Reflection on Creative Careers Fair

Yesterday (24th Feb) our c lass went to Bradford University for a couple of workshops/lectures. The trip started with us arriving at University at about 10.30am where we proceeded to look around the different stalls about different courses available at the Uni and stall about jobs - though ironicly the job centre stall was empty.

At 11am we headed upstairs and into the Great Hall ready for our first lecture/workshop Phillip Charles. Phillip was the founder of PiPeline Productions -http://www.pipelineproductions.co.uk/ -which set up and now run music workshops mainly targetted in using "rap workshops". These rap workshops are aimed at teaching things that would otherwise be unteachable. The ywork in both schools, colleges, community centres etc. Phillip talks to young people on a level that can be understood and about getting into the music business and from an enterprising asspect. Pipeline Productions also works on Graffiti artwork as well as music/rap.


For our second worshop we went into Small Hall for the workshop on Animation. It was led by - Bill Beaumont who works for Distant Future - http://www.distantfuture.co.uk/ - and his collegue Rozi Fuller - http://www.rozifuller.co.uk/ . We all split inot groups of 3 and fours and each had a table, play-doh, laptop and a camera for us to work with to create a stop motion animation. The people in our group was myself, Harrson and Scott..The animation would be entered in for a competition that would be judged by various poeple from the Creative Careers Fair. Bill was so impressed by our groups' ideas and skills/competence he thought some of our animations had a good chance of winning the competition and the prize of £25. Bill was also so impressed he is wantin gto come to the college to work with us again as he is keen to develop links with is based on the standards of the students work.
The group I was in had the idea of recreating the T-1000 form Terminator 2 in play-doh form. We thought that this would be a good idea as the T-1000 moves fluidically. So we started with what looked like a puddle and then as the frames went on, this puddle grew and changed into a person which was then quickly squished back down by a giant hand.

We put the images into a program called Monkey Jam - http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/ -it works similar to how Flash works. However the program to me seemed a little too slow and difficult to use at first. I would have prefered to work with Flash to be hinest.



For a reflection on our video. We had several technical difficulties which made making our animation very difficult. Cameras not working, then finding there was no memory in the cameras, them not conecting to the laptops. In the end we had to borrow a camera that our college group brought with us to do the animation. But overall for saying we only had limited time to make/produce our animation due to the technical difficulties, I don't think it went too badly and think that the idea we came up with was quite good.







Comparing Flash to Monkey Jam I much prefer using Flash. This is mainly because I have had more experience at using flash and less than an hour working wiht Monkey Jam. I kow muhc more what i'm doing on Flash. While Flash overall is more complex and Monkeyjam is easier to use once you know what you are doing. I still would rather use Flash.
Flash has alot more buttons and complex actions that can be used while Monkey Jam appeared to have fewer buttons and commands.

3D Ship Second Post

Since the last post I have finished off the bridge - extruding it and welding the vertexes together - and put it witht the main body of the ship.

The next thing I will work on for the ship will be its engines. Once I have them completed, I will add a few extra details to the hull and will then add the skin for the ship.

3D Ship Development

Today I started to make my 3D ship based on teh concept art I have been working on.
I started by making a box shipe primitive and converting it into an editable mesh. Once I had done that I started to extrude the faces and edges of teh ship carefully to make it into the shape of a coffin.

I then went through each of the vertexes making sure none of them were out of place and where possible I welded them together to make it smoother and easier to work with.

The next thing I worked on was a second box shape again made into a rectangle shape. I then stareted to extrude that and work witht eh vertexes to make it smaller and to changed it so it had smooth edges. After doing that I repeated what I had done with the main body of the ship and welded together vertexes where needed.



Below is a version of that box extruded and smoothed. I am still working on extruding it to make it more like a tomb stone. This will then be placed with the main body of the ship to become its bridge.

Icons Review

<== My Icons

Over the course of this project I have had to research the market about the different phones such as iPhones, Google Phones etc and compare them. I then had to reseach iconography and symbols and how they are used to represent different things - games and themes for example - so that I could start to understand them and use that knowledge to create my own icons - which are shown above.

The project started with researching icons and what they mean and how they are used in life.

As i researched the icons I learned about how they are used, what icons can represent and this led on to the next section - Themes. After I researched about icons in general, I then moved on to how icons can represent themes and how they do that.

The four major themes I identified in the collage above are War - represented by images such as soldiers, guns, explosions etc. Sci-fi -represented by aliens, ufo's and space. Fantasy - represented by images such as wizards, magi, elves and monsters, things that wouldn't exist in the natural world. The final theme on the collage is Horror which is represented by icnos/images such as zombies, monsters, graveyards, demons, darkness. The fifth theme that I identified was one of my own based on what I was researching for Rob's class for my game. The fifth theme was of Vampires Rock -

The next section I worked on was researching a bit about the company Apple and comparing the different iPhones and Google Phone to see that functions and uses each has.

Once I knew about iphones, how icons are used and that they can represent the different genres, i then started on concept work to create my own icons. I began that concept by drawing different shapes that could house the imges to create the icons - for example a square would be an obvious choice for an icon shape. I drew several shapes and then evaluated their strengths and weaknesses for the shapes until I decided on teh final choice of shape that I would use in my own icons.

After decideing on my shapes I then had to draw concept art for each of the themes and then evaluate those concept images again on their strengths and weaknesses as a potential icon. I did this for all five of my themes, each one having four concept images.

Having decided on what I would do my final icons as I drew those images up as final concept art and would then recreate them on the computer.

Generally I stuck with my concept art when I created my icons.
FANTASY
HORROR

SCI-FI
VAMPIRES ROCK
WAR

As stated, I generally kept with how my concept art was, the only change to it was for the war icon. Originally I was going to do a bullet, but after several tries at creating a bullet, I decided it wouldn't look very good. So instead I used my photoshop skills to create the effect of bullet holes on a brushed metal plate to represent war.

Overall I think the project went fairly well, the only way I can see it being better is that I have to work on my artistic skills, that way I can create better concept are and better final images.