At the beginning of the module, I felt pretty intimidated by
what we were being asked to produce and the fact that we had to do studio
briefs one, two and three alongside each other. My starting point for each
brief was Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. I started by investigating various motifs, tangible
and non-tangible but my work really took off when I started investigating
aliens and the various alien races from the HHGG.
Animation was a completely new process to me and it took me
a while to adjust to thinking sequentially. I set out to produce five, ten
second animated stings but as my work developed I altered this to three, twenty
second animated stings because of the content I wanted to put in each one.
When trying out hand-drawn animation, I found it hard to
draw things moving at different speeds. In my head I could visualise it but
when it came to drawing the separate frames, I couldn’t very well work out how
to change the pace of some elements in relation to others.
Working with Dragon Frame was slightly easier for me because
you physically move the assets around the page and I enjoyed it more as a
process because it isn’t nearly as time consuming as drawing frame by frame. In
retrospect, it might have been a good idea to use Dragon Frame to produce my
animated stings. Since I was working with a lot of cut paper/shape &
texture, it might have made my projects tie together a little better
aesthetically.
When I first started using After Effects, I didn’t really
pay attention to the key frame functions – I didn’t see them as being all that
useful to me. However, once I started actually producing my stings I found them
really useful. I had chosen to work fully digitally and I wasn’t looking
forward to drawing hundreds of frames for each animation. I soon realised that
adding key frames to still assets could do most of the animation I wanted to
achieve. As well as being quite a time efficient way of producing animation, it
was also heavily influenced by the motion graphics I had looked at during my
contextual research.
I think that reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
novel, listening to the audio book and watching the motion picture benefitted
my animation because it gave me the idea to use trimmed bits of audio to
narrate my animation. This definitely worked better than using my own
recordings would have and gives the stings a more finished, professional
quality.
Studio brief three, Printed Pictures has felt like where
most of my focus has been throughout the module. I am guilty of dedicating a
lot more time to this process than any of my other work. However, I can’t say I
regret this decision because I was able to produce so much work and I think the
outcomes are better because of the fact I spent so much time trying things out.
Personally, I can see a huge difference between my first set
of screen prints and my final prints. From all my failed attempts, I learnt how
to fix certain situations and what I could do to avoid them in future. For
example, on one occasion the ink kept spreading on the image – too much was
coming through the screen. To counter this I stopped flooding the screen in-between
pulls which worked fine but I felt I had to work more quickly in case the ink
dried into the screen.
What I liked most about the printed pictures brief was how
flexible it was. Aside from being limited to a particular process, I could
interpret my research any way I wanted to. I am happy with how I responded to
the brief but I also really enjoyed seeing how other people responded to it. In
some respects, if I were to approach this brief again, I would do it
differently. I’d like to have explored ‘product’ a little more and how I could
have used textiles with screen printing.
Studio brief one, the Visual Journal has been something I’ve
dipped in and out of throughout the module. It informed all of my other work
one way or another. I used it as a tool to try out things that I knew didn’t
have to be a finished product, so it didn’t matter if I didn’t really like what
I was making. Primarily I was investigating alien characters and looking at
ways which I could represent an alien form with shape, line, colour or texture.
Although I am happy with the investigations I made, I do regret that I didn’t
get into it earlier on in the project as it took me a while to notice which
pages had some potential. I’ve learnt that a visual journal is an on-going
process which is never really resolved. For example, where mine ends, I could
easily pick it up again and find something I want to investigate further. For
me, this module has been about investigative play and extracting the best bits
for more refined outcomes.
