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.
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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.
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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