Flash Workshop Lesson Three

Today we learnt about line thickness and how this changes the more you put pressure on the drawing tablet pen. We  were allowed to go a bit wild and just draw whatever we wanted for a few minutes to try and find a thickness we liked, below are my quick doodles in flash.

I found a good thickness i liked and drew the central picture with it, i think this will be the same line thickness i will use to outline my cut out body parts for my upcoming animation.

Flash Workshop Lesson Two

In the second Flash lesson i was taught how to add textures into Flash which can give animations a more hand drawn or unique look. My tutor quickly demonstrated by using this texture which was drawn in photoshop in a few seconds.

Red Rubbish

 She then quickly drew a character and showed me how the texture would look and the sort of result you can expect to get if you use this style. Ignoring her picture and just focusing on the effect, i quite like this style. I think i might use this but instead of making a texture in photoshop, i could use colouring pencils. I'll test this and post what it looks like later on.

Groovy Jumpers

 For the rest of the lesson we were taught a little more about gradient and went over manipulating objects again just in case people had forgotten. Although I'm not a big software or animation fan, this programme is much more friendly and accessible than Maya, even if it is a bit more childish looking. Here is the ball i had to animate bouncing in slow motion so you can see each stage.

Flash Workshop Lesson One

So our Maya tutorials are over! Yay! Now we are having Flash tutorials instead which in my opinion are much more fun and easier to understand. Even though we were only learning the basics i learnt some stuff i didn't know before about the gradient tool, line effects and colour. We were asked to draw a flower, colour it, and then have a play around with line effects and gradient. I liked the look of the stippled line, even if it does look like a five year old did it in MS Paint.

A Stippled Flower

Next we were taught about simple shading techniques and how to join lines up that didn't quite meet, as simple as this sounds it was very useful as in the past I've just deleted an odd line instead of fixing it. Again we messed around with the gradient tool (even though you can't really see it in the picture) and easily shaded our second flower. I'm looking forward to the next Flash lesson where we will actually be animating an object.

A Poorly Shaded Flower

Visual Music - Yvonne Eckersley

In this lecture we were taught about how music can be linked with sight in the form of colour and movement. This is something we have already been taught because we have Yvonne as one of our tutors so none of this is particularly new, however I'll review it anyway.

Yvonne taught us that many scientists and musicians have attempted to link these two senses as far back as 1669 when an argument was put forward for the spectrum of white light to include a 'musical division'. Since then there have been several inventions specifically made to experiment with colour and music. For example, 1730 saw Castel introduce his 'Ocular Harpsichord', which was a harpsichord with several strips of coloured paper linked to certain notes that when pressed, would be visible. This was a very similar design to Rimington's 'Colour Organ' which worked in the same way.

Rimington and his 'Colour Organ'

In 1919, Thomas Wilfred came up with the idea that light should be considered as an art form called 'Lumia' and should remain as a silent art form - sounds riveting. Luckily he changed his mind however and revealed to the world his Clavilux, a complex instrument that allowed the player to create colourful patterns appear on a screen while music played. It was described as being beautiful but the design was incredibly complex and hard to reproduce, apparently Thomas Wilfred was a great artist but not a very good mechanic.

This does actually look pretty cool

More recently, Norman McLaren has experimented with music and colour- painting straight onto bits of film because he couldn't afford any other materials. His work usually consists of coloured shapes moving around to music and he rarely uses and characters or story. After being shown a few bits of his work i can easily say i am not a fan, they get very boring, very quickly, but it is clear he spent a lot of time on them. Here is some of his work:

Even though I'm not a big fan of the examples of visual music Yvonne showed us, i do think there is a connection between sight and music, especially when it comes to colour, for example very few people would hear a very deep loud noise and then in their head imagine the colour yellow or pink would they? Most people associate noise with black or navy and graceful music with light colours.

It is a shame that Yvonne didn't mention 'Waltzing Waters', a very interesting and pretty display of water fountains carefully timed to music with lights flashing through the water. I've seen it for myself and it seems much more interesting than the colour organ etc. and gives better evidence that colour and music are linked. Sadly i seemed to be one of very few people who found this lecture useful, although there was barely any relevance to my course it was interesting but it didn't seem to interest many others.

Maybe this would have been more interesting: Waltzing Waters

The Sustainable Lie

Unfortunately this lecture was a part two to a previous lecture i missed due to the BAF trip. From what I understood his previous lecture focused on the pollution of the world by gas emissions and waste packaging etc. This lecture however was about greenwashing, which is when companies spend more money on advertising how much they help the environment rather than directly helping the environment. For example an advert for energy saving light bulb is being broadcast on millions of television screens and wasting vast amounts of energy that will never be saved by switching to a different light bulb.

Apparently at the moment 20% of the planet's population are using 80% of the planet's resources and if 100% of the planet lived like the West does, the planet would be unable to sustain itself. It would be an ecological disaster as there wouldn't be enough crops to feed everyone or enough fuel to get things from one country to another. But we will surely reach a social disaster if things continue the way they are with only 20% of the planet living in luxury. However, as far as the possibility to sustain ourselves in concerned, we won't know until we try. One hundred years ago sociologists were warning us that the population couldn't withstand six billion people eating a basic amount of food let alone a percentage living in luxury and we have managed quite well so far. Fuel on the other hand may be a problem to sustain, with all energy saving fuels seemingly requiring a vast amount of fuel to produce.

Next we were given some statistics:

• There is a new product launched every three minutes which is usually over packaged and produces lots of waste
• $400 billion spent on advertising luxury products we don't actually need which use up fuel to produce them and lead to a lot of waste and over consumption, this ranges from pop tarts to DVD players
• Cement for new buildings creates 5% of all global carbon dioxide emissions but is very rarely pinpointed for this whereas airports are even though plane travel only creates 2%
• The technology we use everyday like Ipads and computers create massive amounts of waste, for example a laptop produces four thousand times its own wait in waste
• BP, an oil and gas company has received a lot of criticism and media attention largely due to oil spills but this company is actually twice as efficient when compared to rival company ExxonMobil who produce 146 million tonnes of CO2 per year - this is more than an average country!

 Lastly were told about how helpful recycling really is and it was quite eye opening. Although we all think that we are being helpful by putting out our recycling every week, a lot of fuel is wasted on actually recycling these items, usually outweighing the amount of energy that is being saved. Paper for example requires a costly bleaching process and only 50% of this new paper is deemed suitable enough to reuse resulting in 50% of all the UK's waste being paper. 50% of all our plastic sent for recycling is sold to China for £50 per tonne (Strangely everything seems to be 50) and is shipped over there, using up a lot of valuable fuel.

Our lecturer's statistics seemed very one sided and included no positive statistics at all. I hope this was just a shock tactic because if there really are such few positive results from recycling then what is the point? I'm guessing he was just using shock tactics as a few of his points seemed very weak and desperate such as glass and metal recycling wasting petrol to take it to the recycling centres - this was the only negative point for these two materials. I'm going to keep on recycling and hopefully that will have some small impact on the world, and if not, at least i tried.