We will meet during our final exam slot (Wednesday, March 17, 12pm to 2pm) to watch each other’s final animated shorts. We will also go through a crit review process. Crits are common in art and design fields, where creators make products that satisfy a particular need without following pre-existing formulas. Our final projects for this course follow the same model, where you just needed to create an animated children’s story, but we didn’t have a pre-set narrative or other assets to use.
We’ll watch each final animation, so you should be able to turn them in before noon. After each one, your group will get a chance to tell us about your creative process starting at the beginning of the term, and your peers will get a chance to say what was strong about your work or what could use improvement.
At the end of the day, anyone who wants their work published more widely will have it uploaded to the Communication Department’s YouTube channel.
Today is a flex day. We will either catch up if we are running behind or cover some subjects that interest us. We will figure out what the plan is by February 25.
We will review many of the Adobe Creative Cloud tools and techniques we’ve discussed through the term. Our main focus will be on the Libraries (and exporting them if we are using the OIT institutional account for Creative Cloud).
We will also talk through document linking and the benefits we get from working in a suite of programs rather than a series of individual tools.
When we get to this point in the term, I’ll tell you which tutorials to check out on Adobe Character Animator. We will be using this tool to wrap up a lot of our other programs this term:
Character Animator will use the character models (or “puppets”) we have produced in Illustrator
Character Animator will accept audio input from us, either directly through a mic or via sound recording files, to animate the mouth of our puppet
Character Animator will allow us to program in arm, head and body movements while a puppet speaks. We can place a character on a background we made in Illustrator or Photoshop
Character Animator will make a video file we can output to Premiere for finalization
We will end up producing our children’s e-book in two forms. We will create a finalized, professional quality book in PDF and EPUB formats. We will also create an animated version of our book with our peers, similar to what we saw in Storytime Online.
After this point, there will be no new assigned homework. We will just be working on that final project.
Update February 18: Recommended Videos
Ok, it looks like we’ve got a green light for learning Character Animator this term. It should be on the virtual desktop and on the lab computers. It comes with a Creative Cloud account for those of you that have gotten your own subscription.
So, for this software, I’m going to ask you to access some of its internal tutorials first. Because animation software is pretty complicated, Adobe has packed a few interactive tutorials into the program itself. These will get you started.
Launch Character Animator and click on the Home button in the top left, or use the Window menu > Workspaces > Home.
It looks like a house
Use the “Start Here” tutorial first (4m 15s long). Then, use the “Recording Lessons” tutorials (there are about a dozen; each is 20-40 seconds of content, but offers you the freedom to play around with the lesson assets).
These two tutorials will get you started with Character Animator. You’ll have a pretty good grasp of what makes this software different from others when it comes to designing content.
If you like where this is going and you want something more thorough, I highly recommend this video from OkaySamurai, the same guy we borrowed puppets from a few weeks ago. It’s two hours long, but it covers almost everything in Character Animator.
As soon as I’m able, I’ll post a short walkthrough of my own demonstrating the same ideas but connecting a little more closely with our course project.
Today’s Content
We will talk about propaganda posters. While we often think of propaganda as a particular kind of thing (like what we looked at for today), we really do see it all around us every day. Much like the science of eye tracking, the science of mass communication has become pretty refined and subtle.
For instance, compare these two posters for the recent war film, 1917.
One US VersionChinese Version
We will compare these posters to the propaganda we viewed before today. Like usual, we want to compare these things by
Page design: What is directing your eye to what locations?
Color design: How would you describe the color palettes of each poster group?
Text design: What kinds of fonts are used? What’s the effect on us, the reader? (Even if we can’t read Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese, we can unpack the effect of font weight and shape.)
Before Thursday, I would like you to spend some time browsing the following websites. Spend at least 10 minutes per website, but there’s no upper limit. You are looking at these to compare the way poster designs from each culture and political movement draw your eye around the page. Do they all work the same way, or are there cultural differences?
Soviet Posters, a website archiving propaganda posters from Russia beginning with the October Revolution
Archive.org‘s curated collection of US propaganda posters in World War 2
Vietnam Propaganda, a website archiving propaganda materials for Vietnamese independence, going back to the 1950s.
Indie Wire‘s collection of 50 war movie posters. If you’ve seen any of these, it’s worth keeping track of the differences between pro-war and anti-war movies.
Today’s Content
We will talk through some basic assumptions about eye-tracking studies and their effect on design today.
In a lot of ways, marketing and visual design has become much more of a science than an art. We know how viewers process images, which has led to pretty dramatic changes in advertising over time.
These documents have roughly the same message (them pants tough, y’all), and they’re both Levi’s ads, but that’s about the limit of their similarity.
Some of this change over time is due to changes in technology. It’s far cheaper now to mass-print photographs and high-resolution prints than it used to be. But, even beyond that change in graphical quality, pay attention to
Where the text is placed
The font design of the text itself
The amount of colors on the page
The shapes and lines that move your eye around the page (that encourage saccades)
The intersections and visual anchors that draw your eye to locations (that encourage fixations)
Now, I have one more image to share during class, but I need to wait until we get there to share it. We are going to try to slow our reading-brain down and think about how we actually process a page or screen.
Before Tuesday, please read Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel’s “Visual Attention to Repeated Print Advertising.” It’s dense and has a lot of math in it. Skip over the math if that doesn’t interest you. The important thing we’re trying to get out of it is an understanding of how eye-tracking studies work and how readers actually view pages and screens. (That is, like Bradley’s blog post said at the beginning of the term, we don’t simply read left-to-right, top-to-bottom.)
Today’s Content
We’ll pick up wherever we left off on Tuesday. We will talk about techniques for touching up images in Photoshop, specifically some precise color-balancing and adding/removing elements.
If there’s time, I will also talk through upscaling and downscaling images. (I really mean if there is time. This process takes a long time.)
