Prophets and Poets
Motion & Interaction
Learning about Flash and its applications contained some metally challenging moments. Just when you thought that you had worked out the logic behind it, it would defy your understanding by acting in a completely unexpected way. It was great to be breaking into new areas of learning though.
The block was really well organised to support novices like myself. It was successful because tightly focussed 'hands on' practical tasks, where we learnt, for example, how to make movie clips and buttons, prepared us with the skills and understanding necessary to complete the ultimate part of the brief. We were actively engaged in discrete practise of the skills beforehand that we were then required to apply in a creative way. Brilliant - a bit like the format for QCA D&T units for schools.
The other nice element of this block was that it was fairly portable - you could work on it at home or indeed anywhere. Seamless.
I decided that I wanted to give the project a handcrafted quality which wasn't without its problems: all those separate drawings of body parts, lots of scanning and toggling between Illustrator and Photoshop to colour the pieces, and having to overcome layout issues presented as the individual pieces (and typography) made their way into the composition.
Looking back over Heroes and Heroines I was drawn to the work of David Hughes and felt that a style of that ilk lent itself to the look that I wanted to achieve. I liked his quirky character drawings and use of subdued colour.
I selected the final idea from a short list of three or four that I had story-boarded. I felt that, although it may be simpler in concept than some of the others, it told a story in its own right. It had a narrative that was clear even without the supporting text. Mind-mapping key words from the poem certainly aided the generation of more unusual or novel ideas, e.g. 'lift' - What kinds of things can lift objects up?
Breaking the idea down into fine sequential steps was difficult at the outset because I didn't know the demands and conventions of the program sufficiently well enough. However, the more I worked at it the more easily I found that I could plan strategically in detail. I'm not a great lists person but I found that breaking sequences down into a list of tasks really helped me to work efficiently towards the end.
As a first attempt, I was quite pleased with the end result. However, if I were to work on another project of this type I would try to find a way of planning the position and scale of the typography against the other elements in adavance of taking it to screen.
Adam learnt some of our names too, which was nice.
I just hope that I don't forget some of the technical steps before I come to use it again. A little practice here and there wouldn't go amiss.
