Week 4 Tutorial

Temporal Identity: Japan.

Image Credits: jodimarr, Kanko*, kalandrakas, Pet_r, Conveyer belt sushi, Conveyer belt sushi, OiMax, Stefan

This week's task was to create a temporal identity on our favourite place. Initially, I wanted to do this on my bedroom, illustrating my favouritism by having bright, fun colours and plush toys bouncing across the screen. However, this idea was squashed when I discovered there was not much helpful imagery to complete this task (either on flickr or through my digital camera) so instead, I chose to do this exercise on one of my favourite places: Japan.

In this piece I tried to capture the beautiful, traditional nature and buildings Japan has in contrast to the westernisation they have adapted into their culture, and encouraged this through the tag line "Japan: A Country of Contrast".

While I am pleased with the concept and overall outcome, the timing fails to match the mood I intended and some of the animations are static. Also, the interstitial pauses between each image are generally too long and unneccessary. I need be more creative in how I animate my images. I could have given this task more time in order to correct the timing, but I instead chose to start work on the final assignment and next week's task. Learning how to utilise 'masks' in After Effects was the intention of this week's task and I do feel as though I have grasped how to construct and utilise them effectively.

Week 3 Tutorial

Audio: eightprime's "Chameleon Phonics"

This task took a lot more time and effort than I anticipated. This was mostly due to the fact that there is a copious amount of options for animating text and thereafter, endless ways to manipulate them. The fast paced audio also deterred me from completing this task, but with much experimentation, this is what I came up with. Some of the parts are not in sync with the audio and it could be greatly improved by adding more dynamic elements, such as shifting angles and conjoining words (something I am not confident or patient enough to attempt just yet), to the animated text, but overall I am pleased with the outcome. I attempted to follow the dialogue, without being too literal, only picking certain words to illustrate and maintain rhythm.

Week 2 Tutorial

Exercise 01: Spacial Montage


This was my first attempt to create a Spacial Montage with the images we had been given in Photoshop. While I had used Photoshop before, I found this was good way to understand the use of layers. I feel the composition is not as structured as it could have been as I chose my images with little consideration and thought to the concept or message I wanted to portray. As the purpose of this exercise was to experiment with cropping images and space, I focused my attention solely to those aspects. If I were to repeat this exercise with the same images and layout, I would raise the building on the left higher and reduce the negative space in the top left corner. I would also experiment with the colours and possibly add textures or filters to blend the images together.

Exercise 02: Temporal Montage

My first attempt using After Effects. In this piece, there is no flow or meaning intended for the images and thus, this is not a professional or appealing composition. However, as it was merely my attempt to learn how each tool works and how I can manipulate images, creativity was not overly required for this task. I look forward to creating much more meaningful compositions and, in future, will clean up and crop my images prior to animating them.