This week in Animation context we would be looking at three elements in the lesson such as the Statement of Intent (SOI), Design principles of the magazine article we'd be doing and some features in Adobe Indesign that we would be reviewing and could prove to be of viable use in producing our articles. We began by discussing the matter of the statement of intent which was the documented intention of or course project in the modules of the course, in this instance it would be the PDF magazine article. We were told that in this course and project we would need to wear many hats and delegate our tasks between modules and outcomes that needed to be submitted which is something that we would need to learn in this matter. We reviewed what we had read of the Vignelli Canon and after seeing it late last night I would think that the PDF document basically described what we were trying to achieve in our work on the 360 research piece, which everyone else seemed to agree with as some of us didn't understand the booklet or its words as some like Paige and myself have some trouble understanding academic writing.
Johnny then brought our attention to the matter of an element called "skill before need" which basically meant that the tutors or lecturers were teaching us a skill that we may not need in some of our tasks the 360 module was an example of this. In terms of the academic writing the University pushes us to read challenging text in the hope that we can understand it more with time and this was a link to what we would need to do in our SOI's as the words in text as Johnny told us had the principles to form their own craft and its important to get a feel for this type of work and text. In this statement of intent it was an element where we couldn't go wrong as it stated our intentions to look at a certain subject of our interest and Johnny told us that "the document sets a venture in motion" meaning that it begins to set what we want to produce into reality much like a movie script that starts the movies development process.
In this document there were several areas that needed to be covered to describe what it was we were going to approach and why. Johnny advised that we keep the text short and simple and not go into too much detail and in short sentences. The document had several things to include starting with a title page describing what it was we would be describing and we were told we could include images of things relating to what we were planning to look at if we wanted to so it would add a creative flare to it. In this statement we needed to be rational about our research and Johnny stated that there would be no need for the use of primary research which was something completely new to me as I had been used to doing primary and secondary research for my projects back in college but as this course kept showing us it was about going outside and beyond our normal comfort zones.
He informed us to try and do our statement of intent within seven days so that he could review it and tell us what we need to improve upon or what needed to be added to the statement itself. Near the ending of the session we were brought to the attention of the software we would be using to bring our article assignments together which was Adobe Indesign. I was familiar with the program as I had been using it in my time at Trafford College and while at first it was the cause of many headaches for me and some university students that I had talked to whilst at an interview for Manchester Metropolitan University it does have its advantages and uses. One element would be in creating booklets and book signatures for my own bookbinding projects both college and own purposes, since thanks to this software I was able to produce a booklet for my end of year show project in Level 3 Art and Design.
Johnny would be showing us some tips and tricks to indesign and how we could use it to create our magazine articles or even a possible layout of our SOI's. The first element covered was an element within the Vignelli canon PDF itself and it involved the use of grids and margins and the different types of text within the different formats such as Serif and Sans serif, serif typeface is the typical text you would see in traditional documents which as was described to us was easier to read and to read words out loud whilst its cousin san serif is a different typeface altogether. Sans serif is the type face thats used in graphic novels and comic books and I was surprised that some members of the group didn't know this. Johnny showed us an example of the serif typeface in a book called the Gutenburg bible which was mentioned in the canon PDF and looking at the image of this the text looked familiar and that would be because it was the typeface that I'd seen in fairy tale books and films at the start of a Disney/ Dreamworks films such as Shrek, Robin Hood, and Cinderella.
In this I learned a few tips about doing a story in a book such as the spacing and size of the text and that the term Horo vaqui did also apply to this element such as the images don't have to fill the whole page if we don't want them to. One element that caught my attention was leaving some space at the bottom of the page for the page number which was called a visual centre. When doing the Indesign document we would be using A4 scaled pages as they would be the easiest for us to use. We were then introduced to how we introduce grids and margins to the document and Johnny showed us to access it we needed to go to the layout option in the tool bar followed by create guides which brought up a box which showed the measurements and the current measurements that Johnny would be using was 9x9, 3mm , 3mm and there was an option in the box marked fit grid to pages and this would apply to the margins too. This was a feature I didn't know about and this could prove useful for when I decided to do a book story using indesign.
One thing that Johnny brought up was the idea of thumb-nailing in Indesign, meaning we could make a simple mock up of what our magazine articles would look like before we decide on a final version. We were shown some ideas of doing this process such as using crosses to represent images in our articles or in terms of text it would be a matter of using lines in columns in the article. The key to this was to just play around with the design and the various settings within the program, we were told that this was a therapeutic process and that when using the design and playing with it we would need to fill the frames proportionately. Johnny then showed us the matter of master pages which I knew were the double pages within a book document or normal document and given my knowledge from college I assumed that the masters needed to be created by dragging the pages down into the document.
However I was shown a different method and to insert the master pages this was clicking the master pages. We were also shown a trick that I wasn't aware of and this was introducing page numbers and titles to all the pages and that was to double click the master pages and anything we did on them they would all be affected in the documents we created and it helps with book titles. To insert elements like page numbers and what could be done was selecting the current text symbol on the page then on the tool bar hit type, insert special character, marker, current page number. This therefore inserted the page number onto the page and there was a short cut to putting in the page numbers and this was the "A" key which would automatically number the pages and is also affected when the text style changes.
Johnny suggested we should have a go at this for fun and see if we may find a use for it especially in our statements of intent which as we were told many times would be pushing the boat out much like our animations in animation 101. I was slightly confused and wondered if he wanted either the word or indesign version and he said we could send the word and PDF version of the document. In terms of exporting the document it would be as a PDF but Johnnys first attempt didn't show the whole article and that would be because he hadn't set the export settings to spreads which would show the whole page spread as I remembered this from doing booklets back in college.
We were told that using Indesign should be second nature to some of us by now and that there was a difference in quality in both these medias of presenting our statements. Looking back on this session it was clear that there were some aspects of Indesign that I didn't know about even from using it since my college studies and much like After Effects it seems that the programs have abilities that we haven't even discovered yet. I feel that this would be a very difficult task, though I have done briefs and pitches before back in college it seems this would be a more achedemic description of our work and it would seem we could further the research from our 360 projects or just start from scratch and it seemed clear that if I wanted to do concept art I would need to find artists from films and games to see if it would help in my pitch.
I feel that I'm going to have to start prioritising my work from this point forwards to see what's the most important task to execute in the evening and weekend so that I will be able to meet the required deadline for my module work. In conclusion it looked like we were nearing the more daunting element of the module and course so far and I could feel my confidence shaking but I knew that no matter what I couldn't give up because for me that would throw away all the work that I've achieved to get on this course and I've been through daunting tasks before and have seen them through no matter what, and I can do it again for this course and module.
Johnny then brought our attention to the matter of an element called "skill before need" which basically meant that the tutors or lecturers were teaching us a skill that we may not need in some of our tasks the 360 module was an example of this. In terms of the academic writing the University pushes us to read challenging text in the hope that we can understand it more with time and this was a link to what we would need to do in our SOI's as the words in text as Johnny told us had the principles to form their own craft and its important to get a feel for this type of work and text. In this statement of intent it was an element where we couldn't go wrong as it stated our intentions to look at a certain subject of our interest and Johnny told us that "the document sets a venture in motion" meaning that it begins to set what we want to produce into reality much like a movie script that starts the movies development process.
In this document there were several areas that needed to be covered to describe what it was we were going to approach and why. Johnny advised that we keep the text short and simple and not go into too much detail and in short sentences. The document had several things to include starting with a title page describing what it was we would be describing and we were told we could include images of things relating to what we were planning to look at if we wanted to so it would add a creative flare to it. In this statement we needed to be rational about our research and Johnny stated that there would be no need for the use of primary research which was something completely new to me as I had been used to doing primary and secondary research for my projects back in college but as this course kept showing us it was about going outside and beyond our normal comfort zones.
He informed us to try and do our statement of intent within seven days so that he could review it and tell us what we need to improve upon or what needed to be added to the statement itself. Near the ending of the session we were brought to the attention of the software we would be using to bring our article assignments together which was Adobe Indesign. I was familiar with the program as I had been using it in my time at Trafford College and while at first it was the cause of many headaches for me and some university students that I had talked to whilst at an interview for Manchester Metropolitan University it does have its advantages and uses. One element would be in creating booklets and book signatures for my own bookbinding projects both college and own purposes, since thanks to this software I was able to produce a booklet for my end of year show project in Level 3 Art and Design.
Johnny would be showing us some tips and tricks to indesign and how we could use it to create our magazine articles or even a possible layout of our SOI's. The first element covered was an element within the Vignelli canon PDF itself and it involved the use of grids and margins and the different types of text within the different formats such as Serif and Sans serif, serif typeface is the typical text you would see in traditional documents which as was described to us was easier to read and to read words out loud whilst its cousin san serif is a different typeface altogether. Sans serif is the type face thats used in graphic novels and comic books and I was surprised that some members of the group didn't know this. Johnny showed us an example of the serif typeface in a book called the Gutenburg bible which was mentioned in the canon PDF and looking at the image of this the text looked familiar and that would be because it was the typeface that I'd seen in fairy tale books and films at the start of a Disney/ Dreamworks films such as Shrek, Robin Hood, and Cinderella.
In this I learned a few tips about doing a story in a book such as the spacing and size of the text and that the term Horo vaqui did also apply to this element such as the images don't have to fill the whole page if we don't want them to. One element that caught my attention was leaving some space at the bottom of the page for the page number which was called a visual centre. When doing the Indesign document we would be using A4 scaled pages as they would be the easiest for us to use. We were then introduced to how we introduce grids and margins to the document and Johnny showed us to access it we needed to go to the layout option in the tool bar followed by create guides which brought up a box which showed the measurements and the current measurements that Johnny would be using was 9x9, 3mm , 3mm and there was an option in the box marked fit grid to pages and this would apply to the margins too. This was a feature I didn't know about and this could prove useful for when I decided to do a book story using indesign.
One thing that Johnny brought up was the idea of thumb-nailing in Indesign, meaning we could make a simple mock up of what our magazine articles would look like before we decide on a final version. We were shown some ideas of doing this process such as using crosses to represent images in our articles or in terms of text it would be a matter of using lines in columns in the article. The key to this was to just play around with the design and the various settings within the program, we were told that this was a therapeutic process and that when using the design and playing with it we would need to fill the frames proportionately. Johnny then showed us the matter of master pages which I knew were the double pages within a book document or normal document and given my knowledge from college I assumed that the masters needed to be created by dragging the pages down into the document.
However I was shown a different method and to insert the master pages this was clicking the master pages. We were also shown a trick that I wasn't aware of and this was introducing page numbers and titles to all the pages and that was to double click the master pages and anything we did on them they would all be affected in the documents we created and it helps with book titles. To insert elements like page numbers and what could be done was selecting the current text symbol on the page then on the tool bar hit type, insert special character, marker, current page number. This therefore inserted the page number onto the page and there was a short cut to putting in the page numbers and this was the "A" key which would automatically number the pages and is also affected when the text style changes.
Johnny suggested we should have a go at this for fun and see if we may find a use for it especially in our statements of intent which as we were told many times would be pushing the boat out much like our animations in animation 101. I was slightly confused and wondered if he wanted either the word or indesign version and he said we could send the word and PDF version of the document. In terms of exporting the document it would be as a PDF but Johnnys first attempt didn't show the whole article and that would be because he hadn't set the export settings to spreads which would show the whole page spread as I remembered this from doing booklets back in college.
We were told that using Indesign should be second nature to some of us by now and that there was a difference in quality in both these medias of presenting our statements. Looking back on this session it was clear that there were some aspects of Indesign that I didn't know about even from using it since my college studies and much like After Effects it seems that the programs have abilities that we haven't even discovered yet. I feel that this would be a very difficult task, though I have done briefs and pitches before back in college it seems this would be a more achedemic description of our work and it would seem we could further the research from our 360 projects or just start from scratch and it seemed clear that if I wanted to do concept art I would need to find artists from films and games to see if it would help in my pitch.
I feel that I'm going to have to start prioritising my work from this point forwards to see what's the most important task to execute in the evening and weekend so that I will be able to meet the required deadline for my module work. In conclusion it looked like we were nearing the more daunting element of the module and course so far and I could feel my confidence shaking but I knew that no matter what I couldn't give up because for me that would throw away all the work that I've achieved to get on this course and I've been through daunting tasks before and have seen them through no matter what, and I can do it again for this course and module.
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