This post is to demo straight my development of my portfolio for my professional practice:
For my portfolio I am using the Adobe Portfolio to put it together. I started the process by uploading the projects that I have created this year, Bubble and Squeak and Famous Women of Hull. These uploads were divided into two project category’s each for my projects that I have created this year. Unfortunately due to Famous Women of Hull been an interactive Flash file that utilises Action Script 3, I am unable to upload this onto my portfolio because of Flash not been supported by many softwares anymore, so I have placed my silent recording of the animation onto my portfolio to display that I can create an interactive animation. The Portfolio was also given several pages that will eventually act as links to websites that are useful for this path I am going down such as Twitter, Deviantart, my blog etc.
The image above to to show what I have put together so far for my famous women of Hull Project in my portfolio. I have also added a link to this blog that is related to that project, so that if I have a potential client that is interested in this project, they can have a closer look at how I work and what I produce during the main stages of a project. I have uploaded the chapter still that I created for this animation with several of my prototypes to also help display how they affected the animation.
The Bubble and Squeak page in my portfolio has the complete version of Bubble and Squeak but it doesn’t have all of my recordings that I did to create the final project due to them been lots of different recording that aren’t necessary to be placed in my Portfolio.
I got the idea for these business cards after seeing the old fashion films from movies and camera’s and since animation uses a very similar process involving frames I thought it would be a cool idea for a business card.
This is what one of my original prototypes looks like for my business card, I used the image of a film still next to it to try and help me create an accurate replicate example of it in my business. The reason I chose this sort of idea for my Business card is that my tutor pointed out that my original concept and logo was not very clear and that I need to add more details to explain what the name Amtanimator actually meant. So it was decided that an idea like this would be better suited for this project. The final concept is not only a good idea to show that I am an animator but it also displays my previous projects that I have done this year and to also show that I have some experience in that sort of animation. The card is also easy to read and understand meaning my contact details are easy to understand as well.
This post is explain and show what I did during the Lines of Thought Workshop, this exhibit was to show pieces of work from various artists from across time, some of these works included Michelangelo, Leonardo and Picasso. The exhibit will remain at Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library till 28th February 2017 before the exhibit is moved to one of the other two locations before it is returned to the National History Museum in London.
We start the workshop by talking with the exhibit managers before she set us a task of looking around the exhibit and looking at the art pieces that drew our attention without looking at information and trying to work out why we found it interesting for an hour. Afterwards we then went went round the gallery with the manger visiting each piece discussing why we found them interesting. I found several of these pieces very interesting as they not only showed what the artists were thinking at the time, as most of the works there were actually prototype sketches or idea that the artists had drawn down so they wouldn’t forget or wanted to try something out. An excellent example of this is Michelangelo’s sketches of the design for the Madonna and Child.
The works that were shown at the Lines of thought exhibit were incredible and truly inspiring, it showed me that regardless of ones art style you can still portray your own ideas effectively and clearly. This has not only inspired but also encouraged me to keep going at with my projects and developing my art skills and not matter what others think about my skills don’t let put me down or make me over confident.
Eventually we left the exhibit and went to another room were we were given photocopies of the art pieces and told to sketch over some of the photo copies with tracing paper. Then with a piece of card we used a pen on the other side of the tracing paper to trace the drawings onto the card to create our own piece of art. With this done we could either keep the art pieces we had created or give them for a collaboration pieces that all the art workshops were putting together.
These three images are of me comparing the traces on the piece of card against the original drawings to see how well I had trace from the photocopies, several other students at the Lines of thought workshop also did this at the suggestion of our guide. We did this not only to see how well our own attempts at tracing the art were but to show how even when coping someone else’s style it will never be exactly the same and will always have your own creative flair to it. Next we returned to the small room that we were using for our drawings and were told that we were going to use the photocopies now to make a collage that all the workshop was putting together. The rule were simple we could do what ever we wanted with the photocopies from cutting fragments out to covering so much of the photo copies with tipex and felt tip as long as we kept all the work connected in someway when we stuck them on the wall.
This is the trace art that we put together using tracing paper, a pencil and a pen.
The pieces above are the main bits that I contributed to Collaboration in the Lines of Thought exhibit. Please note that no all of the cut offs in the images are my own, their are also done by the same people who were in my group. Examples of my contributions are brick road above, The Big Smile, the hanging mace above the and the explosive, the turtle shell helmet, etc.
This next post came up when my project of Women of Hull or WOW! as it was originally known as, had to have few more modifications, according to my tutor Sally the project wasn’t quite their yet so she suggested that I make it interactive to the target audience. Wen I asked Sally how I could go about this she suggested that since I was using Adobe Anime/Flash I should install buttons that the audience could click or press in this case on an interactive board or tablet of some sort. I began to look up to how install these button or at least create them for this project, while I did find the way how to do it on the official Adobe Website Help Page and several other websites and youtube videos, the way it was explained still made it very difficult to understand as well as some of the video qualities been quite horrendous. I eventually learned how to stop the animation on Animate/Flash but after that you could do nothing unless you had a button or another command in to tell it to play after so long. The basic command to stop Animate/Flash on Action Script 3 is to type in the actions command box on the desired lay and frame is stop(); . That took me about an hour to get right and finally understand, after words I started to create buttons for the animation, this took me at least two hours to learn how program correctly before I managed to set them all up correctly through out my Women of Hull Animation (The coding I couldn’t hand type, fortunately both Animate/Flash comes with instant commands that can be tweaked ever so slightly to change which frame the button jumps to. This can be seen in the images below:
This first image is of the button that allows the target audience to start the animation, it will also change into a different shade of orange when hovered over when or pressed and then vanishes.
These two buttons allows the user to jump back to the introduction of the animation and to the animation associated with the introduction of the women that the button is linked too.
This button is at the end of the animation and allows the user to jump back to the introduction animation.
The names on the intro have also been turned into buttons and allow the user to jump to the women who name has been clicked.
This makes the animation not only a lot more user friendly but also fun as it has become interactive and makes the educational aspect of it a lot more effective to the target audience and hope they will begin to learn more about the city of Culture and who has originated or been educated here.
My Women of the World Project is almost complete but I have to make several changes as it didn’t tick the boxes for this course in order to pass my final year. These changes were pointed out to me by one of tutors Sally who said that the animation is within the video are good but I need to introduce another way of showing which women is which instead of just allowing the target audience to guess of just the animation and sounds that they produce. Sally suggested that I make information pages within the animation to replace the portraits that I was originally using to introduce the famous women of hull. These information pages consist of two pictures of the Women showing them doing what made them famous or at least what was associated with them. The information pages also included there names in a colour based on what they had done and a short description about their life.
This made the animation not only look a lot more appealing to eye but also made it look a lot more professional as well compared to the previous versions of the animation as each introduction of the famous women of Hull, where it was just a portrait in black and white and a basic font in colours of the city of culture logo. Which back then, now that I think about it made it not only hard to read but also quite bland and not very professional and this wouldn’t have made it easy for me to find someone who would be willing to take my project and present it publicly. The next thing that I was told by Sally is that since I had got rid of my original introductions for each women and replaced them with these much more effective ones I should also change the opening page and animate it.
This opening Introduction page made a huge difference to the whole animation like the individual introduction pages for each women from Hull also adds something to the animation an makes it look not only a more like an educational documentary animation but also much more professional than the previous version which personally (as I have look at it recently) very childish. There a lots of difference between the new intro and the old one, for example the original opening consisted of two different frames (You could say), the first been a bland title sequence that used the colours of the city of culture logo for the background and opening title (Which was in a very generic and universally used font). It didn’t really catch the attention of the target audience, the only thing that sort of made it unique was the colour scheme and even then it wasn’t really my own creation and felt wrong to use it. The next frames of this sequence was the portraits of the famous women of Hull in the middle lined up in an organised manner, which was the only eye catching thing about this set of frames but it was still rather bland and basic. See above for the two original frames sequences for the opening.
The corrections made to introduction can be seen in the image above the previous paragraph. I had made a complete overhaul of the introduction of this animation with slight guidance from Sally my tutor, who told me to be a bit more creative with the images of the women and the opening. So I found new images of the famous women of hull placed them in photo shop that was set to the size of the Adobe Animate/Flash standard frame size and began to cut and places the images in a unique way before giving it a colourful introduction title and a box with the names of the women I had chosen in order with the background faint allowing the audience to see it. This title and opening not only draws the attention of the target audience in with it’s unique appearance but it also shows the women of hull really well and doesn’t make the project looking boring or over informative.
Their was one problem when I transferred these new introductions and openings to the Adobe Animate/Flash which was that the file refused originally to be transferred over in fragment without having a massive white background with them so each layer would unintentionally cover the previous one,w hen I needed the blank parts of each frame to be invisible. I eventually found a way around this problem but it took along time and a lot head scratching, to be honest I actually discovered how I did to get each other from Photoshop to Animate/Flash by accident. But once I knew how it was a piece of cake to transfer each layer over as it’s own in Anime/Flash and animate them to work allowing each women photo and name to appear in order in the introduction of the animation.
I transferred the sound files over to the Adobe Audition, this allowed me to manipulate sound files to the effects I desired such as speeding up my mouse squeaking file to make it sound like Squeak was getting angry or lower the audio levels.
This is the final version of the idea that I have developed:
I chose this as one of my potential final logo designs because it gives the feel of what I actual do in the sense is that I help bring things to life but like all artists it has my own unique flare to it in the process. (Although it has been pointed out to me that it is hard to read and not every one understands what Amtanimator stands for, so I might have to go back to the drawing board for this one.)
This post is another version the original concept I came up with for the logo which I have developed in an attempt to fix the design.
This version of the design has had a serious overhaul compared to the original concept of the logo that I put together. As you can see I have removed the one continuos line design style and now the logo consists of several lines that not only reveals the original pencil concept in the design but also an somewhat easy to see T. The only down falls with this design is again the T is hard to make out and also the colour scheme in the oval again. What I mean by this is that there is an imbalance within oval with the colours between the lines. So I started to do another version of this design in attempt to try and fix this fault in the design.
The next design only has one difference from the previous design and that is that I have tried to fix the colour imbalance in the logo but like before it does feel right, so I think I am going to have to drop this logo and try drawing a new one, till I find the one that I believe represents me perfectly or one that is appealing to my potential target audience.
As part of my my final year course I need to start trying to place my self into the outside world by learning this skill that is not only necessary but also important in this line of work as it is heavily integrated within the it’s existence. In other words you cannot be part of the artistic world regardless of which place you are in, without been involved within the system that has been set up by artists for generations. An artist makes their way through the world by trying to get noticed by other artists and clients to not only for job opportunities but also experience and improve of ones skill. In order to get started with this process I need to set up several things to help with this process the first been a logo something that can be associated with me as an artist and I have decided that for the logo and name that I will use for myself within this industry is the name that I chose for this blog when I first started my blog, Amtanimator.
I have gone through several different designs over the past few weeks trying to find the right design, the images below are some of the earlier designs that I have come up with.
This one of my first design ideas for the logo, I have gone with something that might be considered quite basic due to the fact that the design is in all a sense one long continues line. In appearance is quite bland and when I drew it I knew that it was lacking something so I decided to do something with the design. This design has one major fault apart from its lack of umph, which is that it is hard to make out the Amtanimator in the design the A is clear to see as is the M even if the line goes through it (making it some what harder to understand that the A). The T is another fault in the design of this version of the logo as it is hard to work out once is forms an oval that passes over and then goes through the A making the T look more like a D which is not what I wanted and it makes the logo harder to work out. The final fault in this version of the design is that the arrows in the end was originally intended to be a pencil head to represent that I worked as an animator but unfortunately this is not identifiable when looked at.
This next image is me attempting to improve my first design at the beginning of this post. As you can see I have taken the original design which is posted in the top left of the image above. From here I have taken that design and altered it several times in several experiments from colour to adding more to image. My first attempt was to add more to the arrow to make it look more like a pencil to show the animation side of my logo. While the pencil did become more clear I began to notice what would be the downside of the design in general. The pencil stood out effectively the down fall was that the actual colours I placed between the lined logo it became such an eye saw since the design was unbalanced with the fact that the so much of the design could be coloured but this rest couldn’t and when I tried to colour the entire background with the same colour it came out looking even worse according to several people that I showed the design too. At one point I manipulated the lines of the design to try and remove the D design that was unintentionally created, this still did not make a difference in the design and didn’t fix the colouring issue.
Here are some more examples for my research, this section will focus more on sound effects and music then the previous version:
Sonic the Hedgehog:
Now most people are familiar with the Blue Blur, especially since it is his 25th Anniversary this year. While Sonic is known for fast paced levels and witty lines, he is also known for his music especially since he went 3D. His music since his turn is often written by the Japanese music group Crush 40 and in more recent years has been done by various other artists. One of his more original soundtracks during his origin years in Sonic 3 was written by Micheal Jackson.
Yes these two song are basically the same, the only difference is that one has been altered for a more modern Sonic Game. The first video is the original version of this soundtrack written and performed by Crush 40, which was developed for the first level called City Escape of the hero campaign of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. The reason why I chose this out of all the sonic songs that have been created is that this is one of the most popular due to it’s up beat rhythm and crisps lyrics as well as it describing part of Sonic’s personality perfectly to the newer gamers that have picked up the game. The song also suits the Level really well because the level is awfully colourful and cheerful as well regardless of all the enemies that it actual possess and together they create one of the most popular levels in the Sonic Universe…. well until you get the giant G.U.N. lorry at the end of the level that tries running you down. The song is that effective at getting the target audience pumped and drawn into the game that most often find themsleves singing along with the actual lyrics while playing that very level. This game also broke the common convention with music for gaming levels instead of having basic songs that gave an idea about the level, it utilizes a proper sound track. This was hardly done during the early 2000’s since games were only starting to become 3D.
The second video like stated previously is another version of the City escape soundtrack that was written and performed again by Crush 40 to celebrate Sonic’s 20th Anniversary. The song was used in Sonic Generations, the first Sonic game to unite Modern Sonic with his past self, Classic Sonic to fix the broken/erased timeline by reliving their most memorable levels both in Modern and Classic Style. The song was used for a classic adaptation of City Escape, while Crush 40 did perform a Modern Sonic version, I personally and several others believe that the classic version is a lot better. The actual beat of this version of Escape from the City is a lot more livelier than it’s predecessor and has a lot more beat to it which helps get not only Classic Sonic moving but also the target audience as well.
Star Wars:
Star Wars, one of the most iconic and popular Space Opera Genre series around today, that is still capturing the attention of the target audience in the next generation. I chose this for many reason such as the are many symbols within the series it’s self such as the lightsaber, which not only represents the weapon of both the Jedi and the Sith but it also represents balance of the force as well and the personality of a person. For example the blue lightsaber can mean peace and serenity, while green can mean balance and hope, red has no meaning because the crystals are artificially grown, although many argue that the colour actual means rage and anger or the craving for power.
The main point why I chose this is because while the lightsaber is a good example of symbolism in film, I did state that this blog post will focus on the music of animations, films etc. So lets focus on this shall we, I chose this clip from Return of the Jedi for several reason and first one is that once we hear the music straight away we know that Lord Vader is here and that if we do anything that he finds annoying he will most likely force choke us. This is used not only to announce the appearance of the fallen Jedi Anakin Skywalker to the audience but it is also used to create a form of weak fear since Sith Lords are supposed to be feared in the Star Wars mythology. This fear is seen mostly in the characters but it sometime can be felt by the target audience watching the films as well. The music if you listen carefully is also used to subtlety hint that Anakin is still redeemable i within the actual song. There are slight clues within it after the major beats that do indicate that Anakin waves between the Light and Dark side since he found out that he still has a Son even after he lost Padame, so he hasn’t lost very thing due to Palpatine’s treachery.
Both of these songs reveal a lot about how music is an important part of visual media and how it can help the story within them move along effectively and clearly. So in my case I am going to have to find both effective music and sound effects to help successfully bring the animation for my acting, aesthetics and audience project to life, although in some cases scenes don’t always need music, the sound effects themselves bring out the true narrative of the story and bring the emotions of the animation to life.
This button is at the end of the animation and allows the user to jump back to the introduction animation.
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