First attempt at animation...

This is my first attempt at animation...
I did this a few months ago, by drawing each of the frames in photoshop and importing them into iMovie. Took ages to do, but I was pretty chuffed when I finished it so thought I'd share it...

Problem?

Due to illness I missed Friday's session where we were put into groups of common themes/ideas and so I ended up in a group who had researched texture...Felt a bit bad that none of my *movement* research could be put into use but don't think it made too much of a difference. The task was to identify a problem in Leeds to do with our theme...
We ended up deciding that the texture of some foods put people off eating them and linked this with the idea of people not getting their 5/day. We did a survey, asking people around the college, to find out whether this was a genuine problem and a total of 26 people agreed that they were put off by some fruits due to their textures and so our problem solving began...
After a week of pestering people to fill in questionnaires (Primary research) we gained a lot of quantitative data which helped us make decisions on how to get people to eat more fruit...our solution was to make people aware of the different textures of fruit available...i.e. dried fruit, fruit bars, juice etc...
The method of making people aware of these options consisted of what Hannah likes to call *the fruity booty*....basically a fruit stall giving away free samples. We did the *pilot* in college, and depending on the success the aim would be to have more spread across the nation!



The primary research we gathered over the week...



Contact sheet Hannah put together showing the fruit stall in action...*click to enlarge*
One of the things that proved very useful during this research brief was actually interpreting the research we'd gathered. It was handy to collate the data and represent it visually so instead of having to read through everything we could see the data immediately.
Although the questionnaires proved useful and we did manage to get some qualitative answers from them, if there was anything interesting on them we couldn't ask more in depth questions from peoples answers...and so interviews would probably be an interesting way of collecting more general opinions and questionnaires could be used for the more specific answers.
5 things I would do differently:
- Use different ways of collecting primary research other than surveys and questionnaires
- Ask more people from the general public rather than those who are around in the studio
- Look at how other people have tried to solve a similar problem
- Involve the general public more in the whole process
- Decide on what people are doing straight away, make it clear and keep communication up during the whole week

5 things I have learnt about the design process:
- Using research effectively ensures that a solution is appropriate to your target audience
- The more you can find out about the problem the better the results are
- Research isn't just reading/surfing the net, it can be practical too
- By experimenting with ideas straight away you can learn from them and develop ideas even more
- Working with other people you can guarantee you'll never end up with an idea you would have chosen on your own

Movement...

...after categorizing our 100 photo's we got back into our groups of 4 and looked at each others photos. We had to think about different themes that each of us could research into, taken from our collection of photos.
The themes that were suggested to me included;
Night-time photography of close objects
Gates
Transport
Movement
Cropped bodies
Found type
Glasses
Fences
Texture
Padlocks

....from the title of this *blog* you can probably guess that I chose "Movement". I was immediately interested in ways that I could represent movement through still image, especially how I could do this photographically.



This image shows the movement of light from a flame...
I used a long exposure time to show the development between the start and end of the photograph. After experimenting in this way I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to photograph the movement of a person.
This proved quite difficult. If the person moved too fast you could barely make out they were there...I think this is probably due to there not being enough contrast between them and the background. Maybe if I were to photograph them in the studio using all white as a background and them in black it could work?



This is one of the images I tried to show one particular movement, compositionally it's not great but I was more bothered about the technique rather than anything else...



...and here is one of the images where I have tried to show movement through stages. To be able to pick up this amount of figures I had to use several flashes. Again the image isn't very strong, but it's a starting point...

Visual Language...

...using crafting to represent words.



These two images represent the word *reflect*. The exercise made us all think about the words and their meanings and how we can communicate that without words. It was hard to do but there were some interesting results from it...

4/100

During reading week we were asked to document the following things through photography;
People, Type, Places, Textures, and Objects.
100 of which we needed to select and present.



- Object & Texture -



- People - (sort of)



- People -



- Type & Texture -

Healthy eating...

...here's an image that one of my friends on the photography course - Dan Ross - has produced, looking at peoples attitude to healthy eating. The message is clear and communicated in a clever and ironic way. Thought people who looked at healthy eating for the last brief might be interested in it.