...photoshop, shmotoshop

 Oh for the love of all things holy, where the hell has my post gone?!? I wrote lovely, clever witty things here and they've buggered off.. again.

Right, here goes.. again.

.....

Finally, I've found something to do for the Live Brief section of the module! Huzzah!

The 'Live Brief' section of the module at last makes sense to me. The idea is that you pitch for (and created at least production work) an outside 'Client' as well as obtaining some form of 'work experience' - the work experience part can be covered by helping a 3rd Year with their final Graduation film.

'Client Based'

For the 'Client' based section I have pitched for a health and safety brief proposed by the University. The brief was to come up with an idea for a new interactive way to test both staff and students on relevant health and safety protocol within the University and office environment. This was due to the fact that on the whole, health and safety protocol tests are ridiculously boring. To the point you may actually wish to injure yourself in the process. I liked this so much more than I thought and though I still have quite a few things to do for hand in, I now know exactly what and how.

List!

• Colour palette
• Area designs x 2
• Scoreboard design
• Pop Up Quiz design
• Simple animatic to demonstrate how the interactive part would work

Ideally I'd have liked to have got a basic interactive sample working but unfortunately the Interactive Media students can't help out before hand in (though the brief is ongoing and they will be available to work together before the brief deadline) so the next best thing is to create a simple animatic that will give an idea of how the game play would roll out.

3rd Year Film

For the work experience section I was beginning to get worried as all the 3rd years asking for help wanted things done that I don't know how to do. Luckily I've since been able to find some bits and pieces to do with Rachel Clement, colouring body parts in Photoshop. For her final film she is making photoshop 'body parts' which will then be linked and animated in AfterEffects as though they were puppets. This will save so much work and time as she's only had to create 'dozens' of body parts rather than 'thousands' of fully drawn out frames. I really like this idea as, in the right story style, it can allow more time to concentrate on the design side of things as the more frames you have to do, the less detail they can realistically have.

In doing the colouring on Photoshop it's made me more aware of and appreciative of something a tutor commented upon with regards to software. What she mentioned was even if you want to work more on the producer side of things and delegate, you still need that software knowledge because its all very well saying you want 'this' to move 'there' but you're going to get no where unless you can also tell them you want it done with 'this' filter at 'that' opacity percentage and so on.

It's been fun getting to use Photoshop and relearn some things - also, I've got a lot more comfortable with using it for more than just making people fat and green in Facebook photos. I love the possibilities for actually creating art rather than just using the program for editing pre-drawn art - my current plan is to continue to practice so I can become as comfortable with a tablet pen as with a lead pencil. I also feel I need to give some time to just learning the basics in other software - AfterEffects, Premiere, Maya etc. It's all very well that I've attended the initial workshops but if I don't regularly at least 'play' with the program, I'll never remember enough to actually DO work that is good enough to show other people.

Because of this mini-revelation, I've decided that the still elements of my showreel I'm going to attempt to created digitally. I love the outcome of digital art, I'm more interested in using this style than I realised and I'm surprised I've never been down this route before. Where's my pen!