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Week 3: Workshop Assignment

This week we were asked to make a poem,poster,card or calligram using different fonts (photoshop, illustrator).

I chose to do a calligram, because I found it very interesting. One of the examples during the workshop that was shown to us was this one:

Looking at that I started thinking about skyscrapers and how I could make the shape of one of the best known skyscrapers using words that describe the area and the building itself. Curious to know if people have already made them, i searched online to find a number of calligrams of buildings like the eiffel tower and the shard and many other skyscrapers.

This then inspired me to do one from my where I lived. The most known building in Guangzhou is the Canton Tower. 

So i used words that best describe China and my experience there to make a calligram of the canton tower. This was a good way to understand my ability and skills of doing illustrator sort of things. I associated china with safe, pollution, nightlife, cultural and many more. 

Although others would use others words to make this specific calligram, since we got the freedom to write whatever we felt like writing that still made sense, i figured it would be best for me to make this more of a personal assignment rather than a public one. 

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Week 1: Introduction to Digital Media

This is our first lecture, and it is an introduction to what digital media is, and what our assignments would be and what we will be asked to do. What was introduced to us what Marshall Mcluhan and his “ages of man” saying.

 which was about how being in a different era changes our perspectives on the way we do things. In this lecture we got informed that we will be having our first task which were the client briefs, we were asked to develop a piece that interprets our narrative. 

This sounds like a great project for the start of the module, since it gives us complete autocracy and freedom, there seems to be no specific route to go along with, it depends on our wants and what we thought would be good to elaborate on. The aim of this project given to us is to be able to demonstrate our understanding or narrative through practical digital media to create tools the following;

-Figurative

-Documentary

-Abstract

our next assignment are our blogs, what we need to do for this is to reflect on our lectures and workshops and include our experiences, our individual/group work, what we’ve learned, our research to elaborate on the module to show our understanding. We than have our group work which is to show our skills on audio and visual media like - stop motion, video editing, interactive storytelling.

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Group Work- The Narrative Project

This is a project we are currently still working on and the aim of it is to develop a narrative project that shows digital media. we have to use tools to create a narrative. This project needs to include audio and stop motion animation, and it has to be a minimum of 90 seconds. 

This project gives us a lot of freedom, which is why me and my partner decided we wanted to do something which involves traveling and learning new things about the area we are now living in. Since we are both international students we thought that finding out interesting things about the place we study in would be a really interesting and fun thing to do not only for the project but also for educating each other and others on the area we live in and the beautiful places we have not heard of or do not highlight. 

After a bit of research we found out that there are actually quite a few islands around the place we live in. We found out about this from an article about Twickenham Island, this is what inspired us to make our stopmotion video that will be a tour guide on islands. We then started thinking about how the layout of this video would be. and questions like;

1. Who is our target?

2. When will we have time to take the clips and edit them

3.How many islands should we go to ?

In the end we decided on these three islands

-Raven's Ait Island

-Eel Pie Island

-Platt's Eyot

All of them have something unique about themselves, which is why we decided on these three.

 The video itself will be laid out as if it were a game. it will be one website with big letter saying Islands of Kingston Upon Thames with a start button which than transitions into another page with a big map of kingston upon thames and the various places we have chosen to go visit so Eel Pie Island, Raven aits island and so on. The person viewing the website can move their mouse to one of the destinations on the map and see a short description of the island, so why it is famous, what attractions there are, and the exact location. if they seem interested they can simply click on the “x” and this will direct them to the video that we have taken in that specific island, for the audio it will be Me and my partner talking about the island and its attractions and if not, we will add music to substitute. The aim of this project is to use as much audio and stop motion as we can to make it a tour guide video and make it original. The skills gained from this will definitely be editing, getting a hold of handling websites, shooting videos and so on.  

And this is our storyboard:

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Client Briefs 3 - Audio Tour

This was one of the most challenging client briefs we were assigned to do. We were asked to pick a specific location and in a audio form we had to show how the location sounded. the difficult part about this is that there are no visuals, so you have to make the audio sound as if the person listening to your audio is in the location you have recorded and edited to give that feeling to.

Meaning, using your editing and recording skills, you’ll have to make the visual into an audio for the person to get a glimpse of how a certain area is.

I thought, since I am living in Kingston Upon Thames, It would be a good idea to try and make that my audio tour for this client brief. I used both secondary documents and my own personal recording to combine and have a result of what I called - “Kingston Town Centre”. 

What can be heard from this audio is people chatting and walking, and also in the background we can hear music playing (which are the street music players in kingston town centre”

I started off at the bentall centre, where there was live music, than i sat on the bench and recorded people walking and chatting. This was all I was able to get from my Iphone 6s. So once I went back home to look at the recordings I have got, i felt as if it was not the perfect recording of what kingston actually sounded like, which was why i decided to play around with this a little bit by adding a bit of other noises that would make the audio tour sound as if the person listening was in the middle of kingston town centre.

This was an overall very challenging project, it took a lot of time and effort for the results to be good. However, you learn a lot from where you live when you try to make a audio tour of where you are staying. It definitely made me appreciate my surroundings much more than I did before. 

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Client Briefs 2- Picture Essay

The second client briefs were a picture essay. We were asked to take or find 5 photographs and be able to tell a story about it. Again, this was completely up to us. Whatever we wanted to portray with this, we got the complete freedom to do so. 

That being said I thought it would be a good idea to show some culture in my essay pictures. Having lived in China for almost all my life, and knowing what peoples ideas and assumptions are about China, I decided that I would show a part of mainland China that people fail to mention, or do not recognize to be a attraction. 

When people think of China they have everything on the top of their minds but do they think about the rooftops? I doubt it. The last couple of years living there, I have discovered many rooftops and made it a hobby of mine to go around new apartments or even skyscrapers to see what the view is like in every single one of them. Not only is it eye-opening, but it is a great way to appreciate the place you live in, and everything that is going around you. 

In specific for China, it is a really busy place. I lived in Guangzhou, which is the third biggest city meaning there is going to be people rushing around and a lot of traffic but also - amazing views!

Here are the pictures that I have used for this client brief:

I never thought these pictures would benefit me in anyway, but when given this project, these pictures really inspired me to base them on the picture essay, since it means a lot to me and is apart of my culture now as well, it was a great way to express how perception changes everything and everyone’s assumptions on a specific view.

The overall outcome of this client brief would be pretty good! I enjoyed writing about it and bringing the photos together to tell a story that means a lot.

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Client Briefs 1- Animation

The first one I've done is the animation. With this assignment we were given a lot of freedom of what we wanted to do with the animation, it could be about anything. So i thought what kind of an animation / video could I make that would be 30 seconds? What would you like to do?

As a result i decided to make a music groups europe tour advertisement. I felt like this would be something that I would not mind doing, so I decided to give it a try. 

I am very interested in advertising, this was a great chance for me to see how skillful I am, and to get feedback on what I need to be changed.

The band that inspired me to do things in the field of advertisement was Placebo, they have been my favorite band since I was a kid, and seeing them live is one of my biggest wishes, 

The way the video was laid out, with a poster-like picture of the band, then another picture of them as a group with the tour dates and location coming from the bottom of the screen (like end credits), later transitioning into the link where the tickets can be purchased.

Here is what it looked like:

The outcome of my animation was overall okay. However, it definitely needs improvement on areas such as; quality and layout.