Project 3 The Clip Final

Media Design at any scale means interactivity. This is my design standpoint. The point of my video is a bit of a play on words with the word 'scale', using the scale of a person in the narrative of the video as a metaphor for the scale of media design throughout the world. Interactivity to me is the most important part about Media Design, if you are not interacting with something then you are not engaged and it is therefore not very good design. Ideally all design should be easy to interact with and understand, some examples of good design that are shown in my video are the CD Walkman, which clearly shows the user where the CD goes and how to to operate it with the help of large buttons. The Satellite Dish is designed with the purpose of picking up transmittable frequencies; it accomplishes this, this is shown in my video somewhat though the use of fantasy. Computers are something that we sometimes take for granted but they were designed well with their maximum potential being used by by people of a standard size not too large or too small. My video shows that some of human designs could be used by tiny or giant people if they existed, but more importantly it shows us that the best designs are the ones that we humans can manipulate to help us no matter what our current circumstances are, whether this is in a foreign area or in a location far away from a source of power. These ideas were shown in my video through the use of different locations, for example the use of a computer in the middle of a forest, and the implication of foreign lands, when the video takes us into both a small world and a large world.

The link below will take you to my clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNfIauOcHUU&feature=youtube_gdata

Paper Mache Satellite

Today we experimented with paper mache. The idea is that the girl in the video will hold up a satellite dish that will be small in comparison to her body as she is, at the current stage, a giant; she will wave it around, searching for a frequency. While she is holding the satellite her eyes are static like an untuned TV, when she finds the correct frequency the static will lessen and an image of the next scene will appear through her eyes.

Model Shellie, holding up paper mache satellite

Tele Vision Static

The Clip - Storyboards

 This is the main storyboard for my final movie, it shouldn't change too much.

1. A computer in a dark hallway,
2.The computer is approached by the main character who clicks on the icon 'small',
3.she begins to shrink,
4.she falls backwards,
5.she lands on a pillow in a small world,
6.she opens a CD case and begins to roll the CD,

7.The CD is rolled into a CD Walkman, 

8.She plugs headphones into the walkman and beings listening to music, 

9.she walks with the headphones as far as they will extend until she reaches a laptop, 

10.she runs on the laptops mousepad controlling the mouse, 

11.she hovers the mouse over the icon 'big', 

12.she double jumps on the left mouse button,

13. The camera zooms up on the sole of her shoe,
14. the camera zooms out to show her whole body and we see a new world materializing,
15. she lands on a street as a giant the size of the houses,
16. she starts to run and spots a satellite dish,
17. she grabs the satellite dish and scans the sky for a signal her eyes become television static,
18. the camera zooms up on her eyes and we see that she has found a signal.

19. The camera zooms up furthur into her eyes showing a picture of a computer setup,
20. the camera continues to zoom and shows the computer is full of errors [restart now],
21. the camera zooms out to show the figure of the girl again,
22. a full body shot of the giant girl shows her holding a large branch.
23. the branch carefully presses the enter button on the computers keyboard,
24. the girl rematerializes in her original world at her original size.



 Background Image codes:

<div><a href='http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramyoga/4021067626/' target='_blank'><img src='http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2543/4021067626_ff25646f1d_m.jpg' alt='Symphony of Light by ramyo, on Flickr' title='Symphony of Light by ramyo, on Flickr' border='0'/></a><br/><a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/' target='_blank'><img src='http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/2.0/80x15.png' alt='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License' title='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License' border='0' align='left'></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;by&nbsp;<a href='http://www.flickr.com/people/ramyoga/' target='_blank'>&nbsp;ramyo</a><a href='http://www.imagecodr.org/' target='_blank'>&nbsp;</a></div>

<div><a href='http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramyoga/4032318979/' target='_blank'><img src='http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3529/4032318979_4a90c69faa_m.jpg' alt='Neon Wind by ramyo, on Flickr' title='Neon Wind by ramyo, on Flickr' border='0'/></a><br/><a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/' target='_blank'><img src='http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/2.0/80x15.png' alt='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License' title='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License' border='0' align='left'></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;by&nbsp;<a href='http://www.flickr.com/people/ramyoga/' target='_blank'>&nbsp;ramyo</a><a href='http://www.imagecodr.org/' target='_blank'>&nbsp;</a></div>

In The Forest

Today we were taking photos for the scene where the character is a giant and is interacting with a computer in a forest.

The idea was to take a working computer and set it up in a forest. This required many long extension cords working their way from the closest power point in the garage to the forest.

The effect I am going for in this scene is for technology to be in an apparantly remote area where all there is are trees for miles around; also it is a good setting for a giant woman to appear, scaled against the large trees which are similar in size to her, and the small computer screen which is miniscule in comparison to her.

The computer screen itself shows many errors on the screen showing a malfunction of the computer, the only opition for the character is to press the enter button to restart the system.

Nana Technology

We aimed to create an advertisement directed at elderly people who struggled to come to terms with the ever-growing world of technology.
The main intention our group had was to portray the companies expertise in teaching and aiding the elderly in the use of laptops, cellphones, iPods and numerous other pieces of modern day technology. Along side this we tried to reiterate the fact that technology is more simple and easy to use than it comes across to be.
We wanted the customer to see that our company offers quick, simple and reliable help at a low, affordable price.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLIvWOMTYrg&feature=g-upl

Computer

 Set making is going to be one of the most rewarding and fun parts of this project. Tonight I had to clear the household hallway of everything; this included taking photos and mirrors of the walls, moving anything that would look out of place, and shifting a large baby's buggy. I then had to set up my computer in the hallway, connect it to a power source, create the folders on the computer, and make it dark and sinister looking by turning out the lights.

The computer at the end of the dark hallway.

The Computer Screen

Test Sample

 

This is a preview clip of how some of my clip will look. There are scenes where the character is either giant or tiny in size (similar to that of Alice In Wonderland) in these scenes I will take photos of my model doing the correct movements that will then match up with the photos of the setting as she interacts with it. For Example, in this clip the photos of the girl are taken seperately from the photos of the street, but when put together it appears as if the girl is walking down the street.

The Background Picture is 'East Bleecker St between Cornelia & Carmine St' taken by'Cedric Mainguy
http://www.streetsfromnewyork.com/east-bleecker-st-between-cornelia-carmine-st/

Individual Brainstorm

I did a rough brainstorm and compiled a list of areas I would like to further research, these included the horror genre, getting the clip to appear as if it were an old black and white horror film;

An eerie UFO clip, my thoughts came to theis song :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSh04yd0eM4
 The Navajo Know by the Pixies, as well as this song the rest of the album has a general theme of UFO's and space, the lyricist of the pixies Frank Black was interested in extraterrestrial ideas as song themes. I thought that similar music could accompany a clip about the discovery of an alien;

Another idea was for a theme based around a test subject for a new piece of technology, "Television glasses, " The idea is that you watch live television, recorded by cameras held on gloves. You could see wherever you pointed your hand, if you wanted to see normally you would have to hold your hands in front of your eyes.

Other ideas included a clip based on a car safety device that uses the distance between the car and other objects as well as nerve stimulators or the human body to cause you to drive more carefully;

inventions to tell how ripe a fruit is, and more horror movie concpets.

Group MindMap

These are some of the ideas that our group of Zahrah, Jimmy, Thomas, and I came up with. As the four of us are heading towards media design we used the media as a starting point. Some of our ideas are about the evolution of technology, the ways in which through film technology can talk to us visually, we also had ideas about horror movies and optical illusions.

Final Epilepsy

http://player.vimeo.com/video/41637807

The above link will take you to a final version of my flash animation video for the word "epilepsy", uploaded  via vimeo so that the quality would be as best it could be.

I chose to turn the word "epilepsy" into my animation for several reasons; initially I had chosen to use the word  "evolution", but I did not think that my animation skills were good enough to do the word justice; I then thought that i would animate the word "strip" but it proved too difficult to shape and contort the "S" how I wanted to. My last resort was "epilepsy" and this has turned out great for me. Not only was it a simpler word to animate, but the animation looks clean and it is easy to understand. I was also glad that I could use a word that portrayed my somewhat politically incorrect sense of humour.

Evolution Storyboard



Evolution

 This is my third storyboard. It portrays for the word "evolution". The idea of this is to make the letters evolve into more complex creatures, just as evolution happens in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faRlFsYmkeY.
When animating this using Flash CS5.5 I would either have to do it really well or not do it at all. In one of our lectures we were shown previous work from previous years and "evolve" or "evolution" was one of the works. It was brilliantly done, starting in a similar way that mine does with a single cell multiplying and then evolving into different sea creatures, there was more activity going on aside from the one main creature evolving; also the evolution stopped in the sea and ended with the creature being caught by a fisherman.
If this is to be my final video I will need to do it really really well. I don't think my flash animation skills are at that level yet.

Epilepsy Storyboard



Epilepsy

Here is my second complete storyboard. Initially this concept got mixed reactions from my peers but ultimately it was too good to leave out, it is a very good illustration of a word.
If I were to put a warning before this clip saying that there may be a strobe light effect, this might be a bit more acceptable.

Strip Storyboard

Strip

This is my first of three completed story boards. Of these three I will select the best and most suitable one to animate using flash.

If I am to animate this well in FlashCS5.5 I will need to learn how to animate one symbol (The 'S') to contort in many different ways, this may prove too difficult.

8 Ideas

1st Page Ideas

2nd Page Ideas

3rd Page Ideas

After filling many pages of paper with doodles and ideas I put my eight favourite ones into short four framed story boards.

I am still deciding if some of them portray things too literally, or if the sense of personification is too strong.

Another thing I thought may be a problem is if the word's I have chosen are too morbid or of bad taste, I have asked some people in my studio group and there are mixed opinions about whether 'Epilepsy' and 'Hang' are inappropriate or just a bit of a laugh.

I'm going to have to start thinking of how to animate my final word using flash. Time to start learning the the flash program a bit better. 

Fast

This is another practice animation I made in the holidays. It is another take on the word 'fast'. Enjoy.

Slow

In the midtrimester break I had a quick play around with Flash CS5.5. I made a quick animtion for the words slow and fast.
For slow I had a look at motion tweens, playing around with rotation, change of colour, enlargement, and curvature during a tween.

I have a bit more learning to do if I want to become a flash master, but I'm getting there.

Practice

 

As an introduction to the second DSDN 101 project we looked at letters and their shapes as well as the typographical practices of kerning and tracking which involves looking at  the spaces between letters.
The space between letters of a word can help to illustrate it differently, this is especially relevant to the next project: "One Word Film" where we will be animating one word to illustrate its meaning.
I also looked at inverted colours and negative space. Instead of always having a black font on a white background I tried having a white font on a black background; Not only does this make emphasize the letters (We are so used to passively reading black text on white), but it emphasizes the space between the letters, whether this is barely any space at all, some space, or a large stretch of space.

DSDN101 Project 1 Hand In Individual

I Used the cover for the Smashing Pumpkins album Zeitgeist as precedence for my individual work. The object I used is a finger puppet of an Orangutan, this would be transformed into the central figure, the ape, in my drawing.
 My drawing has a foreground of water similar to that of the album cover, it has a central figure, it has a background of buildings roughly based on Wellington buildings, and a sky made of clouds and a sun. Compositionally the two pieces are similar. They are also similar in colour.
I used only the colours black, red, and the white of the paper as the album cover also uses these colours; this is a very minimal amount of colour used, but the fine lines appear to show different colour tones.
The drawing is a two dimensional drawing however the scale of objects as well as shadow gives it depth.

DSDN101 Project 1 Precedence Individual

Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist

Ape Finger Puppets

DSDN101 Project 1 Hand In Touch And Draw