Digital Photography & Imaging - Project 3

15/06/20 - 20/07/20 / Week 10 - Week 14

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Digital Photography & Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University / Project 3 

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For this final project, we have to make another digital artwork except we're also going to animate this piece on Adobe After Effects when we finish it. I was really inspired by the early 2000s kind of aesthetic but with a more modern twist on it. I really adore the pastels and oddly unnerving qualities of the aesthetic. Error and dialogue boxes all over questioning reality with a cool pastel undertone to everything. Here are some of the pieces the are really inspiring for me on this project: 

Figure 1: Inspiration

Figure 1.1: Inspiration

Figure 1.2: Inspiration

Using these as inspiration I will make my own renditions of them to try and capture the general theme and aura these pictures have but using my own face instead. Firstly I did a few sketches of my general idea and how I wanted to capture this aesthetic:

Figure 1.3: Sketch 1

Figure 1.4: Sketch 2

I ended up choosing the second sketch because I felt it was more complete overall and had the better idea and composition. Here are the pictures I used for editing. I took a few pictures of myself for the edit and I used an old picture I took in Maldives of the ocean for a calm and serene backdrop for the poster.

I began editing the artwork, I used blending modes and different dialogue boxes I found for the ones in my artwork, I also downloaded the original Microsoft 95 font used back then to use for the "fazal.exe" texts. Here is the artwork before any animation was done.

Figure 1.5: Final Artwork

For the animation, I had to segment the artwork into different layers. I did 5 layers since I wanted the groups of boxes to move on their own and be different movements. The bottom layer is the background, followed by the 4 photos of me with "fazal.exe" below. Next is the paint box with the orange backdrop. Above that is the dialogue boxes and the top bar. 

Figure 1.6: Screenshot of After Effects.

For the dialogue boxes, pictures of myself and the paint dialogue box, I applied the wiggle animation. It was pretty easy to do since I just had to type it into the position. After which I did the glitch effects on the paint dialogue box to make the video more interesting.

Figure 1.7: Wiggle effect command

Figure 1.8: Paint Dialogue Box alone.

After completing the artwork, I did the animation. I wanted the text boxes to be moving around and I wanted everything to be glitching as well. It would give the older aesthetic while having a more modern twist to it. 

REFLECTION:

Experience: Overall I found this assignment the most difficult because I have very little experience in After Effects. I had to use a lot of online tutorials to find the specific effect I wanted being the glitch and it was also hard to get it working properly. When I tried to fix something later the original file had also corrupted so I had to redo it.

Observation: After Effects is really simple when it comes to doing something like the wiggle effect. I had to just put the command in and it would be done automatically and I didn't have to do anything more. But for more complex effects such as the glitch, it was harder. But when you understand what to do it really isn't too intensive in terms of workload, you just need to know what to use and how to use it.

Findings: I found that After Effects has a lot of effects that can be used. I only used one but there were so many that could be used. All the tutorials on YouTube were also extremely helpful for me. 

FINAL POST: Compilation & Reflection