Professional Practice: Showreel

This is the showreel that I prepare for my end of year show:

It contains my all best work from the previous three years.

Hull City of Culture: Poppies Wave and Weeping Window

This post is another on a Hull City of Culture exhibits:

The exhibit will visit several different towns and cities for several weeks. The Poppies are made out ceramic materials and painted before been placed from a window and designed to flow from a designated window within the town or city before reaching a gravel based ground that is also part of the exhibit. The exhibit is a memorial piece for memorial day, for all the brave soldiers that sacrificed their lives to protect their countries and families.

Hull City of Culture: The Propeller

This post is for the pictures taken for the city of culture exhibit fan:

The propeller was moved to Queen Victoria’s square after the opening evening of Hull City of Culture. It is a modern design Propeller for a wind turbine. This piece was shown at the city of culture for eight months before been removed for the next exhibit that would takes it’s place later on. The fan is considered a symbol of not only modern science and culture but also what humanity can achieve if we focus on green energy sources.

Independent Practice: Lines of Thought Workshop

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.

Creative Futures: Pro Practitioner: Client Project WOW potential clients for my project: Maritime Museum

I have written a proposal to the Maritime Museum asking I am able to show my interactive animation to general public at the Maritime Museum. This form not only stated what my intention was with presenting my project but also gave my potential client a way to contact me about my project. A day later after I handed in my project proposal to one of the members of staff at the Maritime Museum I got a response.

The response I received for my proposal was from the curator of the Maritime Museum Robin Diaper stating that at this present time the sites that were under his durastriction were unable to show my project to the public but wished me luck in my future endeavors and my project. So I will not be able to show my project at the Maritime Museum unfortunately but I have at least got some more experience in this part of been an animator.

Creative Futures: Pro Practitioner: Client Project WOW potential clients for my project:

Since this is my client project I need to find a suitable client who is willing to show my animation to the public, as I have already failed to see my first client I had chosen and organise to show my project at the Women of the World event, I have to find I new client. The other day I went around hull trying to find suitable locations and clients to allow me to show my interactive animation, unfortunately the downfall with such a project is that I need to find some where that is suitable for this sort of animation.

Hull and East Riding Museum:

One of Hulls major museums that has a wide range of art exhibits form across different time periods that are both interactive and attract a wide range of tourists mainly children which is a plus in this as that is one of my main target audiences.

The Maritime Museum:

Another good example as the Maritime Museum has a section dedicated to the public to allow artists to show their work to public but you have to put your name forward first and state what you want to show to the public. One of the Hull New Media Students has already held and exhibit here called Lou in Games design.

 

Creative Futures: Pro Practitioner: Client Project WOW Animation Changes 2

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.

Creative Futures: Pro Practitioner: Client Project WOW Animation Changes

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.

Professional Practice: Business card 1

Here is one of my early concepts for my business card:

The design for the card is basic making it easy for my potential clients and employers to easily find a way to contact me. The downfall of this though is that it isn’t very inventive and the logo like I mentioned previously is hard to read, so I might have to come up with a different idea now. Maybe use images of animations to make it a bit more appealing to the eye.

Professional Practice: Logo Ideas 4

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.)