Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3 Week Two

This week was all about random maths and more complicated things like if statements. these were quite new to me compared to week one but it still all made sense to me, some people were having a bit of trouble with the pervious weeks.

When i tried to do the work this week i think i bit off more an i could chew, i could get the random dice to work properly but the problem was getting things to happen when the counter reached a specific place on the screen. 

I went back to this after getting in touch with our lecture Liz and had another go and went even further with it, i had fixed the problems that had been plaguing me before hand and i was loving it, Im not one that usually lasts long doing something if i get stuck so for me staying with it and working out the problems was a great successes.

Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3

Actionscript is something i have been interested in for quite a long time now, and have been dying to expand my abilities in the flash department so i jumped at the chance to learn about actionscript. 

Week One

The first week was reactively basic just learning the ins and outs of instance naming and the like. these kind of things ive worked with before to create websites and the like. So i didn't learnt that much during that first week, but it was still really good to learn the basics again because there were somethings i needed a refresher on.

Homework - we just done some work on the basics that we need to show to make sure that we knew it, moving and changing properties like size, speed, alpha ect.

I created quite an elaborate changeable little program, which you can move, change size, alpha and rotation on one object. it was quite nice, the typography lesson i had earlier was already showing through in this.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week Two

In week two we were focusing on layouts, and how to layout a page with Columns to keep people interested and things easy to read, this was really interesting to me because print is something i am very interested in going into and will give me good ideas for my layouts in the future, one of the main things to remember with these kind of things is you can go away from the column structure and not to be limited by it.

Columns - It can range from a two column page to anything up to 7-8, the line spacing between them shortening with each added column.

Homework - We were asked this week to create some creative layouts which go well with our previous week one work. So i had to create a page layout for my light type work, at first i was a bit stuck not really figuring out a decent acceptable layout, took me quite a few goes to get them working with my uneven type style.

How it will help my Play Brief - I think this layout work is going to greatly improve my design theory when approaching my flash game, it will defiantly make me think more about the weighting of each of the elements as i keep the natural readability.

i am actually looking forward to working out the design properly.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week One

So extended techniques has now finished and looking back on them i feel that i've learnt quite a good deal, first up we have typography in which were learning the basics of type, i've had a few lessons on the subject before but it was really good to get a refresher on the subject. 

Serif - A serif font is like Times New Roman, where there are little flicks on the end of the characters, this is supposed to help with ledgablily/readability when smaller. It is also widely considered more professional than the other font styles. So its more acceptable to be used on a lawyer sign than a kid's store.

Sans Serif - This is basically the same and serif but without the little flick (the Serif) so the typefaces in this family are mostly straight and clean, the two most well known are Helvetica and Arial.

Script - Typefaces which are derived from human handwriting. these are considered more personal.

We then went onto how type can be made out of everything and anything, and how that changes the feel of the subject.

Homework

Feeding in from the examples he just shown us about how type can be made from anything, we have to go away and come up with a good idea on creating out own experimental typography.

I wanted to use my camera and capture something with motion in low light, so it would become blurry and directional.

I captured each letter separately using my camera, it was working really well and i did try to create the whole letter in one go but it was really difficult to keep the kerning right with ledgablitly, i had a few attempts before i decided to just do them separately. 

Personal Website

For the last few weeks i have been working on my personal showcase website, This is how i am going to present my work online in a digital format. As usual i started off designing what i had in mind in my sketch book also begun with looking at what websites i like and why i like them, the one i chose to emulate was this by Dragon Interactive, i love how they used 3d in a traditionally 2D medium like a website is.


Im not exactly new to HTML, but i haven't really utilized CSS before, This project also gave me the opportunity to use my Actionscript knowledge.


Joseph-Eshmade.co.uk - You can view the full interactive version of my website at this URL.

I have enjoyed working on the web as a medium, i have been interested in doing them for a long time but i have to admit the coding part always made me shy away from this line of work and more into print, i am still interested in print and wouldn't mind doing both.

Week long - Team brief

I didn't enjoy this brief quite as much as the other, in some ways we worked well as a team and others we just fell apart, after the first day we just didnt really get in touch with each other again untill the week after when we had to present it to the client (in this case it was Adam). So when we came to actually presenting it we just didnt know what we were talking about and just fall apart basically, our main problem this time was that we 'presented' the idea and didn't pitch it. Since we signed a non disclose agreement i can't really talk about the brief its self, but i found it alot harder than the first because of its specificness, and i didn't really enjoy it.

One Day Breif

This week we have been set a one day brief, the topic of the number '7' and how it related to Britain. This was actually a tough brief but most of us really enjoyed it, we got put into pairs and and had to pitch our ideas to a third party at the end of the day, which was really daunting at first but in hindsight i am so glad we done it this way, it gave us some valuable experience in the design world but also gave us an opportunity to talk about our work to a 'client' which most of us had never done before.

I was teamed up with Mike who had come from another class to do the work with us, i really enjoyed working with him because we could bounce ideas of each other without us both fighting for our idea to prevail over the others. In the end we actually blended a few of our previous ideas together in a non obvious way.

Our final idea for this project, the one we pitched was to have 7 men sitting on the tube ignoring the world around them, ignoring each other whilst reading the papers, and on the front of those papers we have the 'Seven British Sins' such as 'Obese' and 'Sarcasm'.

Our pitch went very well which was surprising seeing as thought we didn't have time to organize it, we bounced off each other in the pitch whilst also delivering all he infomation to the clients.

Character design progress + other briefs

Its been a while since i've updated this blog, which i really need to do on a much more regular basis to keep it updated with my progress and work during the weeks, not months. The other week we had another new round of briefs, so we finished our heros & heroines (presentation) and character design briefs a before we started the new ones, i only recently completely finished my digital version of my characters, i didn't do alot with them digitally anyway, i wanted some more classical medium's in my work as i tend to lean towards digital the majority of the time. The feel of the whole peice is what i love, it feels immersive and very graphic novel esque.

Sketch:

Final work:

2008 - New year, New breifs

After we finished up our joint projects with the creative lense course we went back to our Digital media Groups which i actually pefer to be honest its alot more organised.

We've recived two more briefs when we came back from the winter break, we did also have one over the break that links with one of the new ones, you can find the start to my Heroes and Heroines berif by clicking here, we have to research on a list of high profile artists, designers and companies then later on select one to produce a 10 min presentation, supported by a grid based flash animation to go on in the background, the vast amount of research for the start of this breif aint really up my tree, but i will really enjoy working with flash as i already have a good knowlage of the workings of it. I'm looking most forward to learning some basic ActionScript, and hopfully be able to make my presentation a little more exciting.

The other breif is Character Design, I do enjoy drawing but it can be quite annoying to me if i have alot of it to get done which in this case i do, But i think i can overcome it to produce some good work in the coming weeks.

I'll keep you posted.