Primary Research

When thinking about gaining primary research I decided to gain knowledge around the subject of online anonymity.  I chose to use the website Reddit. Reddit is commonly used as a forum-based website whereby users post talking points and things that they find interesting in order to engage with other online users and hopefully find common ideas between people. You can also post questions which anyone is free to answer without leaving your full name or any personal details. I decided to ask the question ‘What conversation would you have with your 10 year old self?’ I thought this would be appropriate to the project as it is a rather personal question which still recieved a large amount of responses which I probably would not have recieved if I had asked these questions to strangers face-to-face. Some responses were more personal than others touching upon childhood issues and things that they may have found inspiring at the time with hindsight. 

After receiving a few comments from my first question I decided to try again with the question;  ‘Why is it so wrong to break up with someone via text message?’ I thought this again would be relevant as it connects the themes of people and relationships and also the theme of the ability to hide behind a screen and somehow feel less responsibility. The replies I recieved were exactly what I expected and gave off the general feeling that it is incredibly disrespectful to do this to someone. This however begs the question; Why? So many of our relationships these days are based around instant messaging and social media so why can we not discuss the starting and ending of relationships through this media?

I also came across the website Omegle which is slightly controversial. It has a webcam feature which allows strangers to connect from all over the world in a face-to-face scenario. Naturally this results in some content which is NSFW to say the least however I came across a feature whereby I could anonymously ask a question and watch two strangers discuss it on my screen. Again I chose to ask a really personally question in order to hopefully show how people may be more comfortable to discuss said topics without embarassment or responsibility. 

I have presented just one of my responses above which touches upon personal issues experienced by these strangers and how their experiences may have the ability to bring them together. I personally found this incredibly interesting and started to think about how strange and completely differently these conversations would unfold in a real-life scenario. This again highlights how people are ultimately more comfortable behind a screen than they may be in person.

Intro to Studio Project - Conversation

Project/Assessment Task: Brief: A Conversation

Take time to develop ideas and experiment with different media, materials and technologies. Play with instructions, reinterpret, disrupt, reinvent...

What’s the most important conversation for today? 

What’s the most important conversation for the future? Who will you speak to?

What is the message?

Through the application of your chosen practice you are asked to research and develop a visual outcome that centres around the idea of ‘A Conversation’.

Basic examples or starting points you may want to explore could include:

Consider the conversation between yourself and technology, the internet, phone apps.

Look at current social behavior, group activities, communities, lifestyles, conventions, business, leisure, play. An external, political or social conversation that you may support or contest.

Consider the conversation creative industry professionals have with the notion of communication, technology and society.

We also want you to consider the most appropriate mediums for presenting this 'Conversation':

Graphic Design

Posters, Fanzines, Book, Magazine, E-zine, Manifesto, Marketing Strategy, Direct Mail, Advertising Campaign, Advertisements, Copy, Photography, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, You Tube, Vimeo, Vine, etc...).

Considerations:

Where is the most important place for the conversation to take place? How will the conversation be heard?

Who will your audience be?

What are your aims?

Who will benefit?

Aims:

Undertake creative and ambitious research.

Develop a brief through research and development.

Examine the conceptual and aesthetic potential of “a conversation”. Innovate and explore technical parameters.

Create a contemporary portfolio piece.

Make your chosen audience pay attention to your work.

Requirements:

A portfolio of designs involving a high degree of creative and technical skill and also market justification, in which there is a clear reasoned and personal response to the requirements of the brief. Background material in the form of research and concept development will be of a high standard and will clearly support the final outcome. Each assignment will incorporate a high degree of finish and presentation, with all aspects of the brief taken into account.

‘A Conversation’

As Digital Natives you inhabit a seamless, immersive existence with technology; negotiating relationships with the environment and with each other; in the pursuit of connectivity, discovery, creativity and innovation...

This emerging programmable world has created a whole new division between the virtual and the physical; a designable environment, a playground for coders, requiring digital design disruption at all levels. We have to intervene and prioritise unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crisis if we are to become effective visual communicators and address real user experiences to provide meaningful design futures...

Cutting out a Moving Image

This week in the After Effects workshop we worked on cutting out a moving image and using the mask tool to animate said image.

I brought some royalty free looping video clips and a pre-made illustrator background in order to make the process quicker. I made a simple layered background of a landscape and chose a running horse for my moving image as I thought this would be aesthetically effective in the final result.

After importing that into Adobe After Effects I stretched out the timeline to make it easier to edit frame by frame. I used the clipping mask tool to trace around the moving image every couple of frames when it moved into a different position. This basically cut a hole in the image and moved frame by frame with the looping animation.

The next step was to remove the original animation and fill the cut-out section with a solid colour which would effectively show up against my background. I then imported the background layer in order to put the two pieces of imagery together and see what effect this resulted in. At this point I had a coloured background with a horse which remained in one position with consistently moving legs. To resolve this I moved the image out of frame and added position keyframes to give the effect of the animal's legs moving and subsequently carrying it from the right to the left of the screen.

Below is the final example of what I achieved in this week's After Effects workshop and although I found it challenging I did enjoy creating the final outcome. If I were to do this task again I would refine the drawings of each frame and ensure that it loops perfectly as the final piece does not quite loop accurately as there was not enough material to trace around.



The Running Horse from Elissa Boswell on Vimeo.

Cereal Packet Design Continued

This week in the process and production studio it was time to tighten up our drawings in order to vectorise our imagery and work towards making a printable prototype.

The first step was to scan in our hand-rendered drawings and edit the levels of the image in photoshop in order to make the lines more defined and subsequently easier to draw around in Illustrator.

I used multiple layers for the box net, outline and colour to make the refining process easier to breakdown. I found that with the lettering and certain parts of the image like the character's hat the end result looked more aesthetically pleasing when I used the pen tool more loosely and allowed colour from the layer below to peek through. I also created a simple graphic for the back of the cereal box as many of the other's I had looked at for inspiration did not use extensive amounts of detail for the back design.

I will continue with this design in my own time in order to see this finished product but I am happy with my progress so far.