s a m .
Final animation evaluation -
After making changes to my first major draft, and chopping it down by 10 seconds, I noticed some changes that needed to be made (which I talked about in my last post). In this version I have made the start less static by animating some of the words. This gives it more flow and I feel it fits pretty nicely with the music (1009 by Bonobo).
Overall I was really happy with my animation. I feel that it has a pretty strong graphical style and flows well throughout. I was most pleased with the segment with the gun made up of type, as well as the scene talking about life expectancy, as I felt these had the most originality and are the most aesthetically pleasing. My least favourite part is the ending as I feel its a bit cheesy and I was a bit rushed for time so I couldn’t make it more visually striking.
I feel that on the whole the type has a fairly good balance throughout. I used two typefaces - Helvetica and Neou (a font downloaded from Dafont.com). They seem to work pretty well together and there wasn’t any particular sections that I felt looked put together clumsily.
I was aiming this animation at the general public and I think that the simplicity of it helps get across the message. However i’m not sure that the style particularly reflects ‘happiness’ at all. Its quite clinical and sterile, but i’m not sure this matters. Like I said I didn’t want it to come off too cheesy.
I stuck to my storyboard pretty loosely. Some areas I completely changed without re-storyboarding. This may have been a bad idea because if I took the time to draw out how it should look then i could have spent more time perfecting the animation. However I felt that using a storyboard too much felt to rigid. Some of the best parts of the animation came from just improvising and playing around with the ideas on screen. My storyboard was pretty good but it wasn’t as detailed as it could have been.
If I was to do this project again I would spend more time creating thorough storyboards as I found that a lot of the time it was fairly improvised which made some parts take longer to animate. I would also try to keep it under a minute - this is a bit picky but its nice to keep it to the brief specification, and at the moment it clocks in at around 1.05. I could also be nice to introduce a few more graphical images such as the heart and the turbine near the start of the animation to keep things interesting.
So for my final design I took the letter K and printed it in a blood red colour that I mixed. I then printed the words kill and time over it after a long consideration about the placement. I covered half the word kill in white ink and half in black to work better with the red, and to make the word kill jump catch the viewers attention. One of the letter ‘L’s’ didn’t print very well but I am pleased that it came out like this as it is broken up and adds to the effect. I was very pleased with this last print and the trail and error process to get to the outcome was worth it.
Next I began to try and go bigger. However we did not have any big ‘K’s’, so i decided to try and make one myself. I started by trying to use the letters ‘V’ and ‘X’, to build it up, as I had these big letters available to me. I used on of the sides of the V vertically to create a side of the K and half of the X to create the other lines it. I came up with the image in the top left. It didn’t quite work, and after attempting another time I decided to try a different method. I cut a letter K out of cardboard using a scalpel. I then took it to the press and raised it up by putting more card and some wood underneath it. It printed pretty well but it was corrugated card. This created a pattern on the page. It gave a nice effect but it was not what I was aiming for. So I cut it out of normal card and finally got the result I was looking for.
Here are the letterpress prints from Thursday last week. As I said before I wanted to experiment more with colour and composition. I used the phrase ‘killing time’, so I tried to reflect this in the work. In the top photo I used a blood red for the word ‘Kill’, and used a variety of different fonts to make it look disconnected, and uneasy to look at. I kept a fairly large gap between the two words, also to make it feel out of place. The second print was all in black but I played with the composition by reflecting time below killing. The word killing is again using a different font which is less conservative than ‘time’. The small ‘i’ in a different font also breaks the word up and makes it look unnatural. The final image was done by hand rather than on the press. ‘Kill’ was printed multiple times and would have taken to long on the press. i varied the levels of ink on the letters as well as pressure and positioning. This gave a very grungy feel and has a disturbing repetition to it.
I like the individuality of letterpress, the marks made by the ink on the paper is different every time which makes all the prints unique. Heres some more of my prints from last week. I think they were fairly successful but not really experimental enough. They do a good job of getting a message across and have a strong impact, but I wanted to play around with colour and design more, to push the boundaries of the letterpress machines. So yesterday I started to create prints which weren’t as straight forward - to be uploaded soon.
For our print project we had to explore the concept of time using letterpress. I decided to start with the words “time is…” and then add a word to make a well know phrase or sentence. I tried to keep the sentences short and sharp I felt this would create more of an impact. I also used a minimalistic approach to the design to get the sentence across plain and simply. I experimented with an off-white colour for the word “fading” to try and create more of a visual impact. I also applied less ink to the last couple of letters to make it fade away.
Just created this during an illustrator tutorial. We used our initials and had to merge two type faces together by cutting them in half and joining them back together. It was harder to do than it sounds! I then added a shape to make it more interesting and dynamic.
Next I inked up my work using a roller. I then printed the work on the presses, experimenting with placement, amounts of ink on the letters, different presses, different colours etc. I tried to keep the work pretty simple and minimalist as i felt this would be the most striking. Printed work to follow soon!
I started letterpress yesterday. We were given boxes of fonts, which contained wooden blocks with letters on them. We started by using a chase (which is the frame containing the typography), and laid our letters out to create a sentence or a phrase etc. Then letters were back to front so we had to be careful to arrange them correctly. We then used furniture (the blocks of wood which hold the work in place or provide spacing), and coins (the metal clamps which expand to hold the work in place) to prepare the work for printing.
We made a stop motion animation during the making of the instillation. We aimed to take a photo every 30 seconds but I don’t think we were disciplined enough with this so it’s a bit jumpy in places, but still worked fairly well. At the end of the video a full circle is taken around the project to show how it only works from one angle. This bit is also fairly jumpy, but it shows the idea that it can only be viewed properly from one angle.
The project was overall, a success. It was a very ambitious idea, and I enjoyed working with my group as we worked well as a team. I think our concept was strong but if we were to do it again we should take more photos as we go along to make the video smoother. It may also be nice to attempt to make it neater and construct it in a more uniform type face.
(Source: wavethesails)
