Stop Motion Inspiration

I absolutely adore this clip, such a solemn little tale that really catches your heart. I would really like to find out how to do this style of animation that gives depth to the scenes and uses different kinds of stop motion that just seem to mesh together.

Stop Motion Inspiration

I was having a little trouble thinking of how to re-do my storyboard in a style that was not constricted by boxes which is when I recalled this video for Madvillain's track "All Caps". Check it out! Quite literally breaks the boundaries of the traditional storyboard :)

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.

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!

Help with "Design Persona" statement

So we've been asked to write a "Design Persona" statement. And if you're like me, you're having trouble trying to sum yourself up in 300 words. Well it may please you to know that we're not alone in this.

The Walker Art Centre is a famous contemporary art museum and institution in Minneapolis that also has a number of blogs. One of these was a guest blog (a blogger by the name of KDD) where one of the institution's design candidates was asked to write an artists statement - and had trouble with capturing the true essence of himself as an artist.

"I decided to reach out to practicing designers whose work I admired by posing the following question:
Is there such a thing as a “designer statement,” and if so, how would you go about creating one?" - KDD

The responses to he received to this question come from artists in all fields in the arts - Graphic Designers, Performing Artists, Painters, and more, and cover many different perspectives on what it means to be an artist. I think you'll find their opinions most interesting

If you want to check out the blog there are multiple parts. You can view the first part here

Good luck for Monday!

Blast from the Past

I was trawling the interwebz having a look at different styles for a little bit of inspiration, where I came upon a website containing a bunch of nifty little infographics - a style of design I had completely taken for granted. Take this awesome space exploration infograph for instance!

by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Source: www.hongkiat.com

Suddenly I was reminded (with no pun intended) of my favourite video clip from one of my favourite bands, "Remind Me (Someone Else's Remix)" by Royksopp. I really like the insight into the almost monotonous daily workings of an office worker, and I simply adore the quirky infographics spanning from alarm clock function to the process of milking cows, from percentages of fast food consumption during office lunch to train networks and more. Seems MTV Europe loved it too - it won Best Video in the 2002 MTV Europe Music Awards. Check it out!

Helvetica

In essence, type is a mode of communication - a way of displaying information and ideas in a formulaic manner for a reader to digest and ideally understand. By extension, a font is a set of type that displays itself in a particular style.

Much like a wasp has a yellow and black abdomen to caution other animals, or a woman might dress in red to display an image of lust and health, font gives text a particular fashion to provoke an emotional response to the reader. 

Helvetica is a font that is clean, easy to read and universal; it is a colourless vessel created with the intent of communicating information as efficiently as possible. Because the font itself does not come attached with an inherent character besides efficiency, sometimes the only emotion that can be derived from the font is from the words used in the text.

This is why I like this quote of David Carson's so much. It reminds us that communication is not entirely dependent on our ability to read, or even language in general. Many ideas and emotions can be conveyed in other modes such as colour, texture, sound or gesture to name a few, and though Helvetica is a stable medium for conveying a language often much of the meaning and emotion of the text could be portrayed better, maybe in another font.

- David Carson