For this week’s assignment, my subject for a little world will be this small artificial pond located at someone’s house. I took this photo during early winter when it was still chilly during the day, and gray clouds always around.
Despite only housing around 40 gallons of water, I’d like to think of this as a little ocean for organisms too small for the human eye to see. The murky, algae filled water contrasts with the myriads of stones and pebbles around the edges, which makes for interesting subjects in each section of the photo. Though still chilly, a small population of duckweed manages to live despite the other plants having long lost their leaves in the autumn.
I interpreted this as life always finding a way to perceive no matter the conditions. I think it would be interesting to reexamine this pond with a microscope to get a better look at what lies beneath the surface.
Not much of a football fan, but I conveniently found this video featuring all(?) of the ads featured during the Super Bowl. I’m not used to viewing ads with actual budgets, so seeing the quality of some of these was a suprise. Some of my favorites include:
I’ll be reviewing the State Farm skit, which I saw ads on twitter hyping the video about weeks prior to the Super Bowl.
Rest in pieces house in the background
I thought that the stop-motion effect was unique, and definitely kept my attention while I admired the set pieces and amount of people in each scene. I thought that the humor was well-written, and I think that this direction would work for State Farm’s ads outside of the Super Bowl, but less elaborate.
Another ad that I liked was the Popeyes ad featuring Ken Jeong getting excited about Popeyes wings.
All those wings, and they still need drones to fly
I appreciated how the color scheme remains cohesive throughout the video, featuring subtle colors with the bright color of Popeyes’ signature orange drawing me in. Seeing this ad put me in the mood for some wings. Unfortunately, the closest Popeyes is like 2 miles from my house ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Maybe I’ll just shoot an Amazon drone from the sky and deep dry that instead.
For this assignment, I conceptualized some ideas for a personal project I could design that would provide me with experience in creating improved versions in the future, in addition to having an elaborate piece of work and process details to add to my portfolio. Some ideas that I had in mind for projects includes:
1. A poster for a local event 2. A video featuring a hobby 3. A slideshow for a meeting 4. A catalog for a grocery store 5. A family of icons for signage 6. A menu for a favorite restaurant 7. A website mockup for a service 8. An advertisement for a product 9. A social media post about an event 10. An infographic about an interesting topic 11. A magazine cover for a niche publication 12. A brochure about an interesting location
I’m capable of doing all of these with the level of graphic/motion design knowledge that I currently have, but the option I would like the most on my portfolio would be the magazine cover.
This was initially a small project that I worked on as part of the portfolio piece for entering the SCCA program.
I believe that an improved version of this cover with some pages would demonstrate to potential employers my knowledge of combining vivid imagery, suitable colors, and well-balanced typography into one condensed project.
Some skills that I would like to gain by improving this cover would be to redesign it using InDesign, which would be preferred for working with large sections of text. I would also like to design around 2-4 pages along with a back cover to ensure to the viewer that the typography remains consistently readable throughout all the pages.
For this assignment, I chose to feature this animated logo that I created for the After Effects module featuring a shopping cart rolling into view with some item categories that shoppers may want to keep their eyes on when shopping.
One of the logos of all time
Background: When thinking of a logo that I wanted to animate, I thought of some of the franchises that I was interested in. I settled on Nook Shopping, a digital shopping app for the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I had a week to complete the assignment, so I had plenty of time to do everything.
Actions: To start, I began searching for assets that I could use. Though the icons featured in the video were available as PNGs that I could import to After Effects immediately, they turned out to be low quality and looked blurry when enlarged. I downloaded them and traced them in Illustrator to create scalable icons. I had to repeat this process a few times, but it wasn’t too time consuming considering that the icons were easy to reproduce. The background was also recreated in Illustrator using the leaf icon as a brush. I also had to edit a picture in Photoshop before sending it to Illustrator, which was quick and easy.
Lastly, I sourced the sound effects and background music from YouTube using a simple YouTube to mp3 website. The time needed to create and source all the assets was around 2 hours or so.
With all the assets ready to use, I imported everything into After Effects and began animating. I personally didn’t find the animating process to be too difficult, although it did take an hour or 2 to get the positioning correct on some of the movements.
Results: The video was submitted on time, and received positive reactions from the class. The project gave me a decent amount of experience in creating my own assets and using After Effects for animation. Overall, it was a project that I’m proud of, and would replicate given the opportunity.
