Cereal Box Design

Our task within the process and production workshop this week was to work on the development of a character that would be suitable to be used on a cereal box. Using the target audience of young children we first explored examples that may positively influence us when developing our own character.

I found the blog below very interesting as it showed the flow of thought of the concept artists working on some classic well-known films. It was obvious that this experimental process was essential in highlighting the strong concepts.

http://livlily.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/model-sheets-production-drawings.html

This first issue I had to overcome before attempting this task was my confidence with drawing. Without clear references I find it difficult to draw something that I would be happy with and I found this hard to overcome at first. Jay encouraged me to play around with shape and form without too much concern with the final outcome as the design could be edited later on illustrator.

After coming up with a few ideas for characters that may appeal to my target market I began to think about focusing on one idea and experimenting with composition and layout.

I decided to progress with the little boy character after some peer reviewing and began to play around with how I could find an equilibrium between the illustration, typography and product. I also explored options with the name and how to present this. Next week I will be experimenting with the use of colour in illustrator and tightening up the illustration. 

Loops and Living Holds

Thomas Beale Cipher Experiment from Elissa Boswell on Vimeo.

In this week's After Effects workshop we analysed a piece called Cipher by Thomas Beale and attempted to create an animation which took inspiration from the techniques he used.

I created a simple figure in Illustrator and imported the imagery into After Effects in order to animate particular features of the character. We used the wiggler tool in order to give an effect of erratic movement. I found this worked well on the moustache feature of the character as it gave the effect that the figure was talking behind it.

I struggled with joining some of the features together to ensure that they moved simultaneously but ultimately managed to tie the head and moustache together so that when they head moved from side to side the facial hair remained in the correct place. I just did this by dragging the spiral key to interlink the layers and placing keyframes in the correct place in order to make the movement appear fluid and natural. Unfortunately as I struggled with a few of the elements of production the imagery is not animated for the full 10 second duration. I plan to update this in the near future and hopefully create an additional animation using the same techniques which I have learned.