Final Task Part 4

This is my final product of my self portrait, in terms of craftsmanship and how well I think I did I would have to say I did pretty well. Hours upon hours were spent keeping different layers in order, adjusting the opacity to make sure that the over lay was still noticeable but not over powering, and making sure that my lines were clean. Patience is definitely a skill that needs to be learnt went doing a project like this.
I feel that this does represent me and the things I like quite clearly, and that if someone were to look at this they would get a pretty fair understanding of who I am as a person.
I definitely learnt some new skills and techniques when it come to colouring, like for intents when I drew Bowie I learnt that using a combination of different colours (such as burgundy and orange), not just different shades of pink, can really help in making skin look more realist. The main piece of advice I would give some one is to have patience, and to not be afraid to experiment.

Final Task Part 3

To start here are some screen shots of my drawing process while making my project:

While making this I would still say that the hardest part was figuring out what to put on my silhouette. Once I put down some of my favorite bands and books down then the hardest thing drawing wise was the picture of David Bowie, which took me quite a lot of time and effort.    

Final Task Part 2

Thinking up a concept for this final task is very quickly proving to be the hardest part. I never really was one for expressing myself and because of that I really didn't know what part of my self to focus on for this assignment. After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that the things that I like are what help shape and are untimely a part of me. So what my self portrait will be is a collage of things that interest me in the shape of my silhouette.
I will be using my drawing program ArtRage Studio to draw it, because it is easily accessible to me and I have quite a lot of experience using it. I also feel like it will be the best tool to make my self portrait with.
I knew that I wanted to feature some of the bands I enjoy and my love for landscape photos so I started off by putting those into my silhouette, I also purposely made my silhouette not actually look like me, but how I would prefer to look. I an not sure how I want the background to look or if I even want to have a background or just leave it transparent. I do however plan on adding a lot more to my picture so that it will be completely filled up when I finish it.

Final Task Part 1

By far I would have to say that making my own stop motion animation was the hardest task I had to complete in this course, and because of that it is also the work I am most proud of. When making my stop motion I didn't have access to any actual animation software, instead, I had to use a regular drawing program and draw out by hand each frame on an different layer. With having over 150 frames and therefor having over 150 layers, it made my computer slow and start to leg whenever I went to work on it. I also had to go back and add in more frames to my animation, and having the old frames match up with the new was a much harder task then I anticipated, and even though it may not look as smooth as I would like I am still happy that I managed to complete it on time. All of the difficulties I faced and over came while making my animation is the reason why it is the project I am most proud of. I feel that I have learned quite a lot more about animating things out of this experience, and comparing it to an animation that I have made last year proves to me that I have indeed improved quite a lot (unfortunately the animation that I am refereeing to is on my old laptop that is broken and cant turn on, if I still had a copy of it I would show you). If it wasn't for the deadline that was closing in I would have had more time to go over and improve the choppiness of the old and new frames blending together, so that would have defiantly been something that I would have improved if given the chance. Something I would change would be the length of the animation, originally I wanted the "blob" to form into more things before turning into the phoenix at the end, but once again I didn't have time to do that.

The Finished Product of my Stop Motion Animation

152 frames later an I have finally completed my stop motion. Overall I would say that I had a good experience doing this even though it did prove to be challenging at times. Since I can't decide whether or not to post my animation as a video or a GIF I will post it as both, once again I am using gifmaker to make my GIF and video. Enjoy. 

Making my own Stop Motion Animation part 2

Now that I am nearly done with my animation I have ran into a few more difficulties that I feel should be shared. The first one being me having to go back and add in more frames to my animation. Now that may not seem like much work until you note that I named each frame I made as a number, meaning that when I went back to add more frames I had to change the name of all the frames after it. The scene that I wanted to change was the one shown below.

 After seeing it I decided that I wanted to show the shark fins swimming for a bit longer before I had them morph into something else, and after going back and adding more frames I got it to last as long as I wanted it to. After that I had to make sure that the new frames I drew matched up with the old ones; which proved to be a challenge but once I got it to look okay I was fairly happy with it. 

I am not yet done my animation but I am almost there, so you can expect to see it later on today.

 

Making my own stop motion animation

There are many different mediums one could take when it comes to making a stop motion; you can draw it out by hand on a flip book, use legos and create a scene, or use clay to morph shapes. Originally I wanted to make my stop motion using clay, but since I don't have any clay to use I figured that I can simply draw out what it was I wanted to do and make it that way. That's why for this project I am using my drawing tablet to draw out frame by frame my animation. I am using an app called ArtRage to draw my animation with, since I know that time will be a bit of an issue I'm not going to make it overly complicated; instead, I'm gonna use this as a learning opportunity so that I can find out what works well and what doesn't for future events.
What I have planed so far isn't much, I'll admit that, but I have a basic idea of what I want to do. I want to show a ball bounce into frame an over the course of the video morph into different shapes, as can be seen below in my quick story board I made.

       Obviously I plan to do more then just that but for now that is what I have.
While working I made each frame and story board it's own layer; which is a bit difficult to do being that the layers quickly add up and the more layers I have the more my computer slows down, not to mention that it can get hard and time consuming to keep track of all my layers. Something that I like to do to see how smooth my animation looks is by making it into a gif, its a rather quick and simple progress that I find works for me; here's a gif of what I have done so far:

As you can see I still have a lot to do in order to finish this in time, so wish me luck and I will go on back to work.

Making a GIF

The above video shows how two people go about making gifs and how they do it. Gifs are becoming more and more popular online and are often used to convey how someone is reacting to something, those are usually referred to as reaction gifs. An example of a reaction gif that I found on giphy.com is this:

When making my own gif I wanted to show the progress I went thourgh while painting an picture for my art class. Originally I wanted to finish my painting before I made it into a gif, but unfortunately, I'm running out of time to complete this project. To make my gif I went to gifmaker.me and uploaded all the pictures I had (clicking and dragging the mouse over multiple picture is a good way to save time). 

Once all the picture where in I then adjusted the speed setting one the right of the page. It was originally at 500 milliseconds and I wanted it to be a bit slower, so I changed it to 700 milliseconds. 

Since I felt that nothing else really needed changing I then simply clicked "Create GIF Animation" and once it was done loading selected "Download the GIF".

The finish gif that I got is seen below; overall the process was straight forward and easy to use, so much so that I even bookmarked the website so that I can easily go back to it whenever I find myself needing it again. 

Animating Styles

In the above video it shows Marty Cooper and his unique style of animation, which is drawing characters on an transparent piece of paper and having it interact with the world around it. This is clearly an interesting way to animate, and even though the idea to mix drawings in with the real world isn't exactly new, it is still is an fresh way to do it. An animator that I use to follow a few years ago named EmptyFeet on YouTube does a more common type of animation. They don't do the traditional type of stop motion where one would take pictures of clay models, instead they draw out each frame and compose the images though the computer to make their animation. The video below is the first animation of theirs that I seen, and even though it is a few years old by now I still think that it is a good representation of what it is they do.
  

Animation

Animation has always been something that I myself have taken interest in. I have made an unfinished animation before using Adobe Flash CS4, and looking back on it I would really like develop the skill to finish it. (I wanted to insert my short animation here to show you what I was talking about, unfortunately I couldn't figure out how :(.)
I am a fan of stop motion movies, although I have never tried to make a stop motion myself, this is something that I would be interested in learning how to do if given the chance. Even though I have tried doing animation before I still feel that there is a lot that I don't know and could learn, so I am very excited for my next assignment.

Fort McMurray

This is the new embedded post of my Fort McMurray assignment. Hopefully the link in the poster will work this time.

Fort McMurray

This is the poster I made with Google Drawing to help raise awareness to what has happened in Fort McMurray. However, as the only way I could figure out to post it to my blog is in image format, the link to the donation page doesn't work. I don't know if there is a way to upload this poster and have the link still functional, so for now I'll just post the link here instead.

Learning how to use Google Drawing

Using Google Drawing is simple enough, once you open it up from your Google drive you have a few basic functions for you to use in the tool bar at the top left.

Creating an background is simple, what I did is I used the shape tool to make an blue square that covers the whole page.

I then added three different types of arrows to the page. I selected the long arrow and clicked on Arrange, then Order, then Send Backwards. This made the longer arrow go behind the other ones.

With the curved arrow I wanted the back part of it to be behind the Quad arrow while the front remains in front of the Quad arrow. However I couldn't find a way to do this so I just put the curved arrow in front. I even looked for an eraser tool so that I could erase part of the arrow to make it appear like it was behind the other, but still I found nothing. 

Then I made a text box and wrote the word "Arrows" into it, I put the text in the top right corner after I adjusted the size and font.

Finally I just copy and pasted this image from Google and added it in next to the word "Arrows" before saving it.

Over all the program was pretty simple to use and I didn't have very much difficulty figuring it out.

Attawapiskat

After The Last River - Official Trailer from Victoria Lean on Vimeo.

The content in this video do not surprise me, it is not uncommon for people to be left in poor living conditions due to others taking from where they live, usually though it is oil that people come to take not diamonds. But with that being said it doesn't make it okay, once again we have a whole community now suffering due to someone else's greed, to say this bothers me would be an understatement. This is the first I have heard of Attawapiskat, but hopefully the issue's concerning it will become more public so that more people can be aware and hopefully we'll start to see change.    

Text+Art

After watching Austin Kleon's video I find myself agreeing with his ideas about how art is stealing things that already exist.  There is no such thing as being original when it comes to making art, everything comes from something; but it does take an good artist to steal something and make it there own.

Amy Burvall's video talk about her serendipidoodle challenges; which are when she puts out two words that people can then interpret and draw out. There are may art challenges like serendipidoodle out there, one that comes to mind being the inktober challenges, and they're a good way to build up your creativity if you can't think of anything to draw.

There are many different ways to combine art with text, one of the most popular ways to do so would probably be by making an comic book, but there are other ways. I personally like Jean Jullien's way of combining text, and other things, with art; with one of my favorites of her's being this picture.

Combining Images with Text

There are many different ways to combine images with text and many different reasons to do so, I made mine an drawing that goes with song lyrics.

To draw the picture I used a program called ArtRage Studio, when I was done drawing I opened it in MS Paint to add the text to it.

 

Using Scratch

As you probably already know from my last post I am using a website called "Scratch" to help me learn a bit more about coding, and now I am writing down my experience with it as I go.
The first thing I see when I open the website is three options to choice from: Try it out, see examples, and join Scratch. For now I pick the 'try it out' option.

On the new screen I am meet with what appears to be an animation platform, with the cat character in the "frame" and a command sheet to the right of it. There is an green flag and a red stop sign at the top of the frame on the right; so I try to click the green flag, amusing that my character would start a walk cycle or something seeing as there are pre-made setting on the side, and am disappointed when nothing happens. After clicking a bit more I decide that I should actually read the instructions on the far right.

I click start moving on the instruction menu and I tells me that in order to make the cat do the commands I have to drag them out of the command box and into the grey area on the right and then click on them. The instructions then go on to tell me how I can stack more then one command on top of each other to make the cat "dance". Thinking that I have a pretty good understanding of how this works I make my own little animation setting. 

I push space and... nothing happens, the cat didn't move at all. I push space again and see that the bundle of commands I made "glow" when I push it, and that the green flag that I mentioned earlier glows as well so it seems like it should be working... but still nothing is happening. Feeling fed up I decide to re-create the animation sequence from the instructions.

I click the green arrow and it works! Hallelujah! I still don't know why this one works and the other one didn't, but at this point I could care less, I'm just happy something worked. Now as far as the program itself goes this isn't exactly something I would recommend, as far as helping me learn how to code I don't really feel it did that. I may be a bit biased being as I have used an animation software before and this is something clearly meant for kids, not someone considering animation as a career. Over all I wasn't that thrilled with this program, but that's fine by me, I'm sure there is better things out there if I look for them.  

Coding

As some one who spends quite a bit of their free time on an computer, I have very little knowledge about how they work. Whenever something wasn't working with the computer I would ask my brothers to fix it instead of trying to figure it out for myself. This led to me knowing virtually nothing about coding.
It's as simple as this; I never needed to know about how to code something before so I never took the time to learn. Although now, I do have a chance to learn how to do it and I am quite excited for that. I will be using the website "Scratch" to hopefully learn something new, and I will be posting my experience using it shortly.  

Shared Values and the Fight Against Ignorance

For those of you who are following TVO, you may know that they are having a short documentary contest with the theme "Shared Values"; which leave me with the question: What does shared values mean to me?

Well you can break  "Shared Values" down to its literal meaning, which would simply be: values shared by all; but I think that the meaning behind it goes deeper than that. I think that what TVO means by saying "Shared Values" is simply that, the general public should share the same values of those less fortunate. What I mean when I say "those less fortunate" is people who are discriminated against or oppressed in any way shape or form; which could be caused by any form of bigotry, from racism, to homophobia, to ableism.

Discrimination comes in may different form and can effect almost every type of person; but there is a root to it all, a root that can easily be fixed. This root that I speak of is called ignorance, it is only through ignorance that people can make themselves believe that they are better then an entire group of individuals. Ignorance can be a very dangerous tool, but luckily it can be easily avoided through knowledge. 

Breaking the walls of ignorance is what I plan to do for the shared values documentary; I plan on finding a way to expose the facts about inequality, and show the public why it is still an issue today and how to help put it to an end. I understand that discrimination isn't something that can go away over night, but I do believe that every action we take helps bring it closer to ending. 

     

Navigating a Website

In the "Parts of a Website" video the narrator, Sarah, explains to the viewer the basic parts of a website and it's functions; such as the header, side bar, search bar, menu of navigation, and footer. Most of what was explained in the video I have already known from previous times I've been on the internet; things such as the search bar being used for searching and the menu of navigation being used to navigating the website is pretty self explanation.
The Canada Council for the Arts "Media Arts" page has all of this common elements of a website. The menu of navigation is located at the top of the page under the pages logo (located to the left) and search bar (located to the right). The featured content takes up most of the websites page, located under the menu of navigation and to the right of side bar, and the footer is located at, well, the foot of the page, as where it is almost always located on websites.