Shoe Done It?

I've been very very busy the past fortnight, reading up on filming techniques courtesy of 'MUSBERGER, R.B., Single-Camera Video Production Fifth Ed.', going out and practising filming and sound capture, learning the pitfalls of filming in winter (the shorter days and unreliable lighting, and cold, wet, cold footwear.)

Thankfully the practice has paid off to a degree and with the help of my fellow crew we made the toe-dipping-into-the-pool of a film that is 'Shoe Done It'.

Each of us had the same raw footage from the shoots (taking place throughout the week from Monday-Thursday) and were given artistic license in our edits.

Anyways, here's my interpretation of the footage that we'd taken, compressed (rather loosely with hindsight) into a 5 minute short.

(And yes, I'm acting in my own film once again!)

Wild West Notts.

This is the product of a whole day's planning an filming (on a tight time constraint, otherwise we would've spent more time on the shooting stages)

I had the idea after watching the famous ending of 'The good, the bad, and the ugly' and thought it'd be interesting to put my own twist on it.
So, with that in mind, me and my Multimedia buddy Will set off on an epic film making journey to the Nottingham arboretum.

This is the result of that journey.

Our hour with the Panasonic camera yesterday!

This was Will's interpretation of our work, hopefully I can give editing a go once I've downloaded the software.. *Curse this sluggish studentcom connection :(

Moving image.

Will and I met up this weekend to have a go with the Panasonic film camera and other bits of kit, during our time with the camera we had a go at producing a day-to-night effect, a depth of field draw, an emotive zoom amongst others.

Rule of thirds

Here's a snap that I took on my Canon 400D, attempting to put the rule of thirds into practice.

Animations

Over the past couple of weeks I've been learning both photographic techniques (Tim Grey: Color confidence :the digital photographer's guide to color management) as well as introducing and expanding my knowledge of After effects in order to create some animations for my course.

I will be posting the videos to my Vimeo account, and will begin embedding the videos into this post once fully uploaded.

I also used only my own photography, and the music track was a free download, "Thievery Corporation: DC 3000."


The Boss from Joshua McBride on Vimeo.
'The Boss' is actually the second iteration of an earlier piece titled 'ninjas'. I felt that the piece progressed through introducing additional keyframes, along with experimenting with using HSL values on a black background. Through using a blank background, I felt that I could draw more focus to the characters and create video game arcade style. Possible future iterations could include a panning or even interactive background. 


Mountain Fighter from Joshua McBride on Vimeo.
'Mountain Fighter' feels like an evolution from 'The Boss' in that it maintains the wacky character style but adds greater depth in the background and mood of the work. I also put considerably more effort into adding denser keyframes to keep the paths and timing precisely controlled. Another touch was altering the beginning and end points for the music track, though I did find it hard to adjust the audio settings and the options offered here were, on the surface at least, inferior to some other video production software.



This was my second render of a similar animation, this time using an extra object and prolonguing the initial shot.

During my time with Adobe After Effects, I found a number of things that I did and didn't like.
I felt that for the most part that the program was intuitive, and most of the time I'd get the outcome that I was after.
However certain aspects of the production process were quite annoying, such as losing all keyframes if the timer icon was deselected.
Fortunately, many online tutorials are available, as well as literary aids from the library- I found that combining these resources with my own experimentation allowed me to produce interesting and varied outcomes which hopefully connect with the audience in some way.
Whilst rather tedious, I found it worth my time to look at the timeline on a microscopic timescale, as this allowed me to tweak any stray movement arcs in my sequences as well as get the exact end result that I wanted.
Overall I feel that my second 'Mountain Fighter' attempt has build a lot on from my initial 'The Boss' project, and hopefully I can continue to improve over future projects!

Hallowe'en pumpkin carvings

My pumpkin, based on some sketches, WIP

The final pumpkins, mine is on the left, and on the right is Imogen's Tim Burton inspired design

Gotta keep those creative juices flowing, even outside of work!

CRAP!

Hi all, despite the fact that this post may look like an expletive, it does in fact have great relevance to the graphic design (particuarly within screens) process.

The lovely CRAP stands for these four graphic design principals.
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity (I keep thinking 'Position')

The idea is that in order to create work that communicates well with the intended audience, we must bear in mind the four aspects of creating an effective layout in a piece/webpage and thus achieve maximum impact on our audience.

One question I have is that, if these design principals were adhered to, would a satisfactory result be guaranteed 100% of the time?

Futhermore, how do other factors such as colour theory, content and context affect the overall impact of a design, and does CRAP reduce the importance of these?

Finally, how does CRAP explain the one-hit wonders of the design world, and how can it be used to explore past, present and future designs?

Links to some sites that I enjoyed.

The Young Guns awards for advertising, I particuarly liked the beer adverts.

CGhub.com, an excellent source of inspiration for many multimedia disciplines.

The New Boston is an enthusiastic youtube tutor for all things tech, he has some excellent Adobe After Effects tutorials for beginners, thanks to Bartholomew for the recommendation!

The photoxels website contains some simple but really effective tips for photography, and really helped re-enforce what I have been reading in 'Color Confidence- The digital photographer's guide to color management: Tim Grey'

Nate 'Blunty' Burr AKA Blunty3000 is one of my favourite tech bloggers, and covers a number of subjects including media, gaming, photography and gadgets.

Another blogger is Bobby Chiu, a prominent freelance concept artist, designer, teacher and joint owner of Imaginism Studios in California. I love Bobby's style and his passion for his work is inspirational.

Also, thanks to Edgar for his shoutout to ShutterFreaks.

Interactive website update

Hello all, I've recently completed my second website, which uses the idea of mixing the environment of Nottingham city with the humor of a character based chase.

The principal idea is that you play the role of a chicken who has robbed a bank, and is trying to escape the police- it consists of a number of shots with alternate versions appearing once certain paths are followed.

After gaining feedback on the website, I have decided to complete another iteration but add more pages to set a clearer context, add a sense of urgency and hopefully fix any continuity and visual consistency issues.

One issue in particular the contrast between using the character, arrows and colour for navigation, I need to do some deep thinking regarding the navigational consistency of the site.




Once these have been implemented I will test the site live in firefox, make tweaks here and there and finally hand in the complete version.


Here's a link to my final version :)

Interactive Web Design

Spent a couple of hours playing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5, and finally I seem to be grasping how to set out the pages with working links.

Next up I'll use copyright free images from the Hubble Telescope and create an interactive cosmos page just to get more used to the software.

Here's a shot of the index page.

Whilst creating the website was a valuable experience, it doesn't meet the narrative aspect of the project and therefore I will put it on the sideline and begin brainstorming and storyboarding the next site.

However it might be viable to create a fully functioning and accurate space related page for educational purposes, and I might revisit the idea in the future.

My Design Process

For my last design process, I produced a photoshop painting for a video game fan-art competition.
My initial process started with me writing down the criteria for the work, and brainstorming ideas about, until I eliminate to the final idea(s) depending on the time constraints, I then continue by creating a rough composition in my sketchbook, which I tend to use a lot for concepting and just getting my creativity flowing.

Biro drawing scan from sketchbook.

I then scanned the initial sketch into photoshop and used this as a background layer from which I created a digital sketch over the top of the background using the fantastic layers tool, many tips and techniques that I used in my design process were picked up from the digital tutorials of Bobby Chiu, a freelance concept artist, I also referred to 'Bold Visions: The Digital Painting Bible', Gary Tonge (2008), and 'The Skillful Huntsman: Visual development of a Grimm tale at Art Center College of Design', Designstudio|press/ Scott Robertson et al (2005).

When creating the composition, I regularly used the 'flip' command to horizontally reflect my drawing so that I could re-assess the image through fresh eyes- this is the modern equivalent of holding a mirror to one's work to check that the composition balances well. I referred to some of my previous A level art experience when composing the work.

Once a composition was developed, I moved onto establishing base tones and light sources for the piece, this was possibly one of
the longer parts of the process, as the setup on this layer can affect the direction of the entire piece.

The initial tonal/lighting render.

Upon finishing this stage, I then began blocking in basic colour schemes, attempting to create a complementary and pleasing colour composition, the colours went through numerous iterations.

The colour balance attempt, before final touches were added.

 I used a mix of my education as well as online research to decide upon the final colour composition, though I still experimented with different approaches, as I wanted to test a warm and a cold composition.



I posted the unfinished screenshots to my DeviantArt page, as well as asking for the advice of people I knew, once I had recieved enough feedback I made a note of what needed adjusting and set about it in my final passes where I added details, effects and general artistic touches to round the piece off to a satisfactory degree in time for the competition deadline.

The Final Piece.

The final image won joint first place and earned me a mention as well as a nice collection of goodies.

In relevant future work, I will be looking back on my experience in this project, and build on my skills to hopefully create better and better work.

Pin hole cameras

Today we experimented with possibly the purest form of photography, the home-made pin hole camera-can, the device essentially allowed light through a small pin prick in the side of a can.

This light then reacted with the photosensitive paper lining inside the can creating a wide field, sharp 8 second exposure of whatever lay in front of the can.

Here is an unprocessed photograph of my initial outcome.

Here is the same image after some photoshop retouching which hopefully brings it a bit more life.

Whiteboard animation!

Today was the first proper day of the induction and we've spent a couple of hours creating a 10 second whiteboard animation, inspired by pionerring work such as this video from kristoferstrom:



What I loved about whiteboard animation was the simplicity of the medium and the underlying principles used to create the work, however I found that extensive practice may be required in order to achieve a smooth and cohesive framerate, as well as a second-by-second storyboard for the events in the animation.

We'll get to see what our compiled work looks like next week hopefully!

And thanks to the miracle of time travel, here is the full reel of everyone's work:


Our part runs from 0:44 to 0:48, it should've run for 10 seconds but I think we got carried away in the content of our animation and ended up neglecting the total number of frames, perhaps a more satisfactory effect could be achieved in future by either adding more intermediate frames, spending more time on the piece, or dropping the framerate from 25FPS down to about 10FPS, as showing the reel at 10FPS should increase the runtime from 4 seconds to 10seconds, which was the original intended runtime.

I'm glad we've done this though, as I once heard that the person who makes no mistakes often makes nothing at all :)
(As we later found in the 'Failing Forward' seminar- Damn I love being right!)

My review of a NTU Multimedia graduate

  Whilst browsing the NTU Multimedia alumni list, I came across the work of Philip Howlett.

  I immediately recognised the 'The Second City' flythrough that had captured my imagination during the Multimedia open day exhibition, I found that the outstanding level of finesse and technical ability shown in the work was a great example of how to achieve in the virtual environments aspect of the course.


The Second City from Philip Howlett on Vimeo.

  On his website, Mr. Howlett thanked fellow NTU Multimedia graduate Robert Anthill for his assistance on the after effects on the flythrough video, what I found on Mr. Anthill's website blew my mind.


  Things that particuarly impressed me in the portfolio were the levels of technical skill in multiple facets of media (I guess that's why they call it Multimedia?)
  He showed an ability to express himself in a range of forms, from striking photography, to varied and engaging CGI as well as innovative video.

  The variety and inspirational impact of the work from Mr. Anthill showcases all of the things that I believe I'm going to love about Multimedia once I start the course, as every one of the areas that he has covered in his portfolio holds a great interest for myself.


  Previous to University I studied at John Taylor High School where my Art tutors assisted me in pushing my creative boundaries and honing my artistic skillset.

A sample of my creative work can be found in my portfolio.
http://jbmcbride.daportfolio.com/

Just found this on CGS, interesting stuff!

The Ulrech School of Art has come up with this really amusing animation project, there's some info and you can watch their final outcome after the jump.