Evaluation unit 12- Hafsa Zaman
When I read and understood the brief, I was a little disheartened initially. I am not very good at abstract work, and I didn't really know what kind of culture I truly identify with. I think that comes from being biracial and growing up in different areas across the world, experiencing racism and just really being, almost afraid even, to accept who I am. As I researched more and watched other students do their own, I realized that there was actually a lot of symbols and patterns I could use to show who I am and that culture goes further than religion or race.
To help me with my lack of experience with this kind of work, I made use of the internet as well as those around me to gather information. For secondary research, I documented some artists that were recommended to us, such as Hassan Hajjaj as well as some I found on my own via Behance or it's nice that. Looking into other artists' designs helped me with the colours, shapes, and overall authenticity of my patterns. For primary research, I interviewed my family to get their opinions on their own identification and discussed what I've learnt from them and them from me. This was all useful in generating inspiration and ideas for my final pieces.
One of my biggest problems when making the patterns was the lack of programs. We were on a blended learning program during this project; one week on and one week off. Since the project itself  was quite short, I had a very limited time to utilize the college computer. At home, my device is too old to handle anything from Adobe. I had to use a free drawing software, which I use for most of my drawings, Medibang Paint Pro. It isn't vector based, nor does it have any kind of grid/snap to grid system. I did what I could in college, on Illustrator, and everything else at home. Thankfully, I found a very useful online GIF converter which saved me from worrying about not having After Effects or Photoshop which I would have otherwise used for the animation, which is another issue. I was not able to nicely animate the patterns because exporting them one pixel at a time was very frustrating so I couldn't help but give up. I settled on just merging the patterns into themselves using the GIF convertor as well as another GIF with the word "contexture" made with my patterns moving about. I had a couple issues with the longer animation too. Creating it took a very long time, I had to export 56 images in a very specific order, with everything on a different layer and I made a couple tiny but impactful mistakes, like missing a tiny symbol or forgetting which frame I was on and numbering it wrong, resulting in me re-exporting all the images at least 3 times. I made it harder for myself by trying to animate individual aspects in there too. I don't really mind repetitive tasks though so I was okay.
The final patterns and animations turned out well I think. In the end I made 14 patterns, 5 GIFs and a 38 second long video. I particularly like the contexture text GIF on a purple background, I think the complementary mix of colours work really well. My longer animation was good too, I actually really enjoyed layering everything on top of each other and really just painting a picture of myself and identity. It was fun trying to dig for pictures of my family and I; finding lot's of forgotten memories and embarrassing photos and videos. I think It does describe me quite well. It'd honestly be something very useful/informational to show someone new as a really weirdly specific introduction. It has my family, my baby photo and year of birth as well as things I enjoy, bits showing where I'm from and strange Gaelic sayings that are thrown around my house. Can't get too much more personal without getting strange.
I handed the patterns and animations in on time, but I would have liked to try adding music in the background. Actually it's kind of good that I didn't, I would have spent too much time stressing about it only to still regret whatever I used. I do think music is a big part of my identity though. I could have put some horrible traditional Irish music, but that's not my thing. Maybe I could have just Rick Rolled everyone who watches it, that would have been funny. Other than that, there's not much else I would change, unless I had access to After Effects, in which case I'd have made a higher quality video. For what I had, I think I did pretty good.