This past Friday after hearing from AJ Hanneld who graduated from the creative academy in twenty seventeen I was told to think about take-aways I had from my exposure to the other industries in the creative academy. AJ Hanneld has experience in many different fields and can benefit from the multiple different perspectives. The first module I was sent to, out of the five available, was narrative filmmaking with Venessa. In this module we explored how you can tell a story through the different types of shots you choose to use and filmmaking techniques you decide to implement. The first take away I got from this class was how the framing of a subject can change the mood of a shot. An example of this is an extreme close up shot being used to convey tension whiteout explicitly stating it out right. I can use this principle in my program of graphic design to create a sense of movement or tension. We briefly went over this idea in my intro to design class. If you put your subject running off the page or in close proximity to another subject it can create the feeling of movement or tension. Another way I can use this principle to create tension is with the relationship between figure and ground. What I mean by this is if your figure and ground both carry equal weight in the composition in can create a feeling of tension. Even the placement of the subject in relation to the composition can be used to create tension. A subject in the middle of a composition will not create as much visual tension as a subject that is slightly or radically off center. The second take away I got from Venessa’s narrative filmmaking class is how you can use the size of the subject to convey the surroundings better to the audience. In her class this is in reference to an establishing shot where the subject is very small and the viewer is meant to take in the surroundings more. This principle can be used in graphic design with the relationship between the figure and the ground. We also briefly went over this idea in Jill’s Intro to Design class where it is one of the principles of gestalt. In graphic design you can use your figure and ground to together to make the viewer see something that might not actually be there. This happens because the human brain wants to find similarities and patterns whenever it can. The most famous example of this being the image where the two faces shows at a profile view create the shape of a cup with the contrast between them and the ground. The second module I’ve been, if only briefly, is Eric’s After Effects class. I’ve only had one class with Eric so far but we briefly touched on how to make animations feel more lifelike with principles like anticipation. While graphic design and animation are very different fields a lot of graphic design can overlap with motion design, which is becoming increasingly more prominent as graphic design becomes more digital.
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