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Lipsync animation

I ended up in animation class today with Paul Gardiner and he let me follow along using the tutorial files. I just picked a random audio then followed along with his lesson on how to auto-lipsync in Adobe Animate.

"Go ahead, make my day"

- that's what he's saying: [Clint Eastwood's character Inspector Harry Callahan in the 1983 film "Sudden Impact]

It was nice to try this and learn it for the sake of learning. Any familiarity with adobe software is always useful, expand my skillset and for the motion design that we will study in graphic which involves a different kind of animation.

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Final Poster Design

This is my final poster design.

We printed them on Munken paper. in A2 & A3

I printed mine on Munken Pure A3 170gsm paper for the warmer colour for the A3 version. The colour fits with the natural theme.

Left is the Munken Pure and right is the Munken Polar. ^^

Here is what the A2 poster looked like hung up in the 1st yr graphics room.

Lydia gave me some good feedback about resizing the whole thing and possibly trying to counteract the border that was imposed on everyone's images while printing. This border isn't clearly visible on my piece as the background is white already but I can see how it's a bit offset on to the left which is frustrating. However due to time constraints I was only able to try making the piece smaller digitally, and I agree it looks better as it's easier on the eye.

I understand how easily you can just continue to work and edit these pieces forever due to things like this, just endlessly tweaking variations.

Overall I'm relatively satisfied with my design, as visually it looks good however in speaking to others I'm aware of some confusion surrounding what actually is the central image, while visually striking it might be unclear to be raw honeycomb clustered together. In future because of the importance of visual communication in graphic design I'd aim to be clearer to the viewer. I was aiming here to show the anthropocene weighing down on the natural world, specifically with bees (or pollinators) that's why I chose to use the circular text

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poster development continued:

First I had to choose which typeface to use. Maeve was recommending to use a condensed typeface, so we searched on adobe fonts. However I went back the Unbounded typeface we chose earlier as I found it more readable. This is the design on the right.

After I edited the paper wasp nest to look like honeycomb, making a gradient map from swatches of colour from my honeycomb cluster. I love how the gradient came out as it is quite vibrant now.

Here I had three iterations to pick which image of a dead bee to use. However I ended up sticking with the one I chose initially, the one on the right .

I finally replaced my Lorem ipsum placeholder text with a statistic on Irish bee populations that I got from www.pollinators.ie

Another thing I did between posts was alter the honey drips, I used the liquify tool to warp them and added a third pool of honey to even them out.

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Primary Research: LSAD Beehive

I finally got to look at the LSAD on-campus beehive on today and I took photos of it on my pentax-k5

I didn't go through the gate but I could get a good view of it and my camera has a 300mm zoom lens so I used that to try get some close-ups of the bees coming in an out of the hive

These are actually hoverflies and the middle is a wasp I believe. They are also pollinators which are important

This website www.pollinators.ie All-Ireland Pollinator Plan » All-Ireland Pollinator Plan was very useful for the information on Irish bee populations, identification of Irish species and any information on Irish pollinators.

I took one last picture of one of the dead bees too just in case i needed a better photo for my poster

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poster wip development for print

Above is the most recent iteration of the design that I developed today from the black poster below.

Sharon gave me some feedback on this top left initial design:

She didn't like the black background and she pointed out the issue with the yellow type.

I chose the yellow type to try follow my colour scheme but it wasn't working for me as it was getting lose in the honeycomb cluster colour.

Finally the piece of propolis at the bottom were redundant so I removed them

This brought me to the top right design, I used the paper wasp nest as a little stamp-type element. However this text block is too large so in the last design at the top of this post I made is smaller while swapping the nest for a dead bee. I also added a drip of honey with can direct the eye to the text below.

Something I like about the honeycomb cluster implies a globe without using the overused symbol of the earth. Using circular text further emphasises this and when I created outlines of the text I placed them over the cluster slightly, visible with the letter P.

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Primary Research - Bees => Pentax k5

These are some photos I took in my garden using my Pentax K5 DSRL. I used my zoom lens to try get nice macro close-ups without needing to get to close and bother the bees. It was difficult being patient to wait for bees to show up by the flowers, or chasing them around the garden. They are a small fast moving subject so not a lot of reaction time to take a carefully composed photo.

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poster layout trials final 4

These are my four different rough layouts for my poster. I'll choose one to refine and finalise for print after Easter.

These are currently pretty threadbare and in need of refinement. I have made several minor alternate versions of each and options for developing them.

I like using the honeycomb cluster as a central image so I've kept that for each while altering the text placement, and including different elements like lines trying to align them with the black areas of the cluster.

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Anthropocene: Bee statistic research

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intial poster layout trials

I'm using this image as the front page for this post as my favourite design

I started with using an image of the paper wasp nest the fashion technician Gillian kindly showed me. I added a gradient to try show the decay caused by humans with the grayest, deadest parts closest to the anthropocene text.

I was trialling putting the text along the honeycomb cluster, but it currently looks far too clunky, as I was struggling with using the text on a path tool and moving the paths.

I wanted the text along the cluster as it would show the anthropocene weighing down on or imposing onto the natural world, specifically using bees as an example and symbol for my poster.

This was an art board where I was experimenting with manipulating text. Mainly using text on a path and creating paths in different shapes like an arc or a circle.

This was Sharon's mockup as a possible layout option.

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stylescapes digitised - landscape & portrait

landscape

I made 6 different iterations as there is always so many options in photoshop. I was alternating, typefaces, colour, position and size.

I tried out three typefaces using sections of these three poems:

"Arrival of a Beebox" by Sylvia Plath,

"Fame is a bee" by Emily Dickinson

"Her Voice" by Oscar Wilde

portrait

For the 2nd collage I just changed the title typeface.

My conclusion is that I'd like to use the Courier typeface for the word Anthropocene.

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stylescapes digitised

First I made two digital stylescapes using online images.

II was alternated between three typefaces:

American Typewriter

Courier

Palatino

I tried out three typefaces using sections of these three poems:

"Arrival of a Beebox" by Sylvia Plath,

"Fame is a bee" by Emily Dickinson

"Her Voice" by Oscar Wilde

I found some inspiration in the posters made for the film ​ "The Spirit of the Beehive".​ They use honeycomb shapes in their composition and the subject matter is relevant to my project.

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GDC: animating text in adobe after effects

Lydia gave us a little demo on animating text in adobe after effects. We used our names for a short sample trying out the different tools like position, rotation, skew and colour for example.

This is good to learn as we might be animating our posters in after effects at the end of the project.

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stylescapes

First I made this landscape collage. trying to include elements of plants that are alive and then dead meshy-materials that mimic the honeycomb somehow. I also included my colour palette and a photocopy of my thumbnail drawing of a paper wasp nest.

I really enjoyed playing with the printer, photocopying things like scanning in a black hexagon material I got off Gillian the fashion technician. I changed the colour it would print to, using a "pumpkin" orange, green and in the below piece a brown and yellow. I also used this setting to print the big green plant piece in a monochrome green.

Then I made a portrait collage trying to make a balanced composition. I kept the lively more colourful section in the bottom left branching out. I used a photocopy and cut out of my bee thumbnails.

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Primary Research photos from Sharon

Sharon kindly sent me these photos of the inside of a beehive as Primary Research. To get close up images of the beehive is really useful. If I had taken them myself I would be more inclined to try use them as a textured background or use as an element. But because they're not my photos I'd rather focus on my own work.

This print pattern she sent too also sort of mimics the patterns of the honeycomb

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Colour in Design in Adobe Illustrator:

Today Maeve present a lecture on colour theory in design. We talked about the feelings colours give us. After break Maeve gave us an exercise in adobe illustrator to pick colours based on the above words.

Then we progressed to picking colours we thought matched the words within each colour family. Adjusting the CYMK levels of each.

Then we made colour palettes colour picking from images we found online using the site Cosmos.

I tried to pick images related to my project,​ with natural colour schemes.

Lastly we used made different compositional layouts using these restricted colour palettes.

Monochromatic

Complementary + Neutral

Analogous

Split Complimentary

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graphic design: Adobe After Effects Practice

Today we did some simple practice in after effects to familarise with the software

We will use these basics of moving the position, scale, rotation and opacity

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Letterpress

For letterpress I quickly made 3 designs, kind of focusing on quantity over quality.

I tried doing a collage for the letters of Anthropocene for my first piece, trying to mix man-made and natural material objects for the letters. However despite starting that piece first I finished it last using the pre-cut letters for the H, P & E as I ran out of time.

This one I mainly focused on layering of three ink colours, dragging the letters to make nice texture.

For this piece I scraped excess yellow ink across in stripes to make a beehive shape. The I added the letter of anthropocene in a slight curve trying to imply some of the bends in the hive. Based on the below thumbnail.

The full wall of everyone's pieces.