The Plotting Cartesian Coordinates Quiz was very different than other quizzes I have taken. I liked it because instead of just answering questions I had to create things to show an understanding of the topic. It was also better because it allowed me to work through the problems. Working with the coordinates was nice because they are very logical. Coordinates are helpful for plotting exact points on a 2d face but now I can plot things in a 3D space using the Z axis. Coordinate planes are also very useful when transforming objects. You can rotate them around certain points or shrink them by a certain factor. It is also very easy to shift shapes up, down or side to side. You could also use a coordinate plane to plot motion. If your shape was to move to the left then you could plot the exact endpoints using the plane.
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Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 also known as Coronavirus, all Durham Public Schools decided that students weren't to go to school until April 6 giving us 3 weeks out of school but not free from work. This impacted classes such as Digital Design and Animation and Adobe Design classes a lot because a majority of the students enrolled in these classes do not have access to the crucial programs needed to complete assignments. These programs are also critical to our learning because we will build off of this first year of learning for the rest of our years in these programs. These classes are also very fast moving and we will work on new stuff every week or sooner so the fact that we have multiple weeks off means that we are missing big concepts. There are ways to work around this though, such as using other programs and watching tutorials. I had to download and use a different program for an assignment. The program allowed me to learn the concepts of the assignment and complete it but by using this other program I am not learning about how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. I began the montage project by choosing a common visual that would appear throughout my montage. This visual was autumn leaves that were mostly yellow. After I had a few videos of these yellow leaves I began to sort and edit the clips into the lengths and order wanted them in. After that I found some sound effects that I thought were fitting to my calm forest theme such as chimes, birds and wind noises. I pieced together the clips and sounds accordingly with transitions and fade ins/fade outs. After I had my full video I added text to the beginning and end to make my title and credits. With my final product I exported it and turned it in.
This new third quarter objective is to get familiar with editing video and audio files. An intro into the film aspect was this assignment to find examples of different camera shots. Then we would take these still frames of a camera angle and put them into a photoshop document. We then labeled each still frame with what movie or video game it came from and what example of a camera angle technique it displayed.. After that we gave a brief description of why the director decided to use this camera angle and what they were trying to display by using it. This was a helpful assignment that could be useful in other situations and especially later in the unit when we begin to work on things like creating and composing videos. After this assignment we worked in Adobe Premiere Rush or Pro depending on which one your computer could run. The assignment was to make a montage of pictures of only one color. After I created a folder I chose the color yellow and began to grab yellow images from royalty free websites. After I had about 30 I went into Adobe Premiere Pro and began to import the images. The video had to be exactly 15 seconds long but I couldn't have each picture last the same amount of time because I had to make the pictures increase in speed and amount of yellow shown. I inserted all of the pictures and properly adjusted the timing as well as the picture's order. After the video was in place I needed to add the credits, a title and an audio track. I didn't manage to finish this project before we had to leave school but I am in a good spot. These two assignments were helpful to see into how certain scenes can be enhanced through the use of different camera angles as well as how to use video editing programs.
The apple didn't quite skate into my project...more glided in on a skateboard. This was our most recent assignment and it was one of the most complicated ones yet. The assignment was based in Adobe Animate which was a new program for me but I liked it. The project entailed making an apple skateboard across a curved foreground and off the screen as well as animating background objects such as clouds and a sun. We had to make many elements of our animation in Adobe Animate using the tools it offered. Some of these objects were: an additional hill, two clouds, the ground and a sun. The apple and the background were imported from Adobe Illustrator. There were a series of videos that I watched while working with the program to help guide me and show me how to work in the program because it was completely new to me. I began by importing the background and adding a couple elements such as a cloud, an extra hill in the background and the ground/sidewalk in the foreground. I then imported the apple and began animating its arms, legs, body and skateboard. After doing all of the animation by following the videos instructions I went back and added a sun and an extra cloud and animated those in addition to the apples animation. All was well until I tried to export the project. Whenever I exported the project or published it as a gif image the apple lost its animation of pumping its legs and arms as well as bobbing its body up and down. This was problematic because it made the apple just glide in and out instead of making the apple appear to skate on and off screen. Other people were having the same problem and we eventually resolved it by exporting it as a different type of file. I got the file turned in correctly and am now beginning to work on our new project. I will also be using Adobe Animate for this and I really like using this program and creating animations more than creating still images. I will probably later give an update on how that project goes. In the end everything in the apple project worked out and I picked up some very useful animating skills.
At the very beginning of the year in Digital Design and Animation I (Game Design) we began to do weekly sketches to improve our drawing skills. This was fun and I enjoy doing pencil sketches so these assignments were very helpful. We began first quarter with human anatomy, we worked on body parts such as hands, legs, arms and facial features such as ears, eyes and noses. Each week we would have a different area in which we would have lots of practice drawings and then one final product. At the end of the first quarter we had to draw an entire person and put together all of the skills we had learned throughout the quarter. Then second quarter we began working on drawing spaceships and vehicles. When we had done all of those drawing we then did a "Master Spaceship" sketch, that compiled all of the work we had done on drawing mechanical features. To continue the pattern of living (first quarter), non-living (second quarter) and now living (third quarter) we are doing monster/creature sketches. I feel that my drawing skills have really improved and that I have benefitted from learning these techniques. I put lots of the shading techniques I learned in the human drawing segment into this most recent "Power Monster" sketch. There are similarities in between the creatures and the human drawings. They both require more round and softer edges where the spaceships have sharp edges and stronger lines. Surprisingly, there were also some similarities in between the spaceships and creatures such as some of the shading and way the wings on both had to be put into perspective. These techniques will come in handy in the future and I am excited to see what we will be drawing fourth quarter.
In my Digital Design and Animation class we have begun discussing different types animation, and their histories. Animation and movies interest me and I have even used some of the animation types we have gone over in class. We are currently working in Adobe Illustrator and doing "traditional" animation. We were assigned to make an animation of a ball that lasted 10 seconds. To do this, we had to make 120 images because we had 1 drawing every 2 frames and we needed roughly 24 frames per second to be up to par with professional animations. This left us with 120 different frames to make our animation. Creating the background setting was fun and making the path for the ball was interesting but then I hit the tedious part of the process...Making each individual frame and saving them individually. We had to adjust our picture to make only one ball show and then save that picture. Then re-hide the ball and make the next one in sequence show up and so on. This process took me about the entirety of one (school) day. There were multiple settings that had to be adjusted with each picture as well as the squashing and stretching of the ball. Squashing and stretching is a technique that is used when animating a bouncing object. The "stretch" is when the ball is in the air and going towards the ground or coming directly out of a bounce. What you have to do to create the illusion of a real bounce is elongate the object for "stretch". For "squash" you have to expand the object outwards and like the name suggests: squash it. You need to do "squash" when your object hits the ground or the frames directly following. I ended up with an animation of a ball falling out of the ceiling in a grocery store and the ball bouncing into a shopping cart. This assignment helped me learn and think about how animations are made as well how to create the illusion of realistic motion.
One of my favorite assignments we did this year was an assignment in Adobe Illustrator. The assignment was to create an "alternate" movie poster (a poster that hadn't been made yet). We had the liberty to choose any movie, design and style for our poster which was one of my favorite parts of the project. I chose to do a poster for "The Grinch" because I liked the book "How the Grinch stole Christmas" a lot when I was younger and it was almost Christmas time when we did the project. The tools I used a lot were the copy and paste tools as well as the arrange tools. I wanted the focus to be in the foreground but I had a lot of things in the background so I had lots of work to do with the arrange tools (moving things forwards and backwards). I used the copy and paste tools to create repetition. An example of this are the houses in the background of my poster. I created three different types of houses and made each one special. Then I copied and pasted them in a random order to create the sense of various houses instead of a repetitious, single house. I looked at some movie posters prior to this project to get a sense of what techniques were used and to get some ideas. I noticed that many focused on a point in the foreground but also had a background scene so that is what I decided to do with mine. I had the Grinch in the foreground on an ice ledge overlooking the town. In the center of the town is a very large Christmas tree with lights and a star on top. The Grinch is shown pulling the lights off of the Christmas tree and piling them on his ledge. On the right side of the tree (the side furthest from the Grinch) all of the houses are dark and gloomy. The houses on the left side (the side closest to the Grinch) are colored with the classic Christmas green and red. This was meant to represent the Grinch "stealing" Christmas by showing that the houses without lights were dark and gloomy while the houses from which the Grinch hadn't stolen from yet were festive and colorful. I had lots of fun with this project because there was lots of creative room and time to experiment. This project really helped me learn how to use Adobe Illustrator and many of its features.
Chibi knights is one of my all time favorite games to play on a computer. It is an open world, campaign style game and it is free! The basic plot is that you are a knight and your quest is to help different people with their needs as well as saving an entire village. There are three main monsters that you must take on to accomplish your mission of saving the village. Although it is a simple game it is very enjoyable for me to play and I used to play this game all of the time. The game was (and still is) very appealing to me because of the unique graphics style and fun gameplay. There isn't much of a menu (just a title and credit screen) the game in general is very user friendly. You learn how to play as well as key information from characters controlled by the computer (AI). You begin as a very basic knight and you can roam around on the main map. If you walk into a building or a person/monster then you cut into a 2D screen where you either fight the monsters or interact with a character. Your options for the controls are jumping and moving with the arrow keys, attacking with your sword by pressing A on the keyboard or using a spell by pressing S on the keyboard. Whenever you defeat a minor monster you gain XP (extra points that work as a kind of currency in the game) and sometimes they will drop you a heart icon (for a health bar recharge) or a potion icon (for spell XP). Once you get a certain amount of XP you can upgrade certain aspects of your knight: Attack (how much damage your sword does), Magic (how much damage your spells do) or Armor (how many hit points, health, you have). As you upgrade these items throughout the game you can see progression in their status. You begin with generic looking armor a rusty sword and an "ordinary" spell. These all become more and more advanced and it is very satisfying to upgrade your knight. This is similar to the making badges activity we did in class because both the badges and these items show clear progression to a higher status. The campaign is pretty creative although it is not very long or complicated I like the aspect that many things in it rely on each other. An example of this is that you can not fight the beasts in any random order you want. You must begin with the Land Beast once you defeat the Land Beast you unlock magical boots that allow you to walk on water. This grants you access to the Island Beast who can only be reached by walking across the water. Once you defeat the Island Beast you get the key to a labyrinth which leads to closer to defeating the final beast. I know what these items do because I have beat the game multiple times but the first time I played I had to figure it out through trial and error and remembering encounters with AI from earlier in the game. I have very little to complain about with this game I have experienced a few minor glitches but those deal less with the game and more with the website I was playing it on. The only thing I would improve if I could would be making the story/game longer. The game is very accessible all you have to do is look it up on Google and play with Adobe Flash. I would give this game a 4 out of 5 stars only for the length. From the exciting music to the amusing and challenging monsters this is an all around great game and I would recommend you play it.
After working a little longer in Adobe Illustrator I have made new conclusions corresponding with the comparison of Adobe Photoshop to Adobe Illustrator in advertisement. I still like Adobe Illustrator better but there are some aspects of Photoshop that you can't beat. One of the biggest ones being the realistic aspect of the Photoshop graphics. Very recently we received an assignment that tasked us with making a realistic cheese burger in Adobe Illustrator (realistic within reason we are after all working in Adobe Illustrator). Although the burgers look realistic enough if you compare them to a burger in edited Photoshop you could easily see which one is real. Besides the fact that could easily tell the difference between a real food product and an Adobe Illustrator food product, you would definitely not want to advertise any food products using Adobe Illustrator (or at least not made by anyone at the level I am at right now) because they look unappetising and off color. If you were trying to advertise a food product in Photoshop you could simply take a nice photo of your food item of choice and then add different filters and lighting styles to make it look even more appealing. On the other side of that Adobe Illustrator would be much better for designing a company logo and putting it on merchandise. If you tried making a logo from scratch in Adobe Photoshop it wouldn't look as graphically appealing due to the realistic nature of it and how most logos are simple and cartoonish. As you can see there are ups and downs to aspects of both programs and you just have to figure out which one works best in your context.
I like vector graphics and think they can be useful in many different situations. There are lots of things you can do in photoshop with bitmap graphics but the thing I like the most about vector graphics is that you can create images completely from scratch without needing anything outside of the program. I also like that in Adobe Illustrator with vector graphics you can create something a little more practical than just a pretty photograph like you do in photoshop. I think that vector graphics are more useful for designing logos and non-realistic type graphics. They could be used by advertising agencies to make fancy advertisements or by designers to label their drawings or make certain points stand out. Even though we have only been working with vector graphics for a little bit I like using them more than bitmap graphics. I think that I can better express what I am trying to do with vector graphics and the Adobe Illustrator program than with photoshop and bitmap graphics. One big upside to the program is that you can work off to the side of the artboards. I really like this feature because it allows me to test things without having them overlap my artwork or interfere with what I am doing. A negative factor to using vector graphics is that there is a longer process to saving them even though they are usually smaller files than bitmap graphics. I like designing logos and seeing logos that other people design and the program/graphics that allow me to do more of this is Adobe Illustrator/Vector graphics.
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AuthorI am Giacomo Hardin and this is my blog. I will be reflecting on my time in Digital Design and Game Art class. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2020
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