https://vimeo.com/190776951

I attempted the Anticipation/Follow through movement exercise again, however this time it was created within Maya. I was relatively pleased with my initial stop motion exercise of this principal, though I think that on this version, I have improved upon it. This was mainly thanks to the graph editor tool, as I could easily alter the speed and build-up of the block at any time, which I think has helped me to produce a much more realistic looking motion.

This is my bar sheet for the following animation. Due to the fact that in this instance, I am working with two blocks, I have separated the top and bottom halves of the bar sheet to show the directions for each block, as many of the actions overlap with each other, and therefore it would be easier to show what both blocks are instructed to do at the same time. Unlike the ‘anticipation’ bar sheet, this bar sheet mimics near perfectly how the final product turned out, with nearly each frame the same as how it was written down. This proved problematic though, as the sprint of the block at the end of the final product should have been a lot faster, but as I was strictly following the bar sheet, the sprint was not as fast as I intended, therefore reducing the impact of the collision with the other block at the end. In order to get around this next time, I will take into greater consideration the number of frames that I wish each movement to occupy. Aside from this, this bar sheet greatly helped me during the production.

https://vimeo.com/190768124

This is my fifth experimentation in the stop motion room. This time I was tasked to make two individual blocks interact with each other, and come up with a story/situation it. I decided to have my story about block one creeping up to block two, and whenever block two turns around, block one freezes to prevent him from being caught, before finally dashing towards block two and knocking him over. I chose this story as it is relatively simple, and a good way of showing two blocks interacting with each other. As I am giving the blocks more of a character and purpose this time, I took into extra consideration how to animate certain movements, and when and when not to utilise certain principals of animation. For example, when the block is slowly creeping up, I didn’t use much anticipation, as the movement is relatively slow, however when the block dashes at the end, I used a lot of anticipation, in order to show that the movement is going to be a lot quicker. I also used ‘follow through’ for when the block stops when the other block starts to turn around, in order to emphasise the harsh stop. Overall I am pleased with how my simple interaction turned out, minis the dash at the end which I have addressed above, but thankfully I know how to prevent this next time around.

'Making of' - Week 4

After getting a chance to look at everyone's second attempt at the map making task, I found it interesting to see how this time, people were a lot more experimental, and seemed to really stretch the meaning of the word 'map', which lead to some very creative outcomes. One that stood out to me was one that utilised symbolism and simple patterns in geometric shapes as appose to representational drawings of the areas themselves, so I interviewed the creator, Ling to ask her about her inspirations and her feelings towards it- 

I liked the use of symbolism and simple patterns in geometric shapes as appose to representational drawings of the areas themselves, what was the idea behind this?

For this map, I've incorporated the colour and iconography to represent my key moments. As you see the red hexagon is the university of Salford, green represented garden, yellow obviously indicated the tram and grey implied the imperial war museum

How does this differ from your first?

Compare to original map, this one seems more abstract because I have simplified the landmarks to make viewers think about it. The first map was just detail sketches that didn't have any meaning or technique behind.

Which one do you prefer and why?

I prefer second map because obviously, I've put more thoughts and techniques in it compare to original one

Which did you have more fun creating?

I would say second map has more fun creating because I played around with colours and geometry on the illustrator, created a visual communication with viewers

If you were to do this project again, which direction would you take it?

If I was going to do this map again, I would like to transform it into 3D map. I think that 3D map is more fun than 2d drawing and will attract more people

It was interesting to gain her thought process on how she came to the final idea, especially considering how much of a unique idea it was. I find many similarities in this and my initial mapping project, as neither map is concerned with the in-between moments of the journey, and instead symbolically represents the key moments that we wish to communicate. I am very interested in character design and caricatures, hence why I was keen to implement them into my first mapping project, and from her previous work, Ling appears to be very interested in drawing patterns and nature, so she has also explored her interests in this project, which shows by the way she had more fun making it. 

Creative Play - Week 4

In week 4 of creative play, we had a guest speaker from the BBC discuss the topic of Ideation and design processes, and we had some exercises based around yogurts with this topic in mind. For example, we had to analyse people as they ate yogurts in silence whilst taking notes on how they do it, and possible ways which we could improve their experience .The speakers job title, was 'User experience designer', which prior to this session, I had no knowledge of, but since then I have grown interest in it, as it is based around graphic design, which by the work that I produce you can tell that I am very keen on. After some research on this job title, I realised that in order to get a job such as this, I would have to familiarise myself with a range of coding software, which if the opportunity comes along, I will take. Even though we were given a detailed overview from the guest speaker about what 'User experience designer' is, I still wasn't fully satisfied that I knew entirely what this job entailed, thankfully, I found this informative Youtube video which taught me some more about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovj4hFxko7c

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Animation Context - Week 6

'Gestalt' Animation

https://vimeo.com/189777395

As I previously mentioned, as part of our 'Expert in the Room' task, we were also required to make a piece of artwork or animation regarding our phrase/word. I decided to focus my animation on the 'Figures and Ground' aspect of gestalt, as I saw an opportunity to trick the observers via framing, which couldn't have been done with a piece of still artwork. I planned to produce a stylised and short video of a simple graphic image, which is zoomed out in and out of twice, with each zoom out relieving the graphic image to be apart of something different, therefore showing how different people can view things to resemble something else.

I wanted to create my own 'Figures and Ground' image, but after playing around with different silhouettes, I couldn't manage to create a object which can be preserved as more than one thing, so I had to turn to implementing my idea towards an already established and well known image. I was disappointing with my inability to produce something of my own, but am thankful that I can take an already excising image and expand upon it and bring it some more life.

I felt that the video was a bit too bland for my taste and relied too much on reading to be really engaging, so would have preferred to communicate what I set out to in a more effective way. I gave a very simple animation to the human figures by making them hi-five eachother to add a bit more liveliness to the piece. I animated this by separating aspects of the bodies and keyframing them in there desired positions, this didn't turn out as well as I hoped as certain body parts overlap eachother, ruining the illusion, but this technique is one that I definitely think I can expand and improve on further in the future.

I like the design and colour scheme that I have chosen and everything is laid out pleasantly, but I think the favorite aspect of this piece is that it loops, therefore could be constantly playing for anyone to look up and observe at anytime to get the full story.

I am pleased with the final result, though I still feel like I should have created my own 'Figures and Ground' image, as appose to recreating, animating and presenting an already existing one. The main thing was that I took an unknown topic, and applied a moving image to represent it, which I feel I have done reasonably well.

Animation Context - Week 5

Expert in the Room

For the 'Expert in the Room exercise, I was randomly selected to research 'Gestalt', then present my findings to the rest of the class, and then the following week produce a piece of artwork or animation related to my word. I found the research hard to exactly find, as there are many different ways this word can be interpreted, but once I found a decent explanation, the rest of the information became easy to come by. Here is what I found;

‘Gestalt’, was originally German, which translated to literally mean form or shape, but since then has been widely known as a theory regarding human perception, and therefore is a theory focused around Psychology (The study of the behaviour and mind). The idea is otherwise known as ‘Holism’, which is the idea that natural systems and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. This Theory was first introduced by Max Wertheimer around the year of 1890.

The Gestalt theory can be categorised into 5 ‘Gestalt laws of perception’, they are as follows:

• Proximity - Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. When this happens, the observer tends to perceive the individual elements as a group. The individual elements can all vary in tone, value, Colour, Shape, Size or any other physical attributes and still create the same illusion.

•  Similarity - Similarity has a similar premise to Proximity. This law suggests that elements have similar properties and utilise the visual elements in the same way, the mind is more likely to perceive them as a group.

•  Continuity - Continuity occurs when you vision is driven to move through one object and continue onto another.

• Figure and Ground - This law suggests how the mind separates certain forms from the space surrounding them. These are typically created using clever use of negative and positive space. If done correctly, the negative space could also be shifted to visualise a new image.

• Closure - The law of closure states that when observing objects and shapes, the mind can visualise them as being whole when they are not complete. This occurs because the mind has a tendency to see complete figures or forms even if a picture is incomplete, and attempts to fill in the gaps.

After being satisfied with the information that I have gathered, I then compiled all my information into a stylised powerpoint to present it, the results of which can be seen below.

After having feedback on how the all the presentations went, I can see a lot of ways in which I could improve my next presentation. The main areas for improvement is how much information is put onto the slides, as I put way too much information on each individual slide, and when it came to reading out each of them, I more or less just read them word for word, meaning that I could have just sent the presentation to everyone, and they would have received the same information, making me presenting it, pointless. The way around this is to put very simple bullet points on each slide, which I will refer to, but expand on each point myself. I also feel like I needed to interact with my audience a bit more, even if it was just giving more eye contact to the people I was presenting to. Although I was terrified for this exercise, I feel like what I have learned from it will come in very valuable for any future presentations. Although I feel my presentation wasn't a success, I have learnt a lot of valuable advice, and am also anticipating taking me research of this topic further in the next task. I think I will create a 2D or possibly stop motion animation demonstrating how gestalt can be used to create visual illusions for my next task.

https://vimeo.com/189778124

I attempted the pendulum movement exercise again, however this time it was created within Maya. This was a good opportunity to fix the mistakes that I mentioned in my analysis of my stop motion version of this exercise. The main issue I had with the stop motion was that I felt the final few swings were a little bit too quick, which I feel like I have definitely improved on in this version, as due to how easy it is to time and measure specific movements in Maya, I was able to make each swing take the same amount of time to complete it's movement, and have the swings accurately decrease in scale as the number of swings increases, which I feel makes for a much more realistic representation of a pendulum movement. As I mentioned during the evaluation of my stop motion pendulum movement, I didn't follow my bar sheet, however this time the animation follows the movement a lot more precisely, the only difference being that I've added a few more swings at the end, which goes to show how much bar sheets can assist your animations. In conclusion, I found this version of the animation a lot easier to produce, however I feel as though after making this animation, I'd have a much better idea of how to make the movement a lot more realistic in the stop motion room, due to what I have learned during the making of the Maya version of this exercise.