industrial Design. Personally, I used the group brainstorm for the purposes of brainstorming, but made a flow chart to arrive at the decision of focusing on what I believe could be termed "Renewable Design". This will be explained in my standpoint on Industrial Design.

Spot Cleaning Company Advertisement

This is our group's advertisement for "Spot Cleaning Company" for the second DSDN101 Group Project.

Spot Cleaning Company is a house cleaning service targeting families with young children, particularly busy or overworked parents who are often not able to allow time to maintain a clean household in their busy schedules.

Spot Cleaning Company understands these needs, and aims to provide a fun and friendly cleaning service to help ease the stress of your busy lifestyle by providing a professional cleaning service that maintains our high standard of cleanliness and hygiene whilst being family-friendly and entertaining the children.

Our advertisement reflects this with the use of our clean and friendly mascot, Spots the Dog; a mischievous and helpful labrador who both cleans to a high standard and serves as a role model for children, showing them that keeping the house clean can be a fun and exciting chore. This is also reflected with our use of the soundtrack "Yakkity Sax" from the Benny Hill Show. 

Summarily, the mantra of Spot Cleaning Company is "Making Families Happy", a reflection on the company's dedication to helping busy families maintain a joyful and harmonious lifestyle whilst living in a clean environment, and no matter how dirty the mess we keep your house feeling like home.

"The Clip" Test Animation

This is a test animation for the style of stop-motion I want to use in my project for "The Clip"

The Clip - Group Brainstorm

Here's our group brainstorm for Industrial Design, where we focused on the extremist components of Mass Production versus Niche Design, and related them all to the fundamental principals of Renewable Design

Curatorial

“Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

In this piece by Liam Gilbertson, the designer takes the rigidity and strength of the straight form and the sinuous and sensual curvilinear form and effectively juxtaposes them in a visually literal fashion.

The straight form, displayed here in a Constructivist nature can be identified by the interplay of straight and diagonal elements (Zurakhinsky, May 2012) interestingly holds its roots in mathematical modeling for geometries found in nature, and the stainless steel material used suggests the notion of sterility in relation to its interaction with its fluid counterpart.

The curvilinear form, with its soft, undulating folds is a distinct descendant of the Rococo movement, with its "emblematic S-curve" and "whiplash curl" (Coffin, 2008) it achieves a natural fluidity not unlike the nautical ornaments by Meissonier. The origins of this piece stem from a driftwood sculpture in London and uses a layered, subtractive method to achieve an organically infused structure displaying a depth within fluidity, opening the eye the another perspective of fluid form. When put under a light source, this particular method and the vellum paper used in its construction give rise to a layered light and shadow composition furthering the image and understanding of fluidity within the form.

Ultimately the aesthetic achieved in this piece is a mirror imaging of the elements of linear and curvilinear form synthesized from individual origins and composed in an juxtaposing interaction whereby reducing both forms to their basic elements in structure.

Coffin, S. D. (2008). Rococo : the continuing curve, 1730-2008 (1st ed ed.). New York, NY: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Zurakhinsky, M. (May 2012). Constructivism, from http://www.theartstory.org/movement-constructivism.htm#

Oberfell, W. (May 2012). Wertell Oberfell, from http://www.platform-net.com/

 

Turner, B. (July 2009). Driftwood pavillion by AA Unit 2 opens, from http://www.dezeen.com/2009/07/03/driftwood-pavilion-by-aa-unit-2-opens/

http://quotesondesign.com/ (May 2012).

DSDN101 Group Work - Poster

This is our poster for "Spot Cleaning Company"

In our group were Jack Hawke, Jessy Bell, Zak Gatara, and Liam Gilbertson (me). All images are copyright free or based on fictional characters.

DSDN111 - Photographs

Here are some of the photo's I have taken of my finished model. These are unadulterated, untouched by Photoshop, and have not been cropped. I've narrowed it down to 6, and I'm tempted to take more photos, but these so far have been the most effective angles so if there was to be another shoot, it would most likely be the same shots but with different lighting or depth of field. Now just to narrow it down to 2!

DSDN111 - Progress, finally.

Finally getting a move on with my Fluid Form models. I've been racking my brains for ideas, but until now they haven't been ah...... flowing. Well in the groove now, I think this is number 15 in the making.

One Word Film

Here is the final cut of my One Word Film for the word 'intoxicate'

I have changed the music from "Jump Around" by House of Pain to "23 Flavours" by Gramatik from his new EP "#digitalfreedom" due to copyright issues. The track can be found here on SoundCloud. I also quite like his spiel on copyright issues on the same page. All other sounds on this video have been recorded by me.

One Word Film - Process

This is a screenshot of the process I am using to add sound to my completed animation

I have opted to use a multitrack session to record individual voices for all the characters and insert music, and down-mix all the sound to one track which I will cue at the very start of the animation. I removed all the sound that I added before as I was unhappy with the quality I was getting from the mic I used, and whilst adding sound to a finished animation is a bit risky because you can't easily modify your flash to accommodate for changes in sound, the "Sound Referencing Video" function in Audition has been immensely helpful in getting the cues to trigger at exactly the right point. As it is a multitrack session and not a single waveform it also offers the flexibility and ease of modifying a single track at a time without affecting the others. I really don't know what I would have done without this program, and I think I have Adobe to thank for that. I have also chosen to use "Jump Around" by House of Pain as the music in the background of the clip.

One Word Film - Process

In this image I'm attempting to animate all the the characters to party around each other

When I originally started animating each character individually, I animated one character for the whole length of the clip and moved on to the next character, which I immediately found problems with not only the interactions between characters but also the space on the stage they occupied. Much of the time when I animated the interactions, for example the letter 't' pushing over the letter 'c', I found that another letter would pass in front or behind the other letters obscuring the vision of the animations resulting in visually nonsensical movements - you could see the effects of the actions but not the cause.

I instead have been animating each letter about a second at a time and avoided having letters occupying the same space and as a result have started coming out with a clearer animation, and crisper inferences between the letters, which are also easier to add sound to.

One Word Film - Process

This is the first part of my animation for 'intoxicate' which I've testing adding sound to.

I chose to use the word intoxicate, because of the three I chose for storyboarding I thought this would be the most enjoyable to watch, and would be a great challenge for learning the in's and out's of the Flash software. I also thought that it would be the easiest to describe the word through motion as all the text would be constantly moving towards the end of the scene and that this would fit the brief better than the other concepts.

With this part of the video I attempted to add sound to the clip to see what effect the sound had on the process of animation, and see how difficult it was to align the sounds to the motion. Surprisingly I found it very challenging to not only align the sound correctly, but also to get the duration of the sounds to fit as well. I think for the next clip I will attempt to add all the sound to one clip in Audition which I will attach to the flash file.

Storyboards for "One Word Film"

Here are completed storyboards for my three chosen words, Create, Sketch, and Intoxicate.

Create

Sketch

Intoxicate

DSDN101 Project 2: Choosing my top 3 words

I have made my decision for my top 3 words out of the 8 concepts from the brainstorm below, and they are as follows:

SKETCH

I chose this word for the potential it had for freestyling in the way the word eventually made it's way to the screen. For my storyboard I plan to sketch in either more or less than the full letters in an attempt to achieve suspense throughout the scene as the letters are moderately unintelligible until it reaches the end of the scene. For this effect I will either intentionally leave out certain strokes of the letter which gradually get filled in as the scene progresses, and for other characters I will fill in too much of the letter and erase certain parts of the shapes over time on the screen until the letters become visible. The sounds effects required for this animation will only need to be basic, as most of the intention should be shown through the animation.

INTOXICATE

I decided to further investigate this concept because I believe it has the potential to be quite a quirky animation if I dedicate myself to animating each letter of the word as individual characters. I think this would be the best way to animate the word as there are too many different kinds of drunk characters to animate in the one word, and if each letter was a different character then I could cover all the "Spewey Drunk", "Dancey Drunk", "Angry Drunk" and such characters to provide a more rounded visualisation of intoxication. As for my concerns about having an overly despondent scene I will attempt to seperate the characters into groups of interaction and use a music track to provide some sort of order to the chaos.

CREATE


I chose this word because it was a very simplistic idea at heart that would have a strong visual impact through repetition, and really easily displays the meaning of the word 'create'. It would also only use very basic sound effects and most of the meaning could be shown without the use of sound at all, which will fit in well with the design brief. To combat the large number of letters in the animation I would use larger letters which toward the end of the animation will not move so as not to overburden the animation.

DSDN101 Project 2: Inspiration

This is quite a cool text animation I found for that amazing scene in Pulp Fiction

Video retrieved from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ_DRSuk5tk

I love the way the text uses huge size and scrolling techniques to give it an impact for when Samuel Jackson is really starting to get intense, especially how you often don't get to see the whole of the text for the words he's saying yet it still gives the right effect. Even though we don't get to use colour in the animations for our project, I really like the change in colour of the scene and text for when Brett gets shot. And right at the end, the slow fade in of elegant text for "Mrs. Wallace" contrasting the rest of the animation. Fantastic!

Brainstorming Concepts - One Word Film

Below are some of the concepts I had for the One Word Film project for DSDN101. I  by far prefer brainstorming all of an idea visually as opposed to jotting clouds of words - I find this the easiest way to retain my original visualisations.

Frightening

This was my idea for animating the word "frightening", I was really going for the initial shock effect similar to how you might find a scene in a horror film that would play a really loud and scary noise right as the bad guy's head would suddenly appear behind the tormented mistress. In this scene I wanted to have the 'ening' part of the word 'frightening' to be hiding in what I would presume is a house made of letters in a lightening storm, where they would pull back to curtain peeking outside, the lightning would thunder down and they'd pull back the curtain. Opening it once more the lightning would strike and a colossal 'fright' would be towering outside like a giant T-Rex ready to eat the poor little letters. Cue scary sound effects. The letters would try to run away, but in their shock they run straight into a wall, and reconcile with the other half of the word to make 'frightening'

I'm really quite keen on this idea, provided I can work out a suitable way to have the letters hiding away under a curtain of darkness. I imagine this might rely quite heavily on the sound for the shock effect, but hopefully I can make the flashing lights and the "Fright" part of the word look really scary too.

Reform

 A witty little animation I thought, making a visual anagram of the word 'reform' where all the letter swapped with each other by way of the letters popping in and popping out of their places to form, mostly making nonsensical variations of letters for the most part, but eventually forming the word 'reform'. I originally thought about starting with reform as the word that changes and eventually it makes it way back to it's original state, but then I found that one of the anagrams of 'reform' was 'former', and having that at the beginning would work really well.

I am unsure though whether the animation would be misconstrued to think that the one word in my film was 'former', which would go on to make no sense when 'reform' popped up. Alternatively I could start with 'reform' and cycle through anagrams until it came back to the start which would make it a good film to loop, but I'd also run the risk of losing the effect of the one word by having many others in the animation too.

Rebuild

In this animation I wanted the world 'build' to topple over like a house of cards, and from there the word would build itself up again into 'rebuild'. I thought the idea of having the letters 'r' and 'e' stack the other letters back up again, then they could climb the tower they made and sit on top, where the word would be complete again.

I struck problems when I started thinking about how the building actually fell over though - was it pushed? Did it explode? Did someone sneeze? And if I was to have 'r' and 'e' come and do the rebuilding, where would they come from? Were they there at the start? Do they just come in from off-stage?

Create

This is one of favourite ideas so far, it's a very simple idea made stronger through repetition of the same animation of letters popping on the screen until there is so many of them that the screen is black with letters, and then the same idea is repeated again in white to simply spell 'create'. I think it would have a strong visual impact and would be relatively easy to animate and add sound to, always an appealing option.

I am however worried that the animation, whilst simple in essence, might become so crowded that either the viewer will become overburdened with watching it, or the software will. I have to keep in mind that the animation is only 12 frames per second, and given the speed that I want to have the letters animate themselves that might just be a bit too slow. That or maybe it won't end up as a very fluid clip with a million letters on the stage.

Sketch

This is another one of my favourite ideas, for the unlimited potential for ideas once you consider the letter 't' as a pencil, and the essence of the word sketch; you can pretty much draw whatever you want. Well, as long as it fits the design brief. The idea here is basically that the letter 't' draws the rest of the word 'sketch' and then slots itself in the middle at the end of the scene.

I think the potential for this scene is more than just spelling out the word with a couple of pencil on paper sounds, I would like to find a way to draw the word sketch such that it isn't revealed that drawing the word was the intent at the start of the film, but that at the end of the scene the word 'sketch' is "unveiled" in a sense.

Intoxicate

Yet another favourite of mine, I think this word has a lot of potential for a playful and humourous animation. In this scene the word 'intoxicate' gets drunk by means of skulling back the letter 'i' as if it were a bottle of liquor, and the letters in the word begin behaving inebriated; stumbling, staggering and swaggering until their eventual demise in any number of ways a drunk person might end their night on. I like the versatility of this idea as there are many ways to visually display intoxication, giving rise to many different ways of animating this particular scene, for which it applies quite snugly to the brief in the sense of exploring "the way how things and people move as very powerful characteristics of every day objects and actions" as the concept also has the flexibility to allow for plenty of character  to be given to the words without detracting from the scene itself. 

I'm slightly concerned that there might not be enough flexibility to display a good example of intoxication if I was to animate the word as a whole, and inversely animating each letter individually would be taxing to have all the characters interacting in a coherent fashion and might result in an overly chaotic scene. This however would still remain true to the definition of intoxication, though the viewer may not enjoy the scene for it's despondency. The other concern is that this may not be an appropriate topic for a university project. Then again, it is university.

Gravitate

This was one of my more subdued concepts where the letters behave like planets in a solar system. It would be a slow animation of two letters slowly moving together by the force of gravity and the other letters of the word would orbit around the central characters slowly at first, and gradually faster as they begin to accelerate towards the center of their rotation. Eventually the letters would stop in their rotation to form the word "gravitate". 

I think this concept would be a visually effective animation, with plenty of opportunity to use some spacy sound effects, possibly some music like the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I originally thought it would be too simplistic an animation, though if done well I'm certain it would be quite entertaining if the sound effects were epic enough to support the motion. And as Leonardo Da Vinci once said, "simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication", and in this instance I certainly believe that this is a "less is more" type of animation.

Vessel

This was another concept I thought was worth looking in to, as the word 'vessel' is ambiguous and could facilitate exploration of both meanings of the word; 'vessel' as in a container used for drinking and 'vessel' as in a kind of automobile or flying craft. The shape of the letter in the word also make for easy manipulation - as in the example above the 'V' could be used as a cup for drinking out of, and the shape of the letters in the word could also easily be rearranged to look like a car or a plane.

Herein lies my contemplations about this particular scene - It is already very similar to the concept above for 'intoxicate' as one might assume that whatever being drunk out of the vessel is alcoholic, and if I was to animate the scene such that the V is drunk out of and the word transforms into a car or plane which zooms off it might also be misconstrued as advocating drunk driving.