This part of the course is by far my favorite, I love illustration, and it is primarily my background.
We were set to do a quick storyboard detailing our morning, for tomorrows lesson. Not got a clue who the teacher is, 'guest lecturer' fella, but I’m into the lesson, and I think he is partially to blame, haha.
I like how no words are necessary, I know its not the best drawing in the world, but it only took 20 minutes to knock up, so do one.
First time on 3ds max, and i found it silly difficult.
I'm not the best at computers.
It’s the one thing I really struggle with, I can have the weirdest, coolest ideas but its delivery never matches up, I always let myself down, do I found this to be about as challenging as I thought it would be. I left the lesson about ready to cry a few times, haha.
The idea of sitting at a screen clicking buttons, allowing the program to do all the making just didn’t appeal; I’m more into getting messy and drawing by hand. After thinking about it I realized perhaps this gives me an advantage, the fact i hate the outcome means I’m going to have to try harder, and really struggle with myself to create something I’m proud of, so I look forward to that, and maybe incorporating illustration and hand made elements into the 3d animation somehow.
After the first 2 lessons, I started to get my own ideas, and drew up some very rough thumbnail sketches, but soon realized I was getting waay too far ahead of myself. I simplified it, and with the help of a lot of youtube tutorials and the life and death of about 13 3ds max fish, and guidance of anyone sitting within 10 metres of me, I created something I’m actually quite proud of for a first play with the program.
It’s not the best use of the 30 seconds, but its definitely a good representation of my channel, and me. haha
I think the characters are quite close to the sort of illustrations I use in my sketchbooks, I think I posted a fish character in the last blog. I wanted them to look simple and a bit fucked up, standard colours. I like the sort of ‘odd ball’ ‘fail’ thing it has going to it, like there’s so many different ways to create amazing 3d figures and things, but I’ve gone for a simple fish, sort of like I’m taking the piss.
I really struggle with mixing technical elements into freedom and creativity and I think throughout this year this lesson is going to be the one I draw the most from.
I’m gonna churn out 200 words complaining about the ipod touch.
The ipod touch, ipad and iphone in my opinion, eliminate the need for the other to exist. Apple have raised the products to render the other pretty much pointless, its frivolous to own all 3 pieces, simply wouldn’t be able to make use of them all in the most appreciative way.
The iphone 4 has apps, games, face to face video calling, internet, music, google maps, HD, touch screen, retina display, the ipod touch has too, just lacking the ability to make a phone call.
Technology can be beautiful, creating something that solves a problem within society that hasn’t yet been realised, but I think here they’ve just mixed together the winning aspects for the iphone into the ipod touch sloppily, and given it an unworthy title of its own.
All their products seem to be being sculpted into the same thing, just different sizes and names; the personality they once had slipping away, bringing out all the negative feelings I have towards technology. People just seem to be getting rinsed.
I don’t hate apple products, my macbook is the best thing I own, or even the original ipod, just seems there’s no passion to further the individuality of each product.
Decided to do a runner back to stinkers Thursday night, about amazing being home.
Got to the seedy looking coach station silly early, but got to chatting to this lady, who turned out to be heading back to Leicester the same as I was, she seemed sound. The conversation lead to what I was doing at Uni, turns out she works at a Local Leicestershire paper, and was interested in getting me to knock out some illustrations for some of the articles they are planning to print. Loved it.
Not sure it will definitely lead to something, but can’t hurt to send her an e-mail and see what I can get from it.
Everyones blogs are looking embarrassingly similar.
Not sure I won the battle against Youtube to show this video, but have a go.
4th animation in, the one that goes against the help sheet and starts with an egg, proceeds to a dinosaur sucking the head off a worm and finishes with toast setting on fire , that's the animation I helped create.
Uni buzz started up again, here is one of the short introductory projects we did during the first class using a 500 ml can.
Piercing a can with a pin, and placing light sensitive photo paper inside, the small amount of light allowed inside the ‘camera’ hits the paper leaving a reversed image, to the left is the one my relentless produced.
It’s a pretty straight forward and easily explained process, how you can make images using pinhole photography, yet an utterly new concept to me. Some of my class mates had experimented with this kinda stuff before, and explained how you can use a variety of other things, such as shoe boxes which wouldn’t leave the kind of curvature I got on the images taken using my can.
Wikipedia pretty much explains how it work
“A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperature — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.
Pretty rough image, but a cool way of doing things. Theres an opportunity to create in the weirdest places.
One of the more recent project briefs I completed was to create a paper form information source detailing a decade of our choosing, I decided to pick the 90’s, the decade of my birth and an era I really like the buzz of.
To begin my design process I set upon gathering as much information about the 90’s as I could, but soon realised an organised approach would be more beneficial than diving head first into to Google’s depths, so I sectioned the era off into 6 chapters I thought would give a real feel for the time and appeal to my target audience, based on what gets them now, and began to pile up images, videos, music and text to illustrate it.
(Introduction, music, T.V, film, crazes and fashion)
My target audience was primarily people about my age, my purpose to inform.
To inform my ideas, and help create a graphically engaging design I looked at existing informative leaflets, booklets and brochures. Slugging through about 15 or so I was bored as, and was set upon not churning out another crap, unenthusiastic booklet; I wanted my audience to be sharing my passion for the decade.
All my research was mainly image based, and documented within a sketch book,, very raw and informative without too many words, so when it came to design concepts for the final piece I set out to keep it this way, so as to let the reader or consumer of my design get their own interpretation of the 90’s. I wanted a very open ‘in yer face’ piece.
When my idea was set, I moved to layout, messing around with the most successful way of arranging my images, according to colour, relationship etc. and created a few rough prototypes or print outs to show my friends and see which they thought most successful.
Below are a few pictures of my piece, in ashamedly bad quality photos !
