Animation

So, I've finished doing the DP1 module which was in Animation. I had never done anything to do with Animation before so there was a lot to learn! I found the process time-consuming and at times frustrating but overall I really enjoyed doing it, and it's something I can see myself taking further! Once you have a grasp on the software it's a lot of fun to create everything from scratch and I realise my final piece isn't amazing but I'm still pleased with myself for what I have done! 


When we first got the brief I was a little daunted, but I immediately had an idea of designing a little blobby character like the one from the original BBC Three ident. So it was pretty lucky that we learnt how to model a similar character as I was able to tweak that design to create my own. The idea behind my clip is that the letters (which are my initials) turn into a generator which produces a football which the character heads on, only to find a UFO has flown in and is hovering above his head, he subsequently get lifted up by the UFO and dropped a few seconds later, it's a basic idea but thought it would be good because it allowed me to use my recently acquired to skills easily. The most difficult part of the creation was the football which has slightly been cut out of the final piece so I think there will a take 2 coming soon which shows it more clearly, I will post some images of the football as well, as I am quite proud of it, I even managed to create the separate panels on it. As part of the animation teaching we had a guest lecturer who was a storyboard artist,  I found these sessions really useful as he taught us how to get our ideas down in quickly but accurately, this helped me storyboard some of my initial ideas.


Overall I really enjoyed my first DP1 module, it was fairly hard work but once you know the basics it's great fun and I really enjoyed it


I am going to post a take 2 of the ident some time soon.......

Animation TV ident

Tv station ident from Harry Cook on Vimeo.


This is the ident I designed for animation, more to come about the design process but enjoy for now.......

Animation working progress - learning the 3ds max ropes

I've been working with 3ds max for a week or so now and am starting to get to grips with it, I produced this character that will eventually have some moving animation added to him, this is the basic shape, just need to create the emotions and then piece together a short clip. To create a character you have to almost sculpt the shape you want out of a block shape and then create a skeleton mesh of the finished design to work with, adding colour, texture and details such as; teeth, lighting and shadows and then different emotions for the final animation. We were told to keep it simple, hence the basic shape and lack of eyes, but that's because it is quite a difficult  piece of software to get your head around, so one step at a time!  

I will upload the finished animation and the different emotion still images... 

Last piece of work

The last piece of week that I did was to design a masthead to go on top of a website, the client was a jewellery designer, and was moving into teaching arts and crafts for children and adults. However she already had a logo and font that she wanted. I found this hard because I did not particularly like the logo or the font. I felt it made the brand look cheap, but this was a great lesson to learn because it is important to know that you are designing for the client not yourself.


The client also had a basic idea of how she wanted it to look, it was just a question of piecing together on my part! It was a reasonably simple brief and only took some basic Photoshopping of pictures. Although I much prefer to be working to a wider brief that allows me explore different ideas and bring in different elements from a number of designs to create an ultimate design.


I was happy to use the logo and font but decided to do 2 designs; the one that the client specified as well as one that I felt worked better. In the end the client did just want to use the original design but I saw no harm in showing my design, because then I felt I could have more input plus the client may have decided they preferred that design!!!   


This is the design which I created as I would have done it: 

This is the design to the brief: 

In my personal opinion my first design is better, it looks more professional and clean cut, but I would not have chosen the logo or font in the first place.

However overall the brief taught me the importance of designing for the client rather than yourself and that is something I can take and remember in future work.

First couple of weeks

Been through my first couple of weeks at NTU now and am absolutely loving it! Freshers week was insane and had an awesome time. I don't know how I had the endurance to go out every night, but I managed it, and it was definitely worth it, that's for sure! I had my induction for Multimedia as well, which went really well. I found the whiteboard animation exercise so fascinating and was so much fun! It is such a simple concept but one that is so effective when it all comes together! This is what we did....





In my second week, I started on the real work! I received my Context 1 brief which is an essay on The Design Process methodologies, which are; Prototyping, Market Research, Reverse engineering and Open source. The brief is to discuss and argue how they effect the Design Process. I think this is a really interesting topic to talk about and will also allow me to tap into my Business skills for A level as the Design Process and particularly market research are vital to business success. It should be an interesting essay! 


I also started my DP1 which I talked about in my previous blog! I have now downloaded 3ds max  on my computer and am loving it! its such a brilliant piece of software, such a great designing tool to work with, I know I havent tried the other parts of multimedia and my background is completely and utterly graphic design but I am liking the sound of taking animation further, more and more! early days yet though! 

Test Blog

Hi, just making sure it all works! 


Started doing my first DP1 module yesterday on animation! Our brief is to design a ident similar to one used for tv stations between programmes. This sounds like such a good brief and I cannot wait to get really into it! Used 3ds Max for the first time as well, it is such an amazing piece of software and I am really looking forward to exploring it further! I'm sure that it is one of those things that however much you use it there will always be a new brilliant element that you discover everytime you use it. I managed to pick up the basics fairly quickly and have started to explore all the different areas to it!