Final Synopsis

This flash project was definitely a challenge. I've only ever really touched on this program, so it was difficult to try and understand everything. What I liked most about this project was being able to create something and see it actually play out on the screen. I really wanted to make my text come alive. With the quote I picked I feel like there were a lot of key words in there to play with. The most difficult part of this project was figuring out timing. But towards the end, I think I finally got it down. It was helpful to step back, take a break and come back to it 10 minutes later. Overall, I'm quite happy with how far I've come with this project. I figured out things that I never thought I'd be able to do. I think it's very simple, but easy to read. I'm happy with how it ended up, but it would be interesting to see where I could take it with more knowledge and time.

Class Critique/Progress Report

During our class critique, professor Fender offered some really good advice. He suggested to ease my transitions a little better. Right now they're kind of harsh. I'm still trying to figure out certain things. The layers and symbols have been the hardest for me to figure out. Professor Fender also suggested I repeat some of the same movements throughout the whole movie. For example, I have a lot of my text making some sort of impact in the first part of the movie, so I want to incorporate that towards the end. The critique was very helpful, he gave me some great ideas that I've started working on. Right now, I have all the text in my movie and I got most of the timing issues figured out. Now it's just making the final tweaks and making sure everything flows really well together.

Progress part 1

So far for my animation, I have the timing figured out. One thing I found difficult with figuring out the timing was that it was hard to change after the initial set up. For example, at first when I set it up I was 15 seconds short. So I had to go back and change all the timing. And if I changed one layer, I had to change all of the layers. After I did that, I moved on to the actual animation part. I'm still confused as to how to use Flash, so it's a little frustrating. It takes me a long time to figure out one animation for only one key frame. I'm getting nervous I won't have a complete animation. I've never been a great learner when it comes to flash, but it's definitely an interesting program.

Animation Content

The briefer experiments and calculations are, the better. . .practice will make people very good guessers, and the best work of all is done when the worker guesses rightly, and follows his guesses with the actual work, itself the trial and proof of accuracy.

--edward johnston

I decided to choose this as my quote to use for my animation. This was a quote I had to re-read a couple of times to understand. But after reading it multiple times I saw a lot of possibilities in how I could animate the text and make it come alive. 

Type promo synopsis

Overall, this project was a lot of trial and error. I originally had a main idea, but had to make several tweaks throughout the whole process. My main goal was to create a 70's vintage look with my book. I wanted to keep it pretty clean and simple which I thought I was able to execute well. Some of the challenges I experience was being able to keep my text and different elements within the grid. The grid was both helpful and restricting. It was helpful to have a general grid to place all of the text, however when I wanted to explore with bigger letters and shapes it was challenging to make sure it complimented the grid well. But I am happy with the overall look of my poster and book. I think they compliment each other well and it was definitely a good learning experience.

poster

Book/Poster Critique

During the book and poster critique, professor Fender talked about some of the visually challenging elements I had incorporated. From the critique, I tried to make a more uniformed book, adding some of the same elements and weight on each page. I also played around with the text more, creating more variety on the pages. With my poster, I changed the placement of certain design elements and got rid of some text. I wanted to create a more "poster like" feel, so I added more color, and diagonal lines.

This is the first draft of my book. I'm still working with a color palette. I wanted to do a simple book that has a lot of white space.