Manchester Print Festival

As part of Design Manchester 2015 there was a Print Festival hosted on the 17-18th October so I decided to head down and check it out after attending the BCN-MCR event a few years earlier. I loved the atmosphere and there was a selection of great prints. And of course I got a small A3 poster from their event last year.

2nd Behance Portfolio Review

* Images Courtesy of The Engine Room, Huddersfield

   

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For the second year running I have attended the Behance Portfolio Review which was hosted by The Engine Room at The Media Centre in Huddersfield. I got some great feedback for my current portfolio and I also got the chance to speak to Studio and get to know a larger area of the local design community.

Rotoscoping Street Dancer from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

For this exercise we were being shown how to rotoscope a clip and place it into a chosen scene. And for this I needed a short clip of a moving figure with no overlapping of other people or parts of the foreground etc. Then I had to find a looping point int he movement.

Initially we trimmed down the clip to its looping point which for me was about 1.7 seconds. Then to seam;essay stretch it out to two seconds we performed a Time Stretch which adds duplicate keyframes to extend the clip.

We then created an initial mask using the pen tool of the clearest part of the clip, ideally one where the subjects limbs were extended out clearly. I then step by step adjusted this mask to match each keyframe so the sequence was completely removed from the background. One glitch I occurred was the mask in the gab between the duplicate keyframes was randomly generated by After Effects to move from one keyframe to another, not knowing the keyframes are duplicates.So to fix this I enabled the 'Hold Keyframes' options and the mask kept its form until it was manually changed.

Another issue with After Effects is that the lest keyframe is always blank so before the clip loops it flashes off for one frame before starting again. To fix this I had to perform a Time Remap where I moved the endpoint to the next to last keyframe and trimmed the excess on the end. And now my clip looped seamlessly. I could also extend the two second clip to the whole ten seconds now. For this to work I added a simple Loop Out Duration expression into the expression dialogue box.

My Rotoscope was now ready to be added into the scene, for which I have chosen a London street with a large part of clear road where my character will seemingly be dancing. I gave the background a wiggle effect which I learnt from my last tutorial and this gave the background some life which lifted it off the ground.

Code Club

I have recently attended a Code Club and two weeks in I have developed some basic code using the code language Java in the Processing Program. Processing is a piece of software developed by Designers for other Designers to use as a visual creative tool.

During week one I started off with some very primitive code and created a simple ball that bounced around the screen.

And during week two I took this further by adding arrays which generated a number of ellipses automatically and made them bounce in random directions around the screen. And then after the club I wanted to take it a little bit further and generate random colours which I did by changing the value of the colours into random which picked a random number int he scale I specified.

I have been thoroughly enjoying my time at Code Club and I am waiting till I know a little bit more before I start to work it into my practise; but I am coming up with a few ideas currently. Watch this space.

Process and Production Typeface Design

These series of sketches was a result of a process and production task given to us where constrained within a four by four A4 grid. We had to fill each block with a phrase beginning with "I am", this filled the grid and created am interesting type structure. I started off drawing very precise letters with a compass and technical drawing tools, this was a bad start in the wrong direction. We were given this task in the hope we were loose with our ideas and thus allowing us to explore areas we were unfamiliar with. I decided to take influence from the rectangles in the grid and create a rectangular type form, this not only looks stylish but it is a great style to use for teens and young adults due to its.This encouragement to use new materials was informed more when it came to the second phase

I wanted to create quite a stiff and restrictive typeface like this simply because I has never done it before so I wanted to try it out. It has a grungy and edgy look which is a nice break to the swiss typefaces I typically use. I created the larger versions of these letters on A4 sheets of paper using a simple hand printing method. I would simply mask out the edges of the sketched letters and drag ink across the page, then once I peeled back the mask what was left was an imperfect grungy typeface with uneven surfaces and a range of colours and densities of ink.

Another grid based typeface I like the look of which I think subconsciously inspired my own design was the recent identity of Wilsons Republic designed by Aiden Nolan.

The next step for this project is to expand this 4x4 grid into an even larger format whilst maintaining this structure. And to achieve this I will need to re-think my printing methods to adapt to this larger size.

Portrait Animation

Portrait Animation from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

For this tutorial I was asked to prepare a vector drawn portrait of a person that was 1920x1080 and has a number of separate limbs I can animate independently to create a vast range of movement.

One technique I will be using is a living hold and it is used when action in an animation has stopped but the animation is still running through the timeline. For example a subtitle will appear on the screen but will have no animated movement so to make sure the animation does not look frozen or buffering a small moving feature is added like a lens flare or moving texture so there is a subtle element of movement that indicates the passing of time on the animation.

I was told a tip about pacing an animation. If I have a contrast between fast intense scenes with eh odd gentle undertone to create a strong structure within the story.

I am also told we will need to ensure our motion loops seamlessly.

Right so from here I am ready to start, so I created my document and imported the content and set it all in the timeline. I rigged each element up, correcting their anchor points so their movement is natural at the usual joints.

After I had a basic keyframe animation set up for ten seconds I began adding a living hold to some elements using the wiggler function, who’s setting can be found in the window menu. This function adds random movement at a magnitude of my choice, in my case I chose a very small magnitude to add just a minimal range of movement to make my human portrait seem more alive. This adds a level of realism as living things can not hold perfectly still. This feature is also helpful for not animated elements such as backgrounds as adding a subtle amount of movement brings them forward slightly into the animation, merging the foreground and background.

As I added the wiggle to some of my layers I encountered a bug. As the layers were 3D they had 3 axis of movement, so when I added the wiggle it moved the z axis too so the layers move forward and behind each other making them appear to flash on and off screen. So to solve this I selected just one axis of movement, if I wanted another axis I would have to create a second wiggle effect to that axis.

Another feature I was shown was using Javascript to program my animation. To open the edit window I had to alt+click the layer and begin adding expressions. The default code is transform.position. This form of editing is good for complete control whereas the wiggle feature is a completely random outcome.

A handy tip for working with long animations is to create the base product, which is simply the animated objects, before stylising them. This is an efficient way of working as you always have a full product early on and are only making it better after that.

So once I had added some final touches to the animation which included the addition of some textures, I finally ensured the loop was seamless and I finished the animation and rendered it out.

Adding the textures was a simple process, I imported the texture, used an alpha track which is similar to how a clipping mask works in illustrator. This replaced the solid colour with the texture. I then adjusted the opacity of the solid colour and added the multiply blending mode to make the texture more subtle and the colour I wanted.

My Thoughts on Research

Throughout my first year I did vast amounts of written research into multiple artists I have found and other related topics. However the problem with this research is that it was conducted with no direction or purpose, it was written just for the sake of writing it down. This was because I had no initial concept to guide the direction of my research, so most of the research I did was just meaningless and irrelevant to my final piece.

This year however my attitude to written research and how I approach it has changed for the better in my opinion. I now conduct research in sections as and when I need them. This way my research follows the direction of my concept and is used to help and inform me as my idea develops into the final product. For example with my recent Conversation project for my Intermediate Studio Practice module I was struggling for ideas of how to illustrate my Typocharacters, so I did some research and found a book which had some simplistic and genius solutions to typeface imagery, this informed my final design and so my research has become more informative and relevant.

My Working Process Development

My working process up to this point was very simple and rigid and I followed it in a strict methodical manner. I would get my brief, analyse it and write it again in a format more relevant to me, then I would decide on a direction for my research and one by one tick of each subject that I listed to look at. I would follow this very strictly and not deviate from my list of topics, even if my ideas or viewpoints had changed and the research was no longer relevant, I felt I could not allow myself to wander off with my idea; on reflection now I realise this was a terrible idea, I should always follow where my ideas take me. Secondly, I would move onto my idea development which was influenced and directed from my research. I would not allow myself to go back and do more research to help with my production as it was not a part of the plan, I would create stiff sketches that were not free to explore and move away from my initial ideas, I left no room for real development. Then I would charge onward to my finished piece, following my decided plan which lead off from my development process. I was then left with a neat book of 30-50 pages with a neat finished product that was nicely presented and discussed at the end of the project book.

Research - Development - Production

This way of working worked well for me, it got the job done. But it did not give me any room for exploration, I was suffocating my creativity with such a methodical and strict working plan. So coming into my second year I decided to develop a new working process. I did this by first making no plan, and simply following the natural direction of the project. This left me with some loose guidelines to follow from there onwards, to ensure I keep on the right tracks an meet the deadline. Imagine it like this: throw a few darts onto a map and follow the route between each dart and there you have your journey.

The process I was left with went something like this:

. Initial scratching surface research

. Idea development via mind map or similar

. Relevant research based on few different vague ideas

. Final idea brief

. Research on methods

. Development

. Creation

This I think is a much more natural progressive process which follows the ideas lead and makes me progressively learn to support the idea, not creating an idea to fit what I had learnt. It forces me to learn new things to make an idea work which results in a relevant and interesting journey of development from concept to product.