DAY 27

Final Project

Thoughts
I'm not very sure if I'm too happy with the final result. I feel as if I am playing "too safe" with my animations and my type I'm not 100% satisfied with what it is doing on the screen. My main goal was to keep interesting compositions and textures so I guess I at least feel like I met that goal. Rendering this video out crashed after effects a million times..

DAY 26

We really didn't do much for this class day. Just discussed where we were and how we felt about our final animation and he asked us if we needed any help. After the small talk on how we were doing we left to work on our video or other classwork that we needed to get done. I feel like everyone is pretty much crunching on their final animation for Animation class to really worry too much about this final for Type since we have all weekend.

After some thought on the music I chose for my final animation, I figured I really wanted to give a liquid-y feel (because I was at a beach) so I looked up some inspiration videos based on that concept. I chose something similar to Gnarls Barkley's Crazy video because I think distorting the imagery I have to confuse the viewer kind of states how I felt about not knowing exactly where I was going to go with this project and how I randomly found myself at this beachy community up the coast.

DAY 25

Today we looked over our completed Helvetica image studies and spoke about what we were planning for our final animations.

Each student picked out a piece that they liked that wasn't their own and spoke about it. They had to discuss why they picked it and what feelings it gave them. What does it smell like? Sound like? Where was it taken? What vibes do you get? Some students were very detailed about what the piece said to them and some didn't really grasp the concept. Dorian used mine as an example and explained how the piece spoke to him and then asked me what it really was about. He got something completely different than what I said, but it was okay, I purposefully wanted the piece to feel lyrical and dark and mysterious.

Next we are to animate our images into a final video. He walked us through some music and poetry and how sometimes things can mean totally different things to people. He let us listen to some poetry as well and asked us what they were talking about. It was very interesting and useful to the final video we are to make, because we're telling a visual poem about the place we visited and we're trying to convey a thought or a feeling to someone who didn't experience what we experienced.

DAY 24

Project
For this assignment we were to select one of our type photos and set the type just using Helvetica. Then we were to create as many interesting compositions as we could using this phrase. Our focus was on composing a space and not filling a space for further explorations. To create a "visual poetry".

Thoughts
This was really fun to do, breaking apart images and overlaying them and just making really interesting compositions using the helvetica letterforms. They didn't need to be legible which was nice so I tried to push the space as much as I could.
I noticed I tried to create a 3d looking space in most of my compositions and only a few of them were very successful.

Critique
Push them further and look at creating interesting negative shapes.

DAY 23

Today's class was just having all of our images and source materials from our adventures over the weekend. We were to split them into three categories: type, elements, and texture to make it easy for us to pick which photos we would like to use in our project.

Unfortunately I did not have a camera handy over the weekend to go out and take photos so I spent the rest of the class taking a trip out to the beach with my dog to gather materials for the next class.

I remember doing a similar project before in our freshman year with Dorian, where I travelled south along the gulf to some small fishing village outside of Arcadia. This time I wanted to go somewhere a little bit closer to home and wound up visiting another beach called Anna Maria.
This place had a nice feel and I liked the hidden textures and the unique signs around the community. I met a few nice people and just enjoyed the time walking around being a photo bug.

DAY 22

Today we turned in our final books for WEDU using grid systems and tying them together with folios.

I wasn't very happy with mine, I thought I could have printed it out on better paper and pushed the design into something more appealing (I re-did it for the client presentation and I like that one a lot better..) but I know I followed the requirements and I did utilize my grid nicely. I even thought it would be fun to use the "RCAD MD" logo from the facebook page to watermark my folio. I wasn't very happy with the way it looked but it's alright.

I purposefully cut down my book size to be a 16:9 because the content is about a tv network and I wanted to correlate with tv aspect ratios.

But overall the class thought it was middle-tier as we split the books out into "student looking" work and "professional looking" work. Which was alright place to be but I'd much rather have been professional looking.

DAY 21

Since we were done exploring grid systems and how to layout in InDesign different types of settings for images and type, we explored ways of setting up a working document for Motion Design students to use for storyboarding. What could we make that could be utilized by everyone and look professional and satisfy the working staff of the department at the same time? It is a very daunting challenge that we have to consider, especially when pleasing everyone is almost impossible.

We took these ideas and implemented them into creating a working design for our WEDU presentation book. Each page needed to correspond to the one before it in some sort of working system. So taking the previous studies of working grids, we were to create one to use in our final book.