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Miniblog 3

Miniblog 3: Animated Interview

Animation Style: Traditional animation in Photoshop.

I chose this style because I enjoy doing frame-by-frame cel animation and I often use my tablet to do digital drawings, so this style is interesting and familiar to me.

I will do 2-3 drawings for the background stills, and animate the characters frame by frame. I want to focus on character expressions and lip syncing.

Transcript: “And we finally managed to pull over to the side of the road and like flagged down this farmer who’s like cutting his lawn *laughs*

And we’re like, ‘can we use your phone?’ ‘cause we’re idiotic tourists. And... needless to say we ended up having this like huge tow truck come and like tow us away and... there was this whole ordeal. And we payed like massive amounts of money for the tires. But we made it out!”

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iFree

Project Statement

The smartphone – a pocket-sized computer that people rely on nowadays for their daily tasks, social interactions, using the internet, taking photos and videos, and much more. The reason I chose my phone as my subject is because of this reliance on our devices, and how we constantly need it by our side. Deriving from this idea, I portrayed the phone as an object that yearns for freedom due to its owner using it too much. The genre that most suits this video would be drama, because the focus is mainly on the phone’s emotional struggles with the owner, and the overall mood has a more serious tone. Some phrases that inspired my project were “over-reliance on technology”, “confinement”, and “machine learning”.

The video opens with a person talking on the phone; the framing is focused on the phone, and the overall mood of this scene is gloomy, as indicated by the dark and bluish tones. Colour balance was one of the techniques I used during editing to convey the emotion of the phone. It is feeling upset because of its owner’s constant talking and texting, which many associate with dark and gloomy tones. I’ve employed the rule of thirds many times in the shots to create an appealing composition. Afterwards, the scene cuts to an extreme close-up of the fingers typing on the phone’s screen, which again is emphasizing that the main character is the phone. The pacing is fast, conveying a slightly chaotic and unpleasant ambience. A rack focus is used when the focus is on the phone lying on the table, then shifted to its owner, showing the phone’s perspective and that it’s contemplating something. Photos of nature and the sky are displayed on the phone screen, which tells viewers what it’s thinking about: being free and enjoying itself outdoors, without its owner’s annoying presence. The next few shots are considered the climax, where the most dramatic and intense scenes take place. An extreme close-up of the phone’s “slide to power off” and the tilt towards the floor reveals that its intending to shut down, or in other words, commit suicide. Then, with a low angle shot of the phone hanging on the edge of the desk makes the viewer feel nervous for the phone. However, the outcome is not so dark: when it jumps and ends up on the rock, the gloomy blue filter is gone and the atmosphere feels bright, relaxing, and happy due to the colour balance and levels adjustment. The camera tilt upwards to reveal that the phone is outdoors in the nature. Later, the camera sees through the phone’s own “eyes”, panning around the area. The pacing slows down, showing that the phone is enjoying itself and the viewer learns that freedom was what it wanted all along.

Although technology might be extremely useful and inevitable in our lives, over-reliance on technology is not healthy and sometimes dangerous. We should appreciate more face-to-face, physical contact than being absorbed by the digital world. When we depend on our devices too much, perhaps even they will get tired of our presence.

Logline

On a school campus, a depressed iPhone 6S yearns for freedom while struggling out of its over-reliant owner’s hands.

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Miniblog 1 part C - storyboard

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GBDA 201: Miniblog 1

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Moving The Still Project Statement

The action verb “excite” along with a poem from Batsuo Masho were given to my group as inspiration for Assignment 3. The poem, a Japanese haiku, is as follows: “Lightning flash-- / what I thought were faces / are plumes of pampas grass.”

Our first step to this project, as well as for all other design projects, was to ideate, research, and brainstorm. When looking at these two sources of inspiration, there are some apparent ties between them and there were many interesting ideas to expand on. For example, the first line “lightning flash” is very related to “excite”. I utilized tools such as the thesaurus and google images to help me brainstorm and generate more ideas. When ideating for the word “excite”, I associated it with types of movement or actions such as jumping, a beating heart, and a dilating eye. Additionally, emotions such as curious, happy, and surprised came to mind. As for the haiku, I envisioned words like jolt, mystery, confusion, delusional, and somber upon reading the lines.

Because the instructions maintain that our project must not literally translate the references and should not be a narrative, I conceptualized the inspirations abstractly with symbols and metaphors in my storyboard. This ties in with our previous reading “Nature of Representation” in Meredith Davis’ Graphic Design Theory. In the case of this assignment, representation is used to convey intangible feelings or ideas in physical forms (Davis 34). We are encouraged to use the connotative semantic network of meanings, where the meaning is expanded with a field of associations and allow richer messages (Davis 37). My original story board follows a girl’s dilated eye and into her pupil, into a mysterious world of imagery that she is seeing in her head. She sees shapes forming into people, then forming into shapes. Her heart is shown pumping and the frame zooms out to see her running off away from the viewer. This congregated my brainstorming from both the verb and the poem: the pupil and action conveyed excitement, and the mysterious figures expressed Basho Matsuo’s haiku. Out of the three representational approaches, the intentional approach was utilized because the meaning of each representation was imposed by me, the creator (Davis 36).

During the stage of creating the combined group storyboard, it was learned that our group had many different interpretations of the sources. We examined everyone’s work and gathered certain aspects we all liked. Many parts from my storyboard were used in final one, but it was agreed that some of the elements were too literal, such as the eye. Thus in our final storyboard, the graphics are much more abstract and we utilize categorization, subjective representation, Gestalt Theory, and mimicry to communicate the meaning.

A shape snakes down the frame in our first panel, which is the mimic the movement and shape of lightning. It then picks up speed, gradually going so fast that it forms a circular shape, where Gestalt’s principles of order and closure play in to allow the viewer to recognize a circle (Cooperman 166, 179).

I was responsible for the heart scene and an explosion at the end. The heart is hyper-realistic compared to the rest of our abstract designs, but it is made to create a visual contrast when juxtaposed to the rest of the animation, as we believe that a beating heart conveys “excite” the most. It also added immediate drama due to the abundance of red (Cullen 85, Stone et al. 42). Additionally, the heart is placed at the balancing centre to counter the pull of gravity on the composition. As for the explosion, the effect “CC Particle Polly” and “CC Particle World” from After Effects were the key components. The explosion’s timing and spacing were very impactful; it starts out powerful and quick and then slowly recedes. This was also the climax and resolution of the animation.

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Assignment 3 Final - Moving the Still

Alex Karam, Karen Fang, Danielle Park, Meng (Mandy) Zhang

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A3 Heart bleeding animation (1st iteration)

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2nd Iteration of explosion in A3, this time using the “Shatter” simulation instead of Particle Polly.

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First iteration of the explosion in our Assignment 3 animation.

Made through 2 effects: CC Particle Polly and CC Particle World.

Speed and sizing of particles will have to be adjusted. Speed should be key framed to slow down particles.

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Miniblog 5 - Green screen

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Final combined storyboard

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Assignment 3 - Research, Ideation, Style Tile, and Storyboard

Assigned verb: excite

Poem:

“Lightning flash- What I thought were faces are plumes of pampas grass”

- Basho Matsuo

Research and ideation:

I first researched by googling some key words, because I did not know what “plumes of pampas grass” was. It turns out, pampas grass is a big plant with heads that look like fluffy feathers. The author is saying he confused the pampas grass for faces. This knowledge helped me brainstorm ideas.

I then began writing down words that came to my mind when I read this poem, which were mysterious, confused, crazy, jolt. Combined with our assigned verb, “excited”, I branched out even more words. I then drew shapes and images that my mind connected the given prompts with, which included crowds of faces, figures in action, plants, lightning flash, and etc. Movement that I thought of first were jumping and running.

Style Tiles:

The overall feeling I got from the verb and poem was identified in my style tile, although the more I think about it, my feelings start to change.

Storyboard:

The animation I have in mind is depicting a woman at a place where there is a lightning storm occurring. Her eyes are on the lightning flashes and they dilate, with the frame zooming in closer and closer until the whole screen becomes black. In the centre white “blobs” dance around and they become people, dancing and jumping. As the people move, they begin merging together into one shape: an abstract oscillating diamond. This diamond is on screen for a few seconds before it becomes a beating heart. Then it zooms out, to the same woman’s chest and then zooming out even more to her whole body, running. She is running away from the viewer in the last frame.

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Part 3 of Miniblog 4 (After Effects animation)

For the third video the simulation effect I chose to use “Particle World” again, because of its versatility and large range of what you can do with it. This time, instead of cubes, I have the particles set to “lens concave”, which appear to be little dots. I set the motion to “twirl” and the gravity to 0 and velocity fairly low so that they looked like they were just buzzing around statically. The keyframe for the effect, as you may tell, is the colour change.

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Part 2 of Miniblog 4 (After Effects animation)

For the second video, the simulation effect I used was “Mr. Mercury”. This effect is kinda like water and when playing with its “source” keyframing it is really cool how it moves with fluidity.

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Part 1 of Miniblog 4 (After Effects animation)

For the first video, the simulation effect I used was “Particle World”, but a very altered version with cubes twirling around instead of the default lines exploding from the middle. Particle World has so many variations and I added key frames to its birth rate, increasing and decreasing during the video.

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GBDA 101 Assignment 2 - Infographic FINAL

For my infographic, the topic I chose was Pokémon, a popular game and anime franchise that originated from Japan. Pokémon has always been one of my favourite games to play because it immerses the player into the Pokémon world, and we believe that we are actually Pokémon trainers. It builds fictional relationships with your Pokémon that you wish were real, and they are your partners throughout the venture towards becoming a Master Trainer. An infographic’s most important function is to visually communicate ideas or data. My infographic is a representation of quantitative data collected from a survey I conducted on GBDA students, asking them if they have played Pokémon games, who their favourite Pokémon is, etcetera. Based on the results, I analyzed which topics were most interesting and represented it through arc-circle graphs, bar graphs, and more. I wanted to be creative and not have a plain circle for a pie chart, so I incorporated it into a video game controller. I also included relevant images for each point of data, such as boy and girl characters from the game when displaying gender demographics. Colour and flow is also critical for good design. I tried my best to keep my design aesthetically pleasing by choosing only a few fonts to use, and a colour palette that coordinated well. As Cullen discusses in Chapter 6 of “Layout Workbook”, legibility and readability is crucial for selecting the right typeface, as communication is the ultimate goal for a design, thus the typefaces I chose are all easy to read. Initially, I noticed some colours I chose were too close to the background colour, which decreased legibility. Thus, I added a shadow to some words and also adjusted a few colours. Alignment and spacing were also areas I kept special attention to, as alignment makes a design look cleaner and more organized. For the overall structure, my infographic follows just a single-column grid, as everything is only down one column. A good infographic should not be too verbose or overwhelming, as discussed in lecture. My infographic is not too wordy and balances the text with multiple visual elements. I have also established hierarchy by contrast, size, and colour of my words.

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Pokemon Infographic WIP and first Iteration

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