Images as arguments lecture:
We began this lecture by asking 'what is an argument?' and were given three types of argument from this:
Rational, emotional and rhetorical. A rational argument is taken by philosophers who try and reason with evidence and solutions. They usually follow a deductive argument which has a logical form. An example of a deductive argument is: i) All people are mortal. ii) Socrates is a person. iii) Therefore Socrates is mortal. However, they may also follow an inductive argument which is based on empirical evidence (which is evidence that relies on the senses). Inductive arguments are contingently true.
Rhetorical arguments are used by Sophists (360 BC) which used persuasion. It was received negatively in Ancient Greek but it was re-evaluated in post-modern context.

We then moved onto images that could be used as an argument and we began by looking at the Gestalt Shift with the image of the rabbit/duck.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg

This image is labelled as an illusion as there is two ways of looking at it. From one perspective, it looks like a duck and from the other perspective, it looks like a rabbit. However, you can't see both animals simultaneously. It is an intensive experience as it has a logic of thresholds although it is still centred on representational form.

We then looked at another image that followed the idea of distortion and perception. It was Hans Holben the Younger who created the piece- The Ambassadors in 1533.

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/resources/holbein/index.html

This image could be quite easy to create with photoshop in recent day, however, this image was hand painted. The image of the skull at the bottom of the painting can only be seen when it is looked at from the side. However, when you can see the skull, you are unable to see the rest of the image. 

The person on the left is a traveller and the person on the right is a member of the clergy. Both of these people are supposed to portray different views of what happens after we die. The inclusion of this distorted skull is supposed to signify that, whatever happens, you are still dead at the end. However, you have to look from a different point of view and ignore the other points of view to see the blunt message of the painting. This makes it a vanitas painting. 

A similar thing was recreated by Robert Lazzarini in 2000. He 3D printed a distorted skull from real bone. 

http://db.westcollection.org/sites/default/files/rlazzarini872_0.jpg

This followed a similar idea of distortion as you could only see the skull if you looked at it from a certain angle. Lazzarini was alluding to Holben's painting. 

This lecture was interesting as it give yet more background information to art which can support my studies and will come in handy when revising and referencing different time periods. I found it very interesting and shows how powerful image can be. 

7 Stages of Design Process Lecture:
In this lecture, we learnt about the 7 different stages of design process, which are:
1) Define
2) Research
3) Ideate
4) Prototype
5) Select
6) Implement
7) Learn

Stage 1 consists of asking these questions:
-What are the key elements of the product?
-Who is the target audience?
-What is the design?
-When will it be needed?
-Where will it be used?
-Why does the client think a design solution is required?
All of these questions should point you in a direction to follow. Even if it is the wrong direction, at first, these questions will provoke an idea and then that will progress.
It is important to realise that the product may not appeal to everyone and narrowing down your target audience will help you in creating a design as you will not be considering everyone.

The second stage is research, and this is where initial ideas are found. You will need to find both primary sources, which comes from your own experience or findings, and secondary sources, which come from other peoples experiences and findings. It is important to create your own information as you can't completely rely on someone else's knowledge to back up your design.

The third stage is to ideate. We looked at a quote from Gavin Ambrose, who said:
'Creativity  conveys a sense of pure inventiveness and lack of boundaries, yet design requires applied creativity towards a specific end'.
This introduced this stage nicely as this stage is about ideas and not vocabulary. It is advised to avoid preconceptions also. A range of examples were given that support the idea that, the simplest idea is usually the best one. I recognise Okham's Razor from studying Philosophy at A-Level and in the case of proving the existence of God, it worked to an extent. However, when applied to other concepts, such as an idea for a design, it is good to keep it simple and not over complicate ideas or concepts.
At the end of this stage, you should have some kind of rough language of what you are going to create. This may include sketches or thumbnails or trying out ideas.

The fourth stage is the prototype stage. This is about testing the feasibility of  each idea and how they work with the guidelines from the brief. This stage is about exploring what the outcome may look like. This is an example of good animation that probably was defined in the prototype stage.
Tine Milk - Olympic Film from Echoic : Music and Sound Design on Vimeo.
At the end of this stage, you should have a comprehensive layout or a 'comp' for short. As well as this, you should know what idea you want to take forward.

Stage six is implement.
This is building the output and defining the details and refining what has been trailed and clarified. This stage is where the outcome forms and you finish your work.

Stage seven is to learn from the project.
This means you should encourage feedback and reassess your work. Note improvements and things that work well so the next brief you work on, the outcome can be even better and more efficiently done.

This lecture gave a very interesting insight on how to work through a brief and I think that I will stick to a structure like this as it is solid and easy to follow. I enjoyed learning about a different way of working and definitely took the stages on board for the next time I am given a brief.

Final After Effects Session:

I have thoroughly enjoyed all sessions that have involved After Effects, including this one. In this session, the aim was to create a whole animation with the whole group. We were given this example by Adam Gault for inspiration.It is a great animation with a lot of character and detail.


https://vimeo.com/44893686

We began by choosing a creature that lived underwater and were told to recreate it using different layers for its body parts. I decided on an orca.

This is the image I created on Illustrator for the animation. We were given a specific colour to use as a background so that had to be taken into account when creating the creature. This worked well as it was very bold black and white. I then had to take it into After Effects, without a background, so I could start animating it. This would be fairly simple to do as I am now very familiar with how After Effects works and how to animate an object, as long as I have converted the individual layers across to After Effects. I could then animate different parts of the orca. This meant I had to have two compositions, one for the individual layers, and one for the whole orca. This meant that the parts of the orca would move as well the whole object would move across the screen, within a 10 second time period. 

Using the transform controls, I could move the orca in a swimming motion so it could swim across the screen. However, some of the parts of the orca were hard to move because they did not align properly with the fins, body or white spot on the orca. This meant that I had to alter the position of the orca so it would look right as it moved. However, I screenshotted how the tail looked at different periods in the animation to show an idea of how the tail moved and also how I've altered some of the positions of the layers. In the first screen shot, you can see how I can select each part of the orca individually. 

Once done, we sent the videos to Sara, who composed a video of each completed animation and put them into one animation. 

The session refreshed all things that I have learnt from After Effects this year and was, as always, highly beneficial. I love using After Effects and feel I have picked it up quickly.

Gentle Ease Lecture
This lecture was about drawing and After Effects and there was many videos that were shown to us to show what we could do with drawing and After Effects. Personally, my most familiar way of working is physically and I especially enjoy drawing so this lecture instantly grabbed my attention.

Dryden Goodwin: Skill was the first example we were shown that really interested me. I like the fact the conversation between the people and the drawings are so heavily personal to each other and also illustrate the conversation so well by just capturing the essence of someone's appearance or an item that is involved in the conversation. It couldn't be reflected any better by using a different material. The looseness allowed it to be openly interpreted as well as move with the conversation.

Dryden Goodwin: Skill (2014) from Forma Arts on Vimeo.
I love this style of drawing and even composed a sketch of my own in his style to try and grasp this loose and incredibly textured way of drawing.

I really like the way the pen is used to allow the face to come alive with expression and I also like the way the video is composed.

The second video we were shown was by Johnny Kelly and it is called Forest: Just one day.

This was also all hand drawn, like Goodwin's pieces. 

Forest: Just One Day from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.
I like the hand-made look of this video and how it reflects the music so well. I feel like the video brings a whole new element and experience to the song. It looks very minimal but probably takes a lot of work to do and is executed beautifully. The shapes and objects on this paper-looking background move to the tone of the music and what the song is doing. This simplistic style also works well with the simple tune over the back of the song that is played almost throughout. I like the style this is drawn in and the way it flows together also.

The next video we watched was Flow by Jane Cheadle. This video was recorded within her own studio which makes it a personal experience.

flow from jane cheadle on Vimeo .
This video is basically an experiment with materials alongside music which is what the previous video did but this is done in a very different way which appears to use stop motion, and uses it well. It is amazing how the white lines appear to circulate on this black circle along to the music. This is a very textured and ambiguous piece and is incredibly beautiful although looks very complex. I like the way the circle appears to be animated although it is only a series of pictures. It is a very dramatic piece in black and white.

The next video that I found very interesting was Little Boy by Jordan Baseman.

Little Boy from Animate Projects on Vimeo.
This video is deliberately difficult to watch and has an incredibly powerful extract of an interview that introduces it. Watching this video is a highly intense experience of noise and colour which could be interpreted in a number of ways. The powerful thing is, although you want to stop watching it, it is still making you feel emotion and reflect on the short speech about 'the flash' at the beginning. Out of context, you would wonder what this meant and why it is so distressing. Within context. it is even more powerful. This piece is about the disaster in Hiroshima in 1945. The chilling thing about explaining the bombing as 'the Darkness' is almost what the rest of the video is expressing. This unknown and powerful darkness that was probably so intense and terrifying that it can be reflected through a disturbing collection of sounds and ambiguous images that appear on the screen. Ms Setsuko Enya recalled the devastating memory of the Hiroshima tragedy and this is how Jordan Baseman interpreted it.

We then looked at a music video created by Drew Tyndell that was called General Elekriks: Angle Boogie.

General Elektriks: Angle Boogie from Drew Tyndell on Vimeo.
This is a very handmade and energetic piece that looks like it was made quickly and loosely but it was actually made through a process called Rotoscoping which is an incredibly time consuming, frame by frame process. However, this creates an entirely different illusion of it being created quickly and with a lot of energy. This is a clever way of creating animation.

We then looked at more of Tydell's work and the series of 'Loop' videos he made which use a similar process and have a very similar style and energy. This ones called Loop 4:

Loop 4 from Drew Tyndell on Vimeo.
He has made several of these videos and they look effective played one after another

My Mother's Coat was the next video we watched which was made by 'Moth' and is a highly emotive animation.

My Mother's Coat from Moth on Vimeo.
This again is a very loose and reductive style of working which tells a story. which is very rich in emotion, through very little lines and symbols to represent what was being said in the poem. The sullen tone of the poem compliments the style of the animation. It then switches to photograph and real film of the author and the child that the poem is addressed to which makes it more emotive and is really the opposite to the incredibly minimal style that was before. Its important that the artist has interpreted the poem themselves before creating this piece which makes it personal to the artist and reflects what they feel about the poem, adding another level of depth and emotion to the animation.

The final video we were shown was Le Meurtre teaser by Tom Haugomat and Bruno Mangyoku.

LE MEURTRE teaser from tom haugomat & bruno mangyoku on Vimeo.
This another reductive piece of work but uses more block colour as well as using negative space effectively. Although its colourful and simple style, it is very dramatic.

Overall, this lecture was very interesting and it demonstrated to me the different ways to use after effects and different ways to incorporate physical drawing into animation. I am very interested in doing this in my work.

Typography 3:
In this workshop, we had to select a final typeface to take forward and create a sentence out of. I decided on this:

However, I wanted to make it more rounded and more even so I decided to take my time as well as experiment with different weights for my final typeface. This was the final result:

I tried to be exact in my letter spacing and also the sizes of the letters however, this is very hard to do freehand and I did struggle with achieving a perfect looking sentence. However, it has vastly changed from the draft of this typeface. I like the fact it is round and more friendly, but I am not happy with the 'i' as well as the 'q' and the 'b' because they look different and sloppier than the rest of the letters. I also struggled with the 'b' 'o' and 'q' because of the circular spaces within them. I am overall happy with my final result and definitely feel that a thicker weight looks better in comparison to the thinner weight on 'fox' but glad that I experimented with both. It could be neater and more precise and even more adventurous but I do like it as a basic looking typeface. 

Overall, I thought the typography tutorials were incredibly beneficial as I love working with pen and paper and it refreshed my drawing abilities. However, I do feel like my style, which is quite loose and freehand, does not compliment doing typography because it takes a lot of attention to detail. It did allow me to practise this way of working which is also very useful.  

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Cinema 4D:
This is the most challenging tutorial I have come across as I find the program highly complex.
The task was to generate a 3D name on Cinema 4D which I had trouble rendering at the end. I followed most of the steps well but if I missed one thing I found very difficult to catch up and find my place.

This is a portion of what I created. I managed to make a cube move backwards and forwards and added texture to objects. I also  made the lines of MOL appear smoothly. 

This command box shows what I did to the objects. Such as sweeping, adding light, bending objects and adding textures. This was a great introduction to the basics of Cinema 4D and I did enjoy it. I was happy that my animation worked although did have an issue when rendering it as the lighting was wrong. However, it did allow me to know some of the basics. 

I didn't follow the tutorial very well because of the complexity of the programme. However, I will look more extensively into Cinema 4D and improve my skills. This was helpful because it highlighted areas I need to improve on as well as revealed what I can possibly do with the programme. 

Photoshop creative workflow:
I find these sessions the hardest to follow and I don't achieve the level of work I would like to within the time I have. I have minimal experience with photoshop and am new to it this year, which is not the case for a lot of the other students. However, this tutorial helped me in some ways although I found it hard to keep up. We used artboards, RAW images and learnt how to layer over images.

Here, I edited an image that was flat and changed the colours. I was familiar with this tool and how to use it but was still useful to refresh my skills.

We then changed it into a monotone image and learnt how to do this so we could layer colour over it or add colour to the monotone picture. 

I added a blueish overtone on my image. This was also interesting to do as I had never done this before and was a good skill to know about. 

I then got a cityscape landscape to work on and this is where I expanded my skills even more. 

I then brightened up the image which revealed a lot of hidden detail compared to the image which was under exposed. Then, 

We then looked at removing large sections of the image by selecting areas of the photograph. When doing this, it doesn't work 100% of the time because of reflections but it is a good skill to know. 

We then learnt how to do this using a very simple line and gradient. It looked effective but was hard to achieve and I was unable to link the PS file to the AI file. However, I did learn a lot from this tutorial although it was difficult for me. 

This is my non-destructive self portrait using three layers. I used these three images: