Some old work

Heres a few random pieces of work I came across from 2006 using Photoshop. They were signature graphics for message boards and forums and I only recently came across them again.

Michael Jackson

Heres an old piece of work I done just after Michael Jackson died. Thought I would post it on here.

And heres a video to go with it, one of my favourites. It goes with the module as well as the video is a pretty cool example of animation.

First Animation

My brief outlined that I had to create a 30 second animation using 2 dimensional figures on Adobe After effects. On the previous interaction project I had used Photoshop to design most of my images in which I have used quite often before so I had no trouble using the software however after effects was new to me.  I had never used the program before so at first it took me a while to get a grasp of how things work. Once I figured out the basics of how to move pictures and around and thus create the animation it all became a lot easier. On the first day of the project we went out in groups to take photographs, which we would use for our project. We went to one of the university buildings where the walls and floors were white. This would make it easier to cut out and manipulate the pictures later on.  During the first lesson the lecturer talked about different styles and shown us some examples in which she mentioned comic books. As a fan of comic books this immediately stuck in my head as an idea. Originally I had wanted to make the animation into a scrolling comic book strip but as I was inexperienced with the program I was coming across a few complications. If I had more time and knowledge I may have been able to do it. I scrapped that idea but kept with the comic book and instead had the animation zoom into the comic book cover and go from there. As I was originally just experimenting with the program I never really planned my animation. I just went with the flow and added to it where necessary when an idea came into my head. I believe this is more so because I didn’t know how to use the program so I was learning as I went along and with the time restriction on the project I did not want to spend half of it learning how to use the program.  This goes against my normal design process where I like to plan and sketch ideas. I did do a bit of research on comic book covers at the start but that’s as far as it went. If I had planned from the start I probably could have avoided some of the problems that come up the end when I shown my 30-second animation to my teacher as she mentioned some inconsistencies with the styles used. After taking this criticism and making some improvements I am happy with the 30-second animation I have.

Below is my first attempt at the 30 second animation , and then my refined version with improvements. Enjoy:)

V1

V2

Interactive Project

This was my first project on my Multimedia course. We had to create a interactive space where visitors could make decisions through branching and looping and navigate through a series of images.  When discussing in an seminar about general ideas for the project I immediately had an idea about what I wanted to do. Instead of just using digital still images I wanted to do my projects with images I had created in Photoshop. The idea came from a game I had played several years ago called The Crimson Room. It was an interactive game where the user had to click on certain points in a room to navigate around it and try to escape. The images were very basic at the time and created on a program such as paint but it gave me an idea. I wanted to do a similar project but I had an idea where the user would get trapped in a computer and would have to navigate their way out. This would allow me to mix up digital still images and images I had created on Photoshop. As the laptop in the pictures was a Mac book Pro I started off by researching several icons that would be on those machines such as the Mac Finder and also some other common ones for programs such as Firefox. After this I started sketching several ideas for what I would include in my images. As my idea was based around being stuck inside the computer I thought of a few ideas such as the Firefox logo coming alive. Although I never used that idea in my final piece of work it helped spark a few ideas and similar things were included in my final design. After getting my ideas together I planned the layout of the pages to get an idea of the time needed and also which page leads to which as well as branching. This also helped a lot when it come down to implementing the html code as I could easily refer back to the plan and see what was needed to be done.  After completing it and testing it to see if everything worked I shown it to my lecturer who gave me some constructive criticism stating that although the idea was good, the user goes from one area to the other too quick. So to improve on this I would have to make more images to lengthen the interaction. This is something I am looking to improve on. It was also noted the images were of the wrong resolution to what the brief stated so this is also something that I will have to adjust. 

My Design Process