George Eccles

I now began to brainstorm the name for my logo. The initial names I came up with are: FLICKS, ANIMAZE, FRAMES, FPS, FLASH, ACTION, MOVIEMAZE, LOVE ANIMATION and CLIPS. From these names I am leaning towards FLICKS, ANIMAZE, FLASH and FRAMES.

The theme I have decided on is a film festival and more specifically animation. My research helped me to decide on this because I felt that an animation festival allowed me to be the most creative with my designs. I am also keen to again look at animation after creating one for another unit. I have also always been interested in animation.

I feel as if this theme allows for me to be the most creative with my illustrations. I want to use a lot of illustrations for my FMP and I am keen to improve my skills in Illustrator. I also liked the look of the colour schemes on existing posters I saw for film festivals.

I wanted to look at some existing festival posters and analyse them for inspiration and research.

This is the first poster I looked at. I chose this because the colours and design caught my eye. I have always been a fan of simple posters with a bright colour scheme. I believe they are the most effective at catching the customers eye. I am also a fan of the illustration and I want illustrations to be prevalent in my designs. The white text on the coloured background also makes the text stand out and its very easy to read. This is because it contrasts well with the chosen colour.

One thing I would change is the use of different leading in the text. This can be confusing and also makes certain things more difficult to read. I would also change the size of the date and time so people instantly have an idea of when the festival is and if they are free during that time.

Other than this the colour scheme used is extremely eye catching and contrasts well with the text. The illustration is a simple idea and covers most of the poster but is again very eye catching and helps the give people an idea of the theme and things that they may see at this festival.

This is the second poster that I looked at. I am again, a fan of the simple design with the minimalistic style. I want to keep my poster simple and use contrasting colours to catch my audiences eye. I like the colour scheme and the choice of only 3 colours. This helps to not clutter the poster and if you stick to a minimal colour scheme I feel as if it gives your designs a professional feel.

One thing I would change is the amount of information on the poster. I think it helps to add some information on what people will see at the festival.

Overall, I’m a big fan of this poster, it’s colour scheme and the contrast between the colours. I also like the simple illustration that gives the impression of a red carpet.

I now began to research themes which I could use for my festival. I created some mind maps and mood-boards to compile my research in a simple way.

I felt as if these researching these 3 themes gave me enough inspiration for my festival. I am set on either of these 3 themes as they are the 3 which I am most interested in. However, I am leaning towards a film festival for my theme and more specifically animation. This is because I really enjoyed creating the animation for my last unit.

 

Before looking at the specific themes that I could choose I first had to research and find out what actually goes into a festival. The main aspects you must consider for a festival are: Events, Date and Time and Target Audience.

Firstly, for events you must think about what will be needed for your specific festival. If you are hosting a music festival then you will obviously need acts to perform but you can also have other events such as dance areas or games to keep people interested and active. You can also have smaller acts such as animals or performers. These all help to add more interest and things for you customers to do.

Secondly, you must consider the date and time of your festival. This also includes the length of the festival and if it will be on the weekend or a weekday. This can all depend on the theme of your festival and the target audience. I want my festival to be help on a weekend, meaning, Saturday and Sunday. This allows for the most attendance in my opinion and suits my target audience.

Finally, you must choose which type of audience you want your festival to be for. The price of entry for my festival will be low as it will be more focused around watching and enjoying the events. I am going to add an age restriction of 18+ for my festival, this is to allow the acts to create whatever animation or film they see fit.

 

I am now beginning work on my Final Major Project. The brief states that we must design a festival and all of the assets needed to market a festival. This means I will need to create things such as a logo, posters, merchandise and anything else that I think will be needed for my festival.

The aim of this project is to show how far I’ve come as a designer over the 2 years at college and also at work. I am encouraged to put together all of the skills I have learnt from my other units. For example: animation, photography and illustration. I am encouraged to pick a theme for my festival which I am interested in and can relate to. This will help me to come up with designs and ideas because of existing knowledge and designs I have in my head.

I have an idea of what themes I will choose already but I need to do some research on existing festivals with these same themes. I am leaning towards something sport themed or a film themed festival. This will help with inspiration and will also help to decide which theme I want to go with. If I can see how existing posters and other designs look I can use these to decide if I want to do something similar. I must consider other aspects such as photography and illustration. Different themes can have different effects on these and it may be more difficult to get specific photography for a food festival compared to a music or film festival. These are the things I’m considering before conducting my initial research.

I first started by research time based media and some different examples of it. I did this to get an idea of the different forms of time based media and to get a general idea of what it is. I then started to research some artists that create time based media. I looked at different people but the ones that stood out to me were: Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler and Refik Anadol. I research some of their most famous pieces and when they started to create time based media. I documented all of this in my blog. A lot of the time based media I looked at involved the use of people and their bodies. I like the way in which Bill Viola used this but I felt as if Bruce and Tony’s work sometimes became repetitive as they liked to keep the same style through a lot of their pieces. This is why I also looked at Refik Anadol, who uses projection art as the main style for his time based work. To finish my research I looked at some animated gifs created by Nike and Adidas. I wanted to create my gif using the branding I had created for unit 6. I liked the style which Nike use for their animated gif adverts because they prefer to keep the design simple and focus more on catching the eye of the target audience. I wanted to do something similar for my animated gif.

The first problem I encountered was during the light painting. I struggled with some painting some of the outlines around people and the shoe. I also struggled to paint the word LOTTO inside of the designated space. I asked my peers to help me try and get a useable light painting for my shoe. Another problem I encountered was when creating my animated gif. I wanted to create the animated gif in After Effects because it allows you to do much more compared to Photoshop. I hadn’t used After Effects much in the past and my knowledge was very limited. To assists myself I watched youtube tutorials and found out about third party programs such as Ease and Wizz. This allows you to add preset effects to your animations and this helped me a lot for this piece. My animation was quite basic so I just needed to know how to have things move, rotate and enlarge.

To plan for my animated gif I created a simple story board to give myself a starting point. I also discussed with my tutor about what we can do in the next session. For the production methods everything was done digitally. This involved updating my blog, photograph, light painting, After Effects and Photoshop. As discussed before, I had some problems when light painting and getting the desired effects. I had to raise the shoe using a small object to balance it on and different methods of moving the light.

Firstly, I used all of the branding which I had created for unit 6. I also used skills I had learned previously in Photoshop to cutout my light painting designs and also used the photography skills I had learnt previously. In Photoshop I created my first simple gif using my light painting and t-shirt. I learnt how to use the timeline tool previously at work. I then experimented with After Effects which I hadn’t used much in the past. For this I did a lot of video research to get the basics for After Effects and also some more advanced aspects to improve my animated gif. I wanted my final gif advert to be more detailed and professional compared to a gif created in Photoshop.

On my blog I have reflected on all of the aspects for this unit and what I would have done differently if given the chance. I have provided evidence for the creation of my pieces and the different methods I used to create certain pieces. I feel like I could have maybe done a few different styles for my final gif advert and maybe tried some different colours and effects. Other than this I am happy with how my pieces have come out and I feel like I have worked well based off of the knowledge I had and the thing I had to learn to complete these unit.

For my advertisement gif, I wanted to create something simple and similar to the designs from Nike which I had looked at before. I liked the idea of the simple logo and then a shoe design as I felt this allowed you to quickly show off your product and catch peoples eye. Instead of creating a simple gif in Photoshop I wanted to use After Effects because this allows you to create more complex and professional gifs. I used keyframes to create the initial points for the images on my gif and then moved the images in the direction I wanted them to go in. I also used the ease and wizz tool which is third party software that allows you to choose different effects and methods for your graphics to move.

Expo was the effect I chose for the movement of my background and text and this makes the image initially move in slowly, speed up and again slow down once it is fully in shot. I also used rotation and scale for the shoe and did this by initially setting the size of the shoe to 0% on the first keyframe and then on the second frame around 2 seconds after the size was changed to 100% and to rotate around 140 degrees.

Here is my final gif design.

Overall, I’m very happy with how this gif advert came out. I feel as if it could easily grab someones attention if it were displayed on a website and there isn’t too much information. I was keen to keep the information down to a minimum and wanted the gif to quickly showcase the product and catch the users eye.

For this task we had to create a design on a t-shirt to advertise our brand and product. The aim was to use the light paintings for this piece.

I started by finding an image of a plain black t-shirt. I didn’t have to cut anything out for this as I found a good PNG file which I could use.

I started with this plain black t-shirt and then cut-out my favourite light painting piece using the polygon lasso tool. I only needed a rough cut-out of the light painting because I planned on using an eraser around the edges to blend the light painting onto the t-shirt and make it look authentic.

Here you can see the light painting once I had cut it out and used the eraser around the edges to give the feather. For the animation aspect I thought I could change the colour of the light on the design. I could do this using the hue and saturation tool in Photoshop, which can be seen below. I created 4 different colours of the design which I wanted to fade throughout the gif.

 

I also wanted to have my logo somewhere on the design so I added the word LOTTO just under the light painting. I then gave a slight glow on the word which changed along with the colour of the light painting. To create this gif I used the timeline tool in Photoshop and the tween tool to then get the colours to fade from one to another.

Here you can see my final Gif. I am happy with this as I have created it myself using Photoshop and I like the glow on the logo. This is because I feel like it adds a bit of detail to my design and makes it more unique. One thing I would do differently is maybe use more than one of the shoe outlines I created when light painting and put them together using opacity and layer effects.

 

This was my second time doing light painting. Firstly, we started by setting up the camera and the different settings needed to do the light painting. We had to change things such as the shutter speed and ISO to allow us to capture the light painting. The shutter speed was set at around 20 seconds and the ISO was set at 100. This shutter speed allowed us 20 seconds to create our painting. We had to also take into consideration, the health and safety risks, when light painting. The floor had to be cleared and nothing should be sticking out to cause a trip hazard. The tripod also had to be in the same place and enough space between it and the area where we will be painting.

I tried many different thinks that could relate to my sport brand. I tried the outline of a person running, the outline of a shoe and some other things. I used different coloured torches and gels to add a bit of colour and difference to each light painting. One thing I struggled with was the text and getting the correct spacing for this.

These are some of my favourite light paintings and I thought that I could use the shoe outline for my t-shirt design. I could also use the 2 different ones for the same design using overlay effects and can change the colour in Photoshop. If I were to do this task again I would definitely try and get the text finalised. I could do this by doing 1 letter at a time and compiling them in Photoshop.