Recap: 2nd Year Student's and Pathway Choices!

This week has been information overload for me, I've been contemplating my pathway choice for months now, desperately searching for something to tilt me one way or the other... moving image, virtual environments, moving image, virtual environment, moving image, virtual environments e.c.t.

The deal is that I am passionate about both, different stages of my life have been dominated by the two at different times, for example I studied A-level film at college and watched/made film throughout my childhood, but in more recent years a big chunk of my aspirations and spare time has been dreaming about being involved in animation in someway, partly influenced by my increased interaction with games and animated films/shows.

It's a really tough decision, my life could go either way and I really want to make the right choice, I need to make a educated selection, so I'm trying to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages, another thing for me to recognize is that since I started University i have almost been daring myself to choose animation for a challenge and have found it more difficult but more interesting than the others, It's like a personal wrestling match between the two. My cousin has also made a successful career in the animation industry, so there's that as well.

So on Monday we got the the opportunity to listen and Q&A with second year students about there pathway choice, Another interesting matter I noticed was that I only took notes down from the animation speaker (that could say something in its self)

Notes:

Animation:

• Photoshop Crucial
• Do your visual essay in the medium your choosing
• Need some drawing skills
• Do more projects than just uni, enter competitions, challenge friends
• Time management and Pipelining
• Buy a powerful Desktop Computer
• Do a lot of independent research and practice
• Follow current practitioners and techniques
• A lot of hard work, up late at night, but rewarding 
• Don't have to work in groups 
• A lot of time spent in front of computer 
• Decent Pay

All in all it confirmed by thoughts that animation is going to be a hell of a lot of work, with high levels of passion and commitments required, no room for being lazy. I did note that I felt that I would be more confident going into film as its less intimidating and I have past experience in the area, also a plus was that your not on computers constantly.

In conclusion If i can get past the intimidation of VE and embrace that I will have to learn and learn, I'm positive I would find virtual environments enjoyable, I just need to decide if I've got what It takes. Will be confirming shortly.


Calum Whitehead's (Second year student) visual essay:



This has sparked a fair few ideas

Recap #2

Same thing again here, we get given a whole lot of information in a short space of time, so to avoid it evaporating into thin air I'm going to recap on some interesting topics I've learnt in the past few weeks.

Colour and lighting

I learnt that our first understanding of light and colour began with Issac Newton, he experimented with refracted light on a prism, this created components of colour including: red, blue, orange, yellow, green and violet. From his experiments he produced a colour wheel, which has been studied and developed upon by more recent scientist to the present day.

They eye perceives colour as:

• Reflected Light
• Transmitted Light
• A mixture of both

From this I understand what we perceive as colour is a objects absorption of a part of the colour spectrum and then either reflected/transmitted or a mixture back to your eye. It's represented by vibrations, different electromagnetic spectrum vibration change the colour the eye perceives.

We were aslo told about addictive colour, when red, blue and greens are projected over each other, the part where they over lap creates a secondary colours. Computer screens work with addictive colours, if you put a magnifying glass close to your screen you would see thin lines of red, blue and green, this in effect is what creates all the varieties of colour you see on your screen.

There are several colour schemes:

Harmonising colours, colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel often work well with each other, they work of each other. Good to take into account when designing.

Complementary colours, colours that are separated by the colour wheel, when both are used together they tend to create a undesirable effect.

Clashing Colours, colours opposite each other in the colour wheel, unlike complementary colours these colours used together can work well if done right, creating good contrasts, for example black on white.

Hue = The hue is a distinction between red blue and green, this is often presented by the dominant wavelength of an object
Saturation = The purity of a a colour a value of 100 is 100% pure where as a value of 5 is 5% pure, adding more white pigments to a colour reduced the saturation
Brightness = the more black pigments added to colour the lower the brightness.
I Also learnt about lighting in terms of film, where different lights can add different moods and quality to a shot.

Coherence - Light quality

Hard light - Brings up detail, Gives crisp edges, Casts shadows, Gives a focused light source, Is directional

Soft light - Brings up detail, Gives crisp edges, Casts shadows, Is omnidirectional

Tungsten and Daylight -Colour correction and other gels Gels are used to balance light sources Because video does not cope well with mixed colour temperatures
Tungsten – 3200k - reddish
Daylight – 5600k - bluish

I also did a lighting exercise to experiment with different techniques, we used a 3 point lighting system to try and recreate day light in doors with daylight gels. The back and key are hard light, the fill light is soft to fill shadows.

Hexadecimal - A number system with base 16, using the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E and F, useful in computing as numbers in hexadecimal can be stored in four bits. Informal short form used in computing: hex; Of a number, expressed in hexadecimal - It can be used to express colours/

HTML - HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items

Recap #1

So, seeing as I'm not a super-human-cyborg-robot-man I thought it wise to recap on anything significant learnt in seminars and lectures. This way when my later assignments arise, I have a handy backlog of useful information. Also when I word what I have learnt myself, It seems to sink in more than just hearing others speak about it. Well here's number one:

-Image and Composition

We learnt that everyday we are presented with visual information, how we make sense of the information is a key aspect to our intelligence as a society. The importance of visuals surpasses words, This quote elaborates on this perfectly "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak." -John Berger “ Ways of Seeing”. We all associate different shapes with different meaning, which were mentally created at infancy, this in effect changes how different people perceive the world.

What we see depends on the way of seeing, for example we learnt about the swastika, how the image has been around for 100's of year before Hitler, yet its meaning was altered extremely, The swastika was considered a holy symbol for good. This shows how images can be valued differently over time and in different cultures. We also looked at publicity images, how they can portray freedom and happiness to influence society's.

We also touched onto advertising and how were bombarded with up to 600 advertisements a day, It's becoming increasingly hard to filter out the hype and distorted news, we are being more and more manipulated by what we see as there's so much of it. It can even result in higher stress levels and alter our metal health.

We also learnt than when you view anything the process of the human eye and brain is much more complex than you think, the image you perceive is made up of significant structural patterns. composition gives paintings, website, films/animations its structure and meaning, its important as it can make or break a piece of work. composition can consists of Formats, Resolutions, Ratio, Proportion & Balance of an object, The Rule of Thirds (which i already fully understand),  Proximity, Similarity, Direction/movement, Balance, positive and negative spaces and much more...

It's all very theoretical and deep, It will take more research to fully understand the chunk of it, but i certainly have a grasp of the basic principle of image meaning and composition.

#1

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which in its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is usually divided into three branches, which include:

• Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata
• Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
• Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on the people who use them

 #2

Tropes Merriam-Webster gives a definition of "trope" as a "figure of speech." In storytelling, a trope is just that — a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand for a concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly. Above all, a trope is a convention. It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, a linguistic idiom... you know it when you see it. Tropes are not inherently disruptive to a story; however, when the trope itself becomes intrusive, distracting the viewer rather than serving as shorthand, it has become a cliche. Bad screenwriter

Samuel Dobson