Brain Dump of DMD Student

Hello there, My name is Paul Bird, I'm a student at Bournemouth University and I'm studying Digital Media Design. This is just a place where I can collect my thoughts on the course and show you some of the things i'm doing there and how my skills develop.

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here is the longer version which includes the slogan at the end

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Here is the Short version of my animation for Molecule Motions

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Logo Animation StoryBoards

Initial Idea

My most basic and prominent idea I wanted, was to have molecules float in and form the play button and then the rest was to appear, basic and simple but enough movement to be interesting. I didn't want it to be too short or two long as it's something that would get played in the cinema to loads of people at the beginning of the film.

The StoryBoards

  Other than these I just really went with it and just messed around with it all in after effects until I got something I was happy with, as we had only just learned after affects I was going with what was part of my skillet of the time.

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The Logo brought into Real World Applications

Bringing it to life

The next thing to do is to see how well we can bring Molecule Motions into the real world. I thought of some cool ideas for it and then some standard ones as well.

A GyroScope

DVD Rack

T-shirts

Mugs

Business Cards

My favourite ideas were the gyroscope and DVD Rack However if i was to show you it would have to be cool 3D models made in either Maya or Blender but I didn't get the time to do learn it to make said models. I only have the sketches I made from when I was sketching the logo and designing it. Either way i'll post it up again.

Other Mock ups

From here on out it's just the mock ups you might see such as staff t-shirts and mugs and the business cards member may carry around with them.

I'll give credit when it's due the mug and business cards were made from photoshop actions taken from the great site PSD Covers Free for commercial use of course.

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Molecule Motions - Brand Development

It's Decided

It was decided, I though I would go with Molecule Motions after countless ideas for Netgear I couldn't come up with a logo design that I was content with so I decided I would go with a fabricated company. Here is their little Mission Statement

Molecule Motions is a Film Distributing company that releases films for contemporary cinema of todays age. They pride themselves on getting everything right and making sure things move on smoothly proudly making the point of “motion in every detail.”

  Version 1

From my sketches I decided that I definitely liked the idea of a play button made from molecules and that old film projector tape was orbiting around it. The reason behind this is because Molecules can be a great analogy for pixels on a screen as their small but we know they are there. It's also because they are always moving so Molecules seemed like a very cool idea for a film distribution company.

The orbiting tape was just to reinforce that they are to do with film and to keep with the theme of molecules as normally they have orbiting electrons going around them(Who remembers physics?).

Another thing I considered was the text I felt that two different typefaces would be used a strong bold slab-serif font for molecule as they are one of the most basic make ups of everything and motions should be a cursive font. This is just so that I can portray the properties of what I am naming through the typeface.

Idea 1

here is the first one both on a black and white background, this is jsut to check that it will work on either a black background or a white one, as you can see they are reversible, The only difference however is that i removed the lines on the dark background, this is because it broke it up too much and just didn't feel right as I felt on a black background it was already having enough of an impact. So I decided to leave the lines out for a dark background.

Idea 2

I felt that the molecules that formed the play button felt too much like the balls from a game of pool or snooker so I felt i needed an actual solid shape to place inside it as to avoid the confusion.

This was okay but I still didn't think it felt quite right and I wasn't sure how it would look it other colours. I figured that since these need to be animated i'll leave the idea of molecules forming together to form a solid shape and keep a simple play button as the main icon for the center of the logo.

Idea 3 - The final

This idea I felt was the strongest and is the one I went with, as it was the one I felt happiest with. So, I give you the final Molecule Motions Logo IN Black and White and one with some colour in it.

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Rebrand Project - Starting Out

The Brief

We have been tasked with the Job of picking a current brand or have the option to make up a brand new company, to then be able to make a logo that is effective to that Company.

Stuff I'm intrested into - to use as inspiration

If in the case that I do want to make a logo around a new company then I've decided to list stuff that i'm interested in personally as a means of making an interesting Logo.

Here is my mini brain dump 

First Idea - Gorilla Records

My first idea is to do something called Gorilla Records, this is because I Play drums, I listen to a lot of rock music and enjoy my music immensely and I though a Gorilla might be a perfect example of and animal that hits hard so I gave this idea a catchphrase of "Music for hard hitters".

I really like this idea but I soon realised that I'm limited by my lack of artistic abilities to be able to make the Gorilla, I just decided that maybe I should cut my losses your come back to it with fresh eyes

Idea 2 - Rebranding a Current Brand

I decided that I should try and re-brand a current company that i think logo could do with sprucing up and was Netgear. So I listed what the company does what it sells and what it relates:

Makes Products

Heavily branded products

Most known for routers

Networks - nodes / hosts

network diagrams

These were cool. but I was afraid that the logos I was coming up with were sticking to close to the current brand, and then decided to cut my loses.

Enter Molecule Motions

I then thought it be cool, to fabricate a new company but this time something related with film and media, this is because film companies quite often have animated logos as the start of film titles so this means that I can have some cool logo animations.

These are my ideas so far, and hopefully they will develop into lots of cool ideas, the thing now is to start to think of more potential animations for them, Molecule Motions looks like the most promising

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Feeling Guilty?

Work Work Work

I've been doing so much work lately that i've not even considered updating this blog, well...I have, but not had the time. I think I have websites coming out of my ears left right and center, I have a huge collaborative project, a collaborative media project, finishing touches to make on my portfolio site so much to do, so little time.

I can't keep working like this though I need time to chillax and take a breather or else it's just not going to be any fun. I love making websites but at the same time I need a break i've hit a wall on them I can't think of anything, well I can. But it's not of my normal quality. I strive for a certain quality, it only has one criteria... I must like it.

My problem is i've let it sneak up on me more so that it should of, but thats only because I don't know what to do. I'm not stressed as such just worried, worried that i won't perform to my standard and also i guess now... the standard that i've set myself now i'm constantly on a fight to simply best myself. I am my own worse critic.

Why feel Guilty?

I feel guilty because of this one project, my collaborative project is fine i have time for that, nor is it as complex as this current one. It's not a University project as such it is that it is out of academica for my course but it still a University thing. What bugs me the most is my impending media assignment my weakness. I don't like having a weakness some things I accept but this I cannot. Not when it has the possibility of pulling me down, I always aim for the best that I can do which normally requires hours of what appears like work, this being in the sense that to me it doesn't but somehow I never feel closer to what I was trying to do before. I just wish I could magic away this mental block and just come up with an awesome idea and  make it, it's all I ever want to do. It is possible that i've used my quota of ideas or is my heart just not in it? Maybe i'm setting the level too high? I just don't know. But still as I write this, this rant blog post my mind goes back to one thing, a consistent worry. My media theory will it even make sense to me one day, ideas make sense in my head but what ideas can I support am I secretly good at theory? or is it just a tangent of obscure rubbish. This has been a ranting post but also a obscure update, I have lots of work and not enough time and I feel guilty about it , surely i'm not the only one feeling this way right now?  

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A mockup, without planning

This is basically just a quick mock up of roughly what I have. I've been playing with colours and images. I haven't even started to wireframe or sort all through my content. But this should be roughly a good enough header. It might change who knows, just need to get away from that essay.

Something was missing?

Okay so I got some feedback, something wasn't quite right. I think its that diagonal cut across the background image so here we have it with just one image.

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Personal Branding

Since we are making a portfolio and as mentioned previously I wanted to brand myself, either way here are my thoughts process and ideas of a potential identity, I will show my process and then show how I developed it and say why i've chosen to do it like this, and not like that.

Initial Idea

My idea is to have a simple symbol or logo that can form the basis of my identity, I then hope to use different stylings to make it slightly different while keeping the same core idea intact, that way if i change my mind or redesign my portfolio in a couple of years, any potential employers or followers can recognise it, therefore I won't confuse my audience in the longterm. "So Paul what did you come up with, a bird?" Well as a matter of fact I did, you would of never of guessed right? Like some sort of predictable plot in a modern horror film. I have of course incorporated a bird into my logo, well, I say incorporated, It's just a bird (I hope you think it's a bird too).

Hey whats that in the sky? is it a bird?...yes

So here is the logo in it's most elemental and basic form.

I made the bird using simple shapes and 45 degree angles and as you can see, it makes a simple and effect minimal bird. I remember seeing something like it on a minimal poster I think it must be nearly a year ago now, if I can find it I will credit it. 

The reason I went for simple is because it can easily be transfered to other mediums such as print and because it works in black and white and greyscale it means that invoices and business cards are easily made and done because of this, it also doesn't have complex shapes or colours.

Now that I have the basics I could have a play with it and see what extra stuff I could do to it to really make it mine.

How I improved it

There is one problem with it, it's rather bland, I played with textures and patterns to see if that would help but it didn't quite look right, then I thought and decided that maybe I could make it look folded, after all folding paper is to do with arts and craft with is then related to creativity. Crafting is both technical and creative which is what being a web designer / developer is in my eyes. it was perfect, i just needed to make it.

Here I tested it on black and white again to see if it would look okay like that, and success it does. It now feels less bland and gives off a much nicer feel overall giving off a feel of creativity, craftsmanship and technicality.

Knowing I may want to change the colours I made it in such a way that I could quickly and easily change the colour of it by simply changing the colour of the bird underneath, since I used layers of colour at different opacities and small subtle shadows to give the folded look.

Multi-coloured Birds

Here you can see some different colour variations for them, some look really good but some not so much, but you can get the general gist of how versatile it is.

Putting it all together

So now that I have a bird logo that I am happy with, I just need to put it all together, so since I liked the idea of using a circle because of the message I want to convey. A circle was picked, a circle is quite a organic shape and is easy on the eyes. It also makes us feel safer almost as if we are in a bubble and we are safe, I want people to look at it and feel safe and natural, inviting them almost and using such shapes are capable of such a simple cognitive reaction.

So here without further ado a rough idea of what I had in mind. Feedback would be very much helpful and interesting and thanks for reading (if you did that is).

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Another Day, Another Brief

Okay so it's been a while I should be updating this blog. The problem is that if your not use to blogging then you forget you have one, so what have my potentially invisible audience missed.

Group Project Briefs

Well one thing you've missed is two group project briefs which were okay but the thing is because they were not graded not many people put that much effort into them but the ideas were cool, just the effort was lacking in visuals for showing off the idea well.

It's advanced our presentation skills and has managed to get us to work in different groups thus allowing us all to get to know one another and work with different people so, it's not all bad.

We just have the last one today so now it's all gravy and we don't have to do anymore which is cool, but not so cool. Now we have actual graded work. Time to get serious.

What are we doing now?

Now everyone is all busy doing our essays and bibliographies writing 4500 words sounds a lot, but i don't think it is but it's tough when the question is so open to so many ideas and also that wrapping your head around semiotics and identity, and all the other things that have been crammed into our head can be used.

The thing is if i explain some of the things to people who are not on our course then i find it possible i do know the stuff because i can explain it to them, therefore, it must be going into my head.

Another Day, Another Brief

We have another brief. "But you said there was no more, why do you have another one?" Well this one is special. It's graded and it's not something small and simple, it's an entire portfolio site that we have to design and code up from scratch. I like this idea, i've needed a portfolio for ages now so it'll be good to finally get down to the nitty gritty and code one up. My concern though is that I have already been "Labeled" the "Web Guy". This causes me a problem, everyone expects a "knock your socks off" design and website, however, I like the challenge and gladly accept it as it will be a good test of my abilities. I do however not have a clue on what it will look like and what layout. Something minimalistic is needed. My focus is the work and them getting in contact with me.

Do I Brand myself?

One thing I am unsure on though is if I stick with just my name Paul Bird, or do i think of an alias? if so, what? I'm hoping for something related to bird, it's cheesy but it will form memorable mental links if I do imagine it.

Person1: "Oh whats that guy called? remember he has the logo with the bird, he had some really cool work."

Person2: "Oh yeah! you mean Paul Bird, yeah?"

Person1: "Yeah! thats who I was on about"

My surname being bird and having an icon or symbolic bird to accompany it groups my name with that icon / logo, it's cheesy but also makes sense. My only problem now is I have that media theory essay and bibliography to write, but all I want to do is design!  

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Signs and Myths - Fire Kills Brief

We have been asked to write a 300 word paragraph using some of the language and vocabulary from the Signs and Myths lecture. So i have decided to pick it for the recent group project, our fire kills brief idea. Just so your clear it was a TV advert that would be run globally on TV.

We just recently came up with a concept for a TV advert to raise awareness of the fire safety checklist. We had to identify our target audience etc and in short we decided that parents and families were the best audience to target, whats the best way to get through to them? We decided that children. Children are a sign of innocent and in society as well they are seen as needing guidance or protection. This gives you an instant impact because of this deep set idea within society.

However we didn't really want to use shock tactics so we decided to do a role reversal, our idea was to have the child lead the parents through a fire and being more prepared than the adult. We though this idea was good because it throws the normal model of adults protecting children, producing this causal effect of guilt and irony onto the situation. This was good because then it meant that we have invoked some sort of emotion upon the viewers, because they should be the ones that should be doing the protecting and look out for.

The Next thing that this advert finished and hit home with was that we would provide a slogan, something along the lines of "So simple a child can do it". These words would have a great impact because its almost as if its child's play. This sign of child's play creates an image of a child playing, and vastly links to other words and images related to this sign, all that is conjured up to our thoughts are simple and if a child can do it, then surely a fully grown adult can? The effect of this is that we are challenging the viewers personally, its almost as if it is a subtle insult. It conjures up an image of a child playing, and then also everything related to this image of a child innocence, vulnerable, simple. It's like saying that if you can't do this then you are a child.

The campaign in all was to use a child to flip the normal idea of adults protecting children on it's head through the use of a child. A child as mentioned is innocent and vulnerable so using that image of a child and its place in society as needing protected it makes for an excellent way to get through to many people over the world and any culture.

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Group Project - Popular ways Things go Viral - Research

Some other research that I set to do was to see how things go viral, or well at least the popular ways in which things go viral. This would really be key to the campaign and how to get it to spread easily, I know if I wanted to be a user i would want it to be as easy as possible to enter a competition so I wanted to find a campaign that we can create that has this, what I like to call Low Effort = High Participation. What does this mean? It means quite literally its super easy to enter the competition(Low Effort) and that means in return we should get a much higher level of participation(High Participation).

The thing was that I still needed some research to further this idea, to make it the best it could be, so. I set about finding some articles online. Here are two that were the most helpful.

http://socialtriggers.com/craft-contagious-content/

http://socialtriggers.com/problem-fast-loading-websites/

Though the second one has a weird title being about websites, it still holds some very good ideas that are easily transferable to our campaign ideas. It has provided some really solid things to think of when making the viral campaign.

Just like the last lot of research I did, I have written an Overview / Conclusion for them and what ideas we can take from the articles and use ourselves.

These provide a lot of good tips and things to think about, the obvious thing is to tweet and use facebook to get things spread quickly, but there is more to it.

We need to use languages or sentences that invoke emotion, stuff that will challenge, cause anxiety or surprise. These get people riled up, thinking and acting quicker. Something like if we ran a competition and then said that you only had until the 29th of October to enter by, we have immediately created anxiety. People will be thinking along the lines of “Oh shoot! I only have until the 29th to enter by. I better tweet this!” Think about it, it’s used a lot and I should imagine is quite successful. The other thing that this also ties into is, how fast everything acts and that customers are used to everything being fast. So for more effect, slow down. Waiting can be frustrating but if done properly will be very helpful you can make them wait longer but you have to feed them the details and almost pamper them, tell them everything. As an example that it could be used on think of an ATM, despite being quite quick we still stand and wait and it feels like ages. We can’t improve the speed of the ATM what do we do? we tell the customer / user what its currently doing so it could say “printing mini-statement” and something like “Just recounting your money to make sure it’s the right amount”. These small but simple things lessen our perception of time because we think that the ATM is doing something with that time. The knock-on effect is that we are providing a better service and giving feedback to the user.

With these in mind we can generate a campaign that can challenge, shock or induce other emotions to sell the product, if the product can shock or anger people, then people will talk about it. We need to do this through the campaign and it also can cross into the video ideas also.

With this mind-set we can create a campaign that will build up to it's release hopefully creating enough hype to maximise sales and spreading to all of our target audience.

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Group Project - Engaging 13-35 Year olds - Research

One of the things I set to research was how to engage our target audience, thanks again to Melody she managed to find some articles explaining just that, here are the articles that I read through.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8796.asp

http://advertising.microsoft.com/ad-network/audience/men

Once I read through these articles I decided that the best way for it to benefit the group I would write an overview of what the articles cover. Then see how these ideas that the article discuss can be used in our ideas and concepts to make our concept that much more solid.

Here is the overview that I have written covering the ideas in the articles.

Men don’t mind watching adverts if they get to the content they wanted still, we also know that the age range we are targeting are also very active online and tech savvy, this opens up new possibilities and ideas without alienating people. We have also found out that men of this age range will also research and get friends opinions on products and items before they buy them. Meaning that if we could signify that they’re friends have participated in or brought the product then they will do the same. An idea of inviting friends as discussed is a good idea, inducing competition could be a good way of getting something viral, look at song pop, how popular is that? We also need to look at ways of advertising to them, campaigns ect, since the age range holds a lot of tech savvy users it also means an immunity to adverts down the side of websites, I, speaking from experience have naturally learned to ignore adverts down the side and i’m sure thats the same for nearly everyone that uses a computer on a regular basis. We don't need to target them, this is okay since, like mentioned earlier men don’t mind watching adverts even longish ones(15-20 seconds). This leads to possibilities of adverts before other related videos on youtube, maybe asking popular youtube channels that regularly kick out content of similar styles such as racing games.

These ideas mean that now we can focus on how we can deliver the video to the audience more effectively. Now we can easily refine the ideas and keep within the threshold that we have obtained from doing the research.

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Group Project - Pedal 2 the Metal - The Brief

A couple of weeks ago we were given a Project Brief  where we were placed into random groups and then we had to assign our roles and start developing this brief from an idea all the way to a concept which we would then have to present this back to our group selling the idea to them and the reasons behind our decisions.

The brief as it suggests, was quite brief. It had to sell the main features of a racing game called Pedal 2 the Metal. The thing we were producing was a concept for the live action video trailer for the game and also, an idea of how we would make the video viral to reach the target audience (age: 13-35 gender: male) as best as possible.

The first thing we would obviously have to do was simply make a note of all our ideas and then see what ideas we have come up with while adhering to the concept brief.

For a first look at all of our ideas then have a look at the mind-map that one of my group members Melody Bowles did.

We knew this wouldn't be enough so I also thought of things that we could research in order to produce better ideas that will work with already co-existing ideas and trends, this was mainly to help us produce a better overall idea.

Here are some of the things I felt we needed to research.

How to engage 13-35 year olds

Popular ways things go viral

How long people watch adverts for, mainly our target audience

Other Live action trailers

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Let the Dumping Commence

This little space on the internet will soon grow to become a place of thought and ideas, it will be used to explain concepts and personal work i'm going to be doing. 

It will also be used to explain my thoughts and opinions on the theories, lecteurs and seminars I will have, it will act as a unified collective place and hopefully allow me not only to keep a record of my thoughts, ideas and views of the course but of my life as a DIgital Media Design Student aslo. It's also a way to improve my writing skills from report writing to academic writings.

If i'm really smart about this, it can prove invaluable to me, especially for remembering stuff and improving my writing abilities and skills.

So, with that. Let the brain dumping begin and the ideas manifest.