DSDN101 Project 3 - The Clip

This is my final cut for DSDN101 Project 3 - The Clip. I hope you like it :)

The Clip - Storyboard

This is my storyboard for DSDN101 Project 3 "The Clip". I decided against adding annotations to the frames as I felt the image was powerful enough to speak for itself.

Design Standpoint

Network, B. A. (Producer). (2009). E-Waste Dumping in Ghana. Retrieved from http://www.electronicstakeback.com/global-e-waste-dumping/

For my subject of Industrial Design, I decided to focus on the ethics and responsibilities an Industrial Designer has in relation to the environmental impact of the products they design.

As the focus of Industrial Design is effectively geared toward mass production, attention must be paid to what happens to the product once it has lived out it's useful lifespan - "If one’s really honest with oneself, most of what you design ends up in a landfill somewhere." (Tim Brown, 2009)

The question is then, how can we reduce the waste that mass produced products cause? It is a problem that both the consumer and designer often bury and forget - for example in Australia, a country of culture similar to New Zealand, the E-Waste for computers alone is projected to be 11.1 million per annum in comparison to the 500,000 recycled per annum, with similar trends on all other electronic equipment. (Waste, 2009-10-13) These trends are also accelerating at an rate in the current years. (Callie W. Babbitt*†, 2009)  There are many elements that affect a products longevity; aesthetics, time between technological improvements, durability, and consumer trends to name a few. 

Many of these aspects have been addressed by both designer and consumer, for which we have recycling programs, technological improvements into biodegradability, and many campaigns to "enjoy what you have" , but all run on the assumption that what is designed will inevitably be thrown away. The standpoint I choose to take is that this assumption need not be true. The question I ask is, how can we design products so that we can continue designing them? For example, could we design a cellphone that could be upgraded instead of thrown away and replaced by a newer model? 

Could we redesign design itself? (McDonald)

A new way of thinking.

(Network, 2009)

Callie W. Babbitt*†, R. K., Eric Williams‡§ and Gregory A. Babbitt. (2009). Evolution of Product Lifespan and Implications for Environmental Assessment and Management: A Case Study of Personal Computers in Higher Education, from http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es803568p

McDonald, W. Think Exist, from http://thinkexist.com/quotes/william_mcdonald/

Network, B. A. (Producer). (2009). E-Waste Dumping in Ghana. Retrieved from http://www.electronicstakeback.com/global-e-waste-dumping/

Tim Brown, C. P. I. (Writer) & G. Hustwit (Director). (2009). Objectified.

Waste, E. (2009-10-13). Australia's E-Waste Statistics  Retrieved 2012-6-6, from http://www.ewaste.com.au/ewaste-articles/australia-ewaste-statistics/

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.

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

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.

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!