Week 9: What colour is pastiche?

A two tiered tutorial exercise today. It again redirected my thoughts back towards visualising the Distinctive Sound clip. I'd already decided to use a blend of 50s educational video conventions and urban stencilled elements. This exercise helped me to realise how to go about giving it the 50s look.

In considering the mood board for the 1950s I realised that it wasn't so much about colour rather than the lack thereof. The dated look usually came by black and white, or slightly yellowed tones. Also to portray the idea of inferior video, throwing in artificial scratches, patches and hairs works. There would be an interesting sort of vignette to each frame, and occassionally frames would jump, giving the impression of instability. To me sound played a big part in the creation of the 50s look, in ways like the loud, slightly fuzzy music and dialogue that always sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of the president.

I also picked up a fascinatingly interesting resource through the tutorial notes in relation to how colours communicate different things. It seems like the kind of document I could carry with me for many years, that kind of brought all of my knowledge of colour together in one document.

Week 8: The Joy of Motion Tracking

I enjoyed this lesson to be honest. It was relatively easy to keep up with the pace and I guess I'm finally getting used to the program, to the point where I don't hate it. While I like the skills I picked up today, I'm not yet sure where I could apply them.

Two exercises today!

Week 7: The Public Holiday

This is where this exercise was supposed to go.

Week 6: Playing With Graffitti

The week where we were given some grafitti and had to doll it up in a movie. More importantly though this is the week where in the PDF document we were given some tips on achieving the Sin City effect in our images. This also is a good way, when combined with the multiply effect in the layers panel, to create the stencil graffitti effect. This is in fact very useful to the idea I've had in my head since the start of this semester, but put on the backburner for the mere fact that I didn't think I could use the song. I recently discovered that a previous student sought permission from a famous artist to ues their song, so I figured it was worth a shot. Perhaps I should send Wally Debacker that email...

Week 5: The Client Pitch

Mad Mack's deals are MAD! Especially on apocalyptic motorbikes. See? I found the funny in that exercise. That's the only funny I found in this whole week.

The thing with me is that there IS no creative process if I'm spending too much time being annoyed and bothered. Yes I'm still stuck on that. I do that both personally and professionally. I'm useless.

Week 4: Introduction to Temporal Identity

So we were set the task of giving our favourite location a tagline today. In the end I chose the beach (I do love the beach) and it was pretty easy to give it the tagline of "Get swept away".

Don't think about it too hard. I know getting swept away at a beach is a bad thing.

But once I got to that, I kind of ground to a halt. I was really reaching the point of annoyance with the software. I just don't UNDERSTAND IT. I could say that I'm one of those tempermental creative types that needs to have a peaceful mind to make anything remotely artistic. I could also say that I'm lazy and irritated that I have to get up at 6am every Friday and get annoyed as all hell.

I'm the kind of person who likes the best of both worlds.

Week 3: Introduction to Kinetic Text

This was the first week that I really got to have a good play at After Effects. The idea that I can link objects like text and their behaviors to patterns in audio waves. Obviously that's the key to getting the final assignment at its best. Yes, I'm already thinking about it. It's the sort of assignment I've always wanted to do. If I could I would love to do the song A Distinctive Sound by Gotye, but I'm aware that it's a copyright issue.

I'll work on it.