Nonlinear Final Statement

My interactive communication model was an improvement on the static version because it allowed for more layers of information, and a greater depth of detail to be displayed. The static version did not have much room for explanation/clarification, but being able to animate different parts of the model really helped with that. Motion was of course another plus of using an interactive medium, since it helped enforce things like the directional movement of the message and such.

Narrative: Simplified Communication Model

So after turning in my model in class on Monday, I felt like I still was not satisfied with several of the elememtns of my communication model. After a lot of scooting and nudging, font-changing and color-sampling, I'm pretty satisfied with this new one.

I took some of the details/descriptors out of the model. I think that for this project, I want that information to be reveal instead of already given to the viewer. I'm excited to try and animate this into a non-linear, interactive model.

Project 7

To begin, here are the three animations that I put in the the webpage mock-up. The first one is a type-only piece, second is a mostly image animation with houses, and the third is an illustrated animation also with a bit of text. I tried to give them all three different kinds of imagery, but kept them all in the same style.

Text Fact from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

House from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Growing Up from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

And here is the videos placed into a fake webpage. I didn't go ahead and make a full-out webpage, since that wasn't really the focus of my project, but I did add some shapes and the organization logo to try and simulate some of the noise that would be on a real webpage. The animations would rotate through, and loops and continue to play until the viewer moved to a new page. The best way I can think of describing it is like a web reel.

Web Mock-up from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

This was an interesting challenge since I was making a series of animations instead of only one. I have to take into consideration which style and colors for each would be most appropriate, but at the same time still unify them as a series. I'm satisfied with the cut-out, flat style of the animations, although Frankie made a good point about needing to refine the copy. The primary audience for this the parents, so I need to reword things to make them sound more professional and dependable.

During the production, I had a lot of trouble with timing. I worked this out by asking other people in studio "Is this slow enough now?" over and over and over. I seem to have a problem with making everything too fast.

Storyboarding really helped me on this project (with the exception of text being too fast) because since a lot of my stuff was originally hand-drawn, it let me know every piece that I needed to get ready before I even opened up affect effects. It also helped with the digital rendering, and getting all of the layers in the correct order before animating.

From a technical aspect, I'm still working one learning After Effects. I had some troubles getting started, and all of my issues were just from lack of understanding how the program works. In comparison to working in Flash though, this is light years better.

Edited Logo Build from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

And my logo build. I've got the visual aspect down but could add a few things. I need to add the actual name, "PlayDates" to the logo build somewhere, since you don't know what PD stands for otherwise. Also, some sort of sound could help.

Narrative Reel Pieces

Untitled from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Untitled from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Working out the kinks. 2/3 animations down, just gotta plop the last one into illustrator and make it move. Also, I still need to make the fake website frame to drop it in to.

Busy week.

Artifact Brainstorming

So after talking with Tyler, I feel like I have a clearer idea of what I want to do for the articfact to go along with my logo build assignment.

Make a website *slideshow.* I'm not sure what these are called, but they are the little parts of websites that only take up a portion of the webpage, and slowly shows different stories, panning or fading between them.

I'll be making 3 or 4 or these, and plopping them into a little simple mock-up website. The emphasis is not on the website.

Some ideas for the themes of these:

• maps, with houses lighting up as people "sign up"
• pictures of parents being relaxed (because kids are away with another family)
• children playing together, going up together (time lapse)
• car traveling to house
• facts about parents and children

Continuing to think about this assignment, I am considering a variation of still images an animated ones. I mean, as a whole, it's going to be an animated series, but each individual piece could be still or animated.

Newer Logo Build

Edited Logo Build from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Can you spot the differences between the first logo build and this new one? It's just some tiny tweaks. But, I think I'm pretty much done. I would like to consider adding some sound, maybe a little bit of children's laughter at the end, but so far, I'm having trouble finding just the right sound clip. Anywho, it's time to get moving on the next part of the assignment.

Logo Build Process

Ok, so here's the BASIC draft for the 5 second logo build. Now that I have the general motion down, I want to try and make it a little more lively. Right now it's preeeetty dull. I'm thinking by using things like ease and a couple other little tricks, I can keep the same story but add a little snazz.

Untitled from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Logo Build

After finally working out my logo, and colors; here is the final logo:

And here's the logo build that I'm moving forward with, followed by the other sketches that I did. This was a little tough, I found, and Ian pointed out during critique, to create things without creating additional meaning. SPECIFICALLY: Two circles combining could be translated as something a bit more intimate than I would like to convey. Also, having the ascender and descender of the P and D grow, at any point, could be considered abstractly sexual. This might just be our young, wild minds going to far, but none the less. I will do my best to make this 100% innocent. No growing, no 'hooking up."

Revised Logo? Perhaps

So, the first logo that I made was pretty awful. I don't really want to do a several-weel-long project on a terrible logo. So, I've redone it!

I'm not sure if I want to have the "Playdates" text along the bottom. I keep changing it around, then deleting it altogether, and I'm not sure at all. Here are some color variations:
I really like the idea of venn-diagrams lately. Out of all of these color choices, I'm most drawn to the 5th one, with the pale orange and blue. But I do want to avoid having a color scheme that avoids leaning towards 'boy' colors or 'girl' colors, and also avoiding having one 'boy' and 'girl.' More variations to be done.

Combined Channels - Final Deliverable

Untitled from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

For the combined channels assignment, I was tasked with using my type channel (which was digital) and combining it with the image channel (which was not). As you can see, the last result was, at the least to say, nothing special. This project gave me a lot of frustration, for several reasons.

First part of my aggravation was my own doing. Because my text was digital, I for some reason thought that there wasn't any real way to switch it to a static form. Being the kenetic, time-based type that it was, I thought that I would keep the type as an animation, and the image channel as the element that changed mediums. Kind of like a football game, type was the home team and image was the visitor (that's about the extent of my football knowledge, too). Anyway. I tried to scan in , digitally render, and place my drawing from the previous project into the flash document that was already existing. This did not work well, because the previous flash was white text, and making the drawings white (and subsequently cohesive) made them practically invisible. Not to mention, the level of detail that was in the drawings did not translate well into the flash file, making things a little hard to make out.

Having the text and the images run simultaneously didn't work out in the final. I STILL made the text move too fast, and it's impossible to view both channels at the same time, leaving the viewer confused and having to watch it multiple times to get all the information. Additionally, compared to the water-coloured pictures from the original image channel, these digital rendering make the drawings look really...bad.

The second part of this project that I had problems with was the technical aspect of what I chose to do. I kind of mentioned the frustration with the digital medium already, but more specifically, I guess it's the labour-intensive, not-quite-rewarding experience with Adobe Flash that made me want to rip my hair out. The best part of making an assignment in Flash is being halfway through with a project, importing some images, seeing that it looks terrible, and knowing that you don't really have the time to start the whole thing over. So instead, you spend the rest of your time (which is a lot) working on a project that–at best–will be mediocre. I know I'm whining, and this project was just incredibly unsatisfying. It's something that I will not want to ever put in a portfolio, and I don't think any amount of fixing and tweaking could salvage this thing. Narrative in general seems to be a class that I'm just not grasping. < /grump>

Narrative - Combined Channels Storyboard

Here's a sample of my beginnings of the combined channel project. The channels that I used previously were the text channel and the image channel, so now I am going to attempt to combine them in an animation. I'm also going to attempt to fix a couple of the smaller issues that were in my past project (although I don't really have enough time to correct some of the bigger issues).

Flash flash flash! Everything is all story-boarded out, now it's just time to sit and twiddle around with frustrating programs, whew!

Logos

Rough sketches. I ended up going with something almost identical to the text that I had on my research poster. Before doing the poster, I had actually tried something similar to the first sketch. But someone mentioned that it looked like a broken leg, ack. And the ones with the houses just look like...houses.
Small and large version. Seems to lose its readability/clarity as it gets too small. I'll continue refining.

NA Project Detail Narrative # 2

Unfortunately, I do not have an image reference to go with this post. I was negligent in documenting my work before turning it in. That aside, I will attempt to still talk about it without the visual aid.

For this round of the one-channel-only projects, I went along with the image channel. At first, I wanted to create some sort of story book showing the interaction of the audience (parents and their children) with one another. This was promptly shut down, but for good reason. I was thinking out of reach, given the short time frame. One very useful bit of advice that I gleaned from the peer discussion we had on Monday was that I didn't need to label what I was going to make. It didn't need to be a book, or a brochure, or a poster. This helped a lot as I tried to come up with something new.

The concept that I ended up coming up with was an interactive piece that showed a (potentially) infinite relationship that could be experienced by the audience of my organization. The two-sided piece visually told a story of two different families that traveled to one anothers' homes for different reasons, so that the children could have their "playdate." The cars that could be pushed across the board represented the lasting connection that the members of playdates could form. As one car was pushed across the page on one side of the board, at the same time the other car would be scooted back to the starting position (they were attached).

Understanding Comics - Reading

This reading was an interesting insight into the world of comics, but could also be applied to just about anything visual. Plus, since it was literally a COMIC about comics, it gave useful visual examples that might not have been so clear if it had only been in text format.

Our senses can only show us what is immediately in front of us. The rest of it is just assumed to be there. In the reading, this is called the "faith" that outside of what we immediately experience, there is more. Kind of freaky to assume otherwise. In the visual world though, (like comics, or a movie, for example) it is actually true that outside of what we see, there is nothing, and we just believe that there is more happening outside the frame or in the spaces in between. This is called "closure."

This "closure" device would be a useful tool in my narratives, as I could use it to challenge audiences to fill in the spaces that I leave for them. Since I'm thinking about doing image for my next detail narrative, it seems like using what comics call "gaps," or the space in between panels (or whatever visual spacer I have) would be the best way to make these spaces.

There are 6 types of closure:

moment to moment

action to action

subject to subject

scene to scene

aspect to aspect

non-sequitur

NA Project 3 Detail Narrative

PlayDates Mission Statement from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

For this assignment, I utilized solely the channel of text to "narrate" the PlayDates mission statement. One thing that I found to be a challenge was the task of animating the text in a fashion so that it revealed more to the message than the words themselves. Through color change, movement and arrangement, I attempted to illustrate the mission statement with some special flares. I also tried to move the text in a quick, fluid manner so that it was read as one continuous thought, instead of broken up, unrelated phrases.

I constructed my narrative in a linear fashion, and only allowed the viewer to see smaller parts of the whole message as I revealed them. At the same time, I also allowed the viewer to "look back" at the previous portions of the sentence, or narrative, by keeping it at the top of the screen. This also helped unify the message as a whole, as mentioned before, in contrast to only being seen as pieces.

Everest F+S

You should go make a snack while this video loads. It's pretty long, but worth watching if you've got 15 minutes. :)

As It Happens from renan ozturk on Vimeo.

Traces the journey of three guys up everest. They produced the footage, edited it, and published it to the internet AS THEY WERE CLIMBING.

Props to men who are willing to take the time to video editing in the freezing cold, on top of a flippin' mountain.

Narrative Poster / Final Print

I feel like this is a major improvement upon the last exercise. I try to use the houses in a community as a diagram to show how the "PlayDates" organization works. While Tyler said they look like arrows, and not houses, the idea is still there, I think. Plus, I added some photographs that might help further aid the communication of what the organization does.

Narrative Poster / preliminary research

• historical references / recent precedents (what came before? what inspired this? how did this start? etc)

Playdates are a late 20th century innovation.[citation needed] Playdates are becoming part of the vernacular of popular culture and form a part of children’s "down time." Most parents prefer children to use these hours to form friendships by playing with other children either one-on-one or within small groups. When children are very young, most parents stay for the playdate and use the time to form their own friendships and parental alliances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_date

Parents of both sexes are spending an average of ten or twelve hours less per week with their children than when they did in 1960. (Journal of the American Medical Association study, from The New Yorker.)
Forty-two percent of working parents are spending less time with their spouses. (Yankelovich Partners 1996 poll; San Francisco Chronicle 1/11/1998)

• visual language/culture surrounding the topic

http://www.wahm.com/articles/play-dates-for-the-kids-scheduling-time-with-other-wahms.html

This article has been a HUGE help in helping me articulate all the information I want to cover. There are other articles on this website that have been very helpful. The site in general is VERY useful. Thank you, Work-At-Home-Moms.

• sources of stylistic visual inspiration

Here's a few. I've got a whole little folder going though. I still like the idea of incorporating things that look child-made into the poster, even though the audience is more the parents. So, child influence, but ultimately speaking to the older audience.

• objects or products associated with the topic

Any children's objects related to recreation and group play. Outdoor toys, games, craft supplies. NOTHING like TV, video games, anything that take away from a social experience.

• diagram of a “participant’s experience” with the topic or organization (how do they interact with the topic, product, or service?)

Narrative Video/ some process

Behold! Here are some of my notes, research, and thoughts pre-game to the actual making of the video. It took a while to work out what I wanted to convey through the 15-seconds that we were allowed (even though I didn't end up conveying it so well). I tried to figure it all out by writing down everything I could think of, and highlighting the most important things.

Then I tried to separate out while I thought that I could cover visually, and what I could cover through the audio.

Setting things up:

And once again, here's the video. While the still shots seemed to look fine in quality, and the actual process of making the stop motion wasn't that difficult, bringing it into the computer and rendering it into a video was pretty frustrating. But that's a technical issue, not something that had to do with the conceptual level of the video. I'll work harder in the next portion of this assignment to make sure that I more clearly define the points that we are suppose to cover.

Play-dates! from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

15 Seconds

Play-dates! from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.