What is a Line...

Here are the 75 photos of the items that I want to use for this brief.
They are roughly ordered by similar shape but they go in a kind of wave so that the line is more interesting.

The images are quite small, so clicking them will link to a bigger view.

I have also made some tests for drawings instead of animation:

The top example is a really basic hand drawn effect on photoshop using the brush tool. The effect is quite messy and doesn't look like a quality neat piece of work, but I think that it could work with a bigger image and a smaller brush.

The bottom image was made with Adobe Illustrator. It creates a perfect line but is really time consuming. With 75 images it would take way too long to turn every image into a vectorised line drawing, especially with full detail.
In the above example I tested using just the outline, but it doesnt give enough detail to properly distinguish what the object is.

What is a Line...

Here are some other styles of animation which I experimented with to come up with a final idea for the brief:

What is a Line...

Heres a quick test of possible animation style for the What is a Line brief.
It shows a coke can morphing into a pint glass and then into a bottle of energy drink (really quickly)

Visual Language - Book Fair

As part of the module we were asked to make 20 books in 'hot dog fold' style to be sold at the annual book fair and to represent Graphic Design at the college. The books had to be either A3 or A4 when unfolded and the only limitation for content was that it should be based on our photographs for visual language from before christmas.
My theme was '3' and before christmas I made my theme into taking photos of signs with 3 of their leters cropped to the right side of the frame.
To keep the book simple and effective I decided to continue with this theme but take more photos and then categorise the photographs so that they have some order.

My first thought was to get loads of different photographs, categorise them by colour and then make each of the 20 books a different colour. When I started this idea I found out quickly that there are a lot of black, grey, white and red signs but almost no purple, pink or green signs to be found. Another issue was that it would have taken thousands of photographs to create this idea the way that I imagined it.

I quickly changed the idea to organising by alphabetical order but again realised that some letter are more common than other and I couldn't find a single way to get an X at the beggining of a sign.

So again I changed back to colour organisation but this time I decided to make just 3 different types of book and then reproduce this set of three books 7 times to make 21 books overall (consisting of 7 sets of 3). Each book would be double sided so that it could be reversed and they would go from red through orange and to yellow, then from yellow to green to blue, from blue to greyish colours and then through to black and finally white.
I worked out that I needed 384 photographs of signs to create this idea so I got photographing.

I found that there were still a lot more reds, blacks and whites than any other colour for signs, but as long as I had 384 to fill the books then it wouldn't really matter because each book would still flow into the next.

The next problem that I came accross was how to lay the photographs out so they worked in a book and in a poster, and in the end I actually opted to make them work as posters over books because the visual appeal of seeing all the photos together was much nicer than page by page. Each 'poster' had 8 x 8 photographs on each side. Here are the final posters:

They do still work in a kind of book form, but they do not have the cut across the middle of the page which lets them fold into a proper hot dog fold because that would make a lot of the images turn upside-down.
Here is each book in everyway that it could be displayed (unfolded then refolded up):

And here are the books lined up:

Visual Language 11

In this session we had to bring a book which we could manipulate.
The book that I had was a strange non-fiction book called "The Other Ariel" about a poet and some of her poetry that was not published after her suicide or something like that. From reading short extracts and the blrub of the book I got the idea that it was all about secrets and hidden things along with violence, abuse and generally death.
The task was to manipulate the book (folding, gluing, cutting etc) to give it more of a visual representation of what the book was about.
My book was pretty much entirely negative but I decided to focus on the idea of hidden things and secrets.

I decided to cut into the book to reveal negative words and words related to the themes of the book but leaving the rest of the book in tact (kind of like revealing the secret, hidden words which describe what the book is actually about).
Here are some photographs which show what I mean.

Visual Language 10

In this session we focussed on english language definition. In pairs we defined a few terms (For example Verb, Adjective, Noun) and made sure that we had the understanding right by putting them into grammatically correct sentences. I was in a pair with Ceara.

After reminding ourselves of the definitions we went on to do a few small exercises where we shortened some articles and stories into 160 characters (including spaces and punctuation) which is the length of a single SMS text message.


I think this exercise was useful for realising exactly how much writing you need to communicate a message. This is a prblem that I have a lot as you can probably see by my long posts and I think that this session should have hopefully helped me see that I don't always have to write everything for it to be understood

Visual Language 9

In this session I had to take some aspects from the photographs in the previous week and then take 50 photos incorporating that aspect. I really liked the way that some photos were cropped to show 3 of something even though there were more than 3 of whatever it was. I started out just by using this exact aspect, taking pictures of anything that I could get 3 out of using cropping. I quickly realised that alot of the photos were the same and unless you looked really carefully they rarely looked like a set or even like they shared any value.
Looking back over the photos I found a few where I had cropped words to show only 3 letters and I really liked how those photos looked really similar. At this point I realised that the positioning of the objects within the frame was really important and chose to focus on cropping 3 letters of a word and positioning them on the left hand side of the frame.



I think that this worked really well overall. Some work a lot better than others, usually because of the perspective changing the view of the image asnd the proportions. I really like the way that the image sits in the frame on the right hand side and the contrasting colours of each picture makes them all stand out and clash in a way that I think looks really appealing in a collage kind of way. It is quite obvious that they are a set and share the common aspects of type, 3 letters and format within the frame.
This exercise has definitely taught me alot about hoe important frame is, but also that you have to concentrate on perspective too such as where you are standing when you take the picture, the distance from the object and the height of the photograph.

Visual Language 8

For this visual language session the group was split into pairs and each pair was given a subject matter such as 'circles', 'switches' or the number '3'.

I was in a pair with Jamie and we were given the number '3'
We decided to focus anything that we could associate with the number 3 such as a 3 of one thing or finding the actual number 3. We had to take 100 photographs between us, so we each took 50 and then put them together.
These are the 50 final photographs that I used:

Visual Language 7