After Effects 4 - Typography Facts

Previous animation sessions have focused specifically on character design , for this task we had to pick our favourite type face and create a short informational piece about the typeface. The typeface i chose to research was 'Roboto' , i chose to use this font as i used it in my first project and instantly fell in love with it , my favourite aspect of the font is that it is available in so many different weights and styles.

Roboto is a sans serif font that was created specifically by google for the android operating system. This font style has been used in thousands of mobile devices and android products. Google describes the font as "Modern , yet Approachable" and "Emotional".

My aim for this piece was to create an animation that flowed into each key scene smoothly , i felt that this was essential to my animation as simplistic type isn't very interesting to look at on its own. this session allowed me to combine my knowledge of animating shapes with keyframes and animating type to create a more advanced piece of work.When choosing colours i stuck to black and white for the main sequence , however when mentioning 'google' i used the specific colours of each letter to add characteristics to the text. 

Originally i had difficulty trying to make the colours flash up separately for the word Google so i settled on bringing all the colours in all at once. Although i seemed help asking how to do this it proved to be too complex for the amount of time i had to complete the piece.

Towards the end of the animation i used the same shade of green that the android branding uses for their 'Android' character, i felt that adding this character would give the animation some more personality , making it more interesting for the audience and providing a direct link to android.

Illustrator 1 and The Creative Cloud - Basics

This session was an Introduction to the Creative Cloud as a whole , We started off by creating an account on the creative cloud , in my case i already had one. This was to show the power of the cloud and how it could link all devices together. We devoted our attention mainly to the Adobe smartphone apps , such as Adobe Capture; Adobe capture is an app that image traces photographs and sends them directly to the cloud for you to use in photoshop or illustrator , this is useful as you can see what images will look like as a vector while on the go. This app proved useful to capture inspiration. Another useful feature of the app was that you could photograph and object and it would allow you to import it as a brush stroke , making different types of patterns when using brush tools in photoshop or illustrator. Another useful tool that adobe capture provides is the ability to photograph a subject and sample a selection of swatches from the photograph. This is very useful when creating colour schemes that need to relate to the subject or giving a piece a specific feel. This application can also help inspire the colour range and channel your mind into looking into different schemes.

We then moved onto illustrator skills , i feel that illustrator definitely isn't one of my strong points in the course therefore i was excited to listen and learn about the softwares potential. I had basic knowledge about some tools such as the pen tool and other vector tools. We began by importing an image of our choice to the dartboard. I chose a photograph of myself as it was easily accessible. We then proceeded to use the image trace tool , this of which i had used before , however i learnt that they're other options when tracing such as 3 colour , 6 colour and low fidelety image trace options. all of these allowed my photo to have a unique outcome with many potential for editing.

after making my photograph become image traced we looked at other creative cloud software like 'Adobe Typeset' , this software was basically a font extension book which provided thousands of developer made typefaces that you can download to your devices via creative cloud. 

I feel that my final image turned out well as i used all the skills that i have been taught in todays session. I found this session extremely helpful as it allowed me to brush up on my illustrator skills , something of which i haven't had time to do yet. I hope to look into illustrator in further sessions and learn some more advanced techniques.

Prequel / Sequel

The lectures main focus was that nothing is 'original' , and that every piece of design has been inspired by or has certain similarities to other pieces. however this does not mean that your designs can't be original , all it means is that we need to channel our creative process in the right direction in order to achieve this. This is become apparent as when we begin the creative process we need to take inspirations from items around us that we have already seen. Technically making everything copied.

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." - Salvador Dali

The first subject of the lecture was internet Memes. this was a key example of prequel sequel as they are funny however they lack value due to the unoriginality of the work. this parked questions about plaugurism and how memes arent classed under copyright regulations.

this lead onto our next topic which was a 30 minute video. The video 'Everything is a remix' Specifically looked at music and how artists have sampled beats from other songs in there own musical creations.the film discusses different laws and regulations about these beats or could it be that people just share the same creative output?

"Legal remixing is fine, illegal copying is not - if your work fails to distinguish itself enough then you must attribute!"

Visualising Sound

This lecture looked at sound as a basis for visual communication. the point of this lecture was to start to introduce us to the new project brief and inspire us when starting the new project. Our project brief was:

"Each week you will be supplied a short section of music to respond to. You have a wide scope of processes and approaches to experiment with. This is a good opportunity to apply and further develop your skills and critical and creative thinking gained through the process workshops, and workshop week and previous studio brief. In addition, you are encouraged to think beyond purely digital work. There is plenty of scope for traditional processes across both print and animation. You may consider photography, illustration, video or physical 3D or 2.5D construction." 

I felt that i was going to struggle with the new brief , this was because we had such limited time to produce as many pieces. I had to keep my ideas short and fast , with not much time to refine them in further detail. my main point of focus was to not get stuck on one design and let the rest slip as the most important thing was experimentation.

We were introduced to the earliest know visual piece of sound , this was known as the hurrmian hymn 6 . this hymn dates back to 1400 B.C.E the piece was discovered in the 1960's in the ruins of a palace in Ugarit. there were 29 musical texts found at the time of its discovery. there was no chronological order of the texts therefore the numbers after the hymn were not relevant to the time they were written.