Fy Enw

Lloyd Hopkins - Bath Spa university - Creative computing

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Typography: the style and appearance of printed matter.

For this piece of portfolio work we were tasked with the creation of animating text and shapes in conjunction with a song of our choice, one line minimum, to this end I chose to work my piece around the Arctic Monkeys song: R U MINE. The work itself was created in adobe after effects.

I started this work by finding an MP3 of the song this was done with a YouTube converter, once downloaded it was imported into the software where a creator can manipulate everything from the soundwave itself, add text, images, animations. However due to the nature of the task I had to find the lyrics I felt could create a good, short example of this style of work. My chosen lyrics are the first two lines of the song.

“I'm a puppet on a string Tracy island, time-traveling diamond”

Even though these are very short lines I felt there was opportunity to create something quite visually pleasing, the song also features a drumming opening, so I decided I would incorporate this somehow. The first creative decision I made on this piece was to keep everything black and white, this was due to the album in which this song comes from has the same black and white colour scheme, with a black background and white images and text on top.

As stated above the opening of the song features drums being played periodically, to visualise this I added a circle that would expand and contract upon every clear bang of the drum. This worked very well I feel and adds to the overall sense of the piece.

When deciding what to make for the first line I decided that a simple contrasting split would create a nice visual, with the top half being white with black text and the opposite for the bottom. To connect the “On a string” I added two small rectangles which shot across the screen one going vertically and the other horizontally, I just felt though this was a nice touch to add. With the screen clearing after this line we are shown a whited-out image of, admittedly looks like just a while blob, Tracy island, which is from the 1960’s puppet show. With again a whited-out image of a rocket shooting across the screen diagonally, an iconic image from the show. This leads us to the second part of the second line. For this I felt a good visual would be to have the words Time-Traveling shown to be hangs on a clock that would spin until the lyric is over, this was actually done using a typography generator online, which allowed me to easily manipulate the direction that the words were facing.  And finally, the word “Diamond” I had no idea what to do for this and seems as though it is such a quickly said word in the song I knew I had to do something simple. So, I arranged the word into the shape of a very rudimental diamond.

In conclusion I feel as though my piece was very well created with good visual style and timing with the song, often going into a frame by frame view of the timeline/ waveform to make sure things are exactly right to the point where I was satisfied.  

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For this piece of work, we were tasked with creating a game using the online software “bitsy” that had to evoke thoughts of vintage games, however this is due to the limitations of the software. Bitsy uses an 8X8 pixel grid that allows the user to paint into it creating the player avatar, tiles (To be used as scenery/walls) sprites and items, but with only this sized grid it was immediately very challenging to create anything that appealed to me, however with a bit of time and creativity I have created a game that I feel gives the impression of old Gameboy games, such as the legend of Zelda, purely off the art style. However, there is another challenge to overcome when using bitsy and that is you can only have two frames of animation per asset, so simple movements were required.

My game (Into the Mine) is a very simple adventure game where the player is required to find an item and return it home, with a bit of exploration and challenge, as there is something else in the mine. However, we were also set a time frame in which our games must be completed by, three minutes, so I was unable to create huge amounts of rooms and paths for the player to explore, so I had to keep everything concise a focused, however regardless of these limitations I feel as though my end product is a very charming game with a great art style. If I were able to have had unlimited time using this software and creating my piece I would have gone much further with it, adding extra items, characters and locations.

 Bitsy runs off of HTML in a user’s browser, and allows a creator to change certain aspects of it, however I am not proficient enough with the language to create any real differences, however I was able to add background music, which really adds to the atmosphere of the game whilst still keeping in with the retro feel.

You can play the game at this link: https://fyenw.itch.io/into-the-mine

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Gestalt Principles. Gestalt is also known as the “Law of Simplicity” or the “Law of Pragnanz” (the entire figure or configuration), which states that every stimulus is perceived in its most simple form. Gestalt theorists followed the basic principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are five principles that we aim to follow when creating a piece of this nature: Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, and Connectedness. Our task is to re-create a logo of a company that we feel either doesn’t suit what the company is trying to achieve or just if we don’t like it, and like anybody stuck for something to inspire them to work, I looked in my room and found my BUSH record player and noticed that there could be something done here. So, I looked at BUSH’s current logo and what the company is trying to sell (Musical devices, Speakers, headphones, microphones, record players etc.), with this in mind I set out to create a logo using the Gestalt principles and Adobe Illustrator to reach this goal.

My piece works mainly around the principle of closure or negative space. The first thing I thought could be done was to change the S into a record in motion, this was done by using the text tool to create the S (All letters were created as separate entities) and to manipulate its anchor points using the select tool, which illustrator allows a user to do due to its vector graphic nature. This turned out really nicely I feel and is the first thing most people I have shown have been drawn to, so I decided to make this the focus of my piece, however I have made three iterations on my piece (Final design is the top image) with two varying very slightly with the addition of a circle inside of the would be record, and the last being wildly different, when I decided that there could be more room for experimentation. I added more negative space principle into the piece with the human face carving out the B, I did this to represent how Music is so close with human culture and society, and whilst I feel it may take slightly away from the overall piece I am happy with this addition, although some time configuring it could make it work really well. I also added a pin incorporated into the H to really drive home the record player idea. The actual creation of this tool was all done using Adobe illustrator, by using exclusively the Text and shape tool the piece began to take shape.

Overall, I feel though my pieces meet what I set out to do, however with all work, more time spent with greater knowledge of the software and why each principle is used could have led to a far better piece in general.  

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Selective colourisation (or colourisation) is any process that adds colour to black-and-white, sepia, or other monochrome images. This can be done in many ways, but for these pieces I used Adobe Photoshop in conjunction with the brush tool and using new layers to allow for colour to be placed right on top of the image. Photoshop allows its users to add different options to their pieces in the form of overlays, the multiply and colour options were used for both pieces 

The two pieces above are my work on this technique, with the first image being a photograph of my home town during the sixties of the locally famous market and bus station, and the second being a still of the D day landings. 

For both pieces I tried to do something different, for the city image I focused on the industries that were present in Newport during the time, which made the city what it is today, I went about this by manually using the brush tool to paint colour onto the image, creating the desired effect. I received feedback for this piece from my class mates, the criticism that I feel is most relevant is that I should colour the entire image, not just the industrial aspects. This was suggested to me as in the current state the image looks quite lifelike (Given more time and colouring the whole image).  Whilst my other piece only gained information from my housemates, where the general agreement was that the colours ran and created an undesired faded look. In order to improve this, I could/ should have spent more time carefully choosing my colours and applying them to the piece, however I am very new to Photoshop and have already just between the two pieces seen an improvement compared to that of work I am creating now.