Fiona is a designer and project manager who has worked in the digital media business for the past 15 years and in this lecture she showed us some of her recent work. She runs the website www.glimmer.ie which is a portfolio of her digital projects. It showcases the different websites, adverts and animations she has created or collaborated on.

The first thing that she explained to us was that nothing is truly original and it is perfectly acceptable (if not necessary) to get ideas from other work before we begin creating things ourselves. She gave us this quote to think about by Jim Jarmusch “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from
that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft)
will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery
- celebrate it if you feel like it.”

Before Fiona tackles a website she will look at many other websites and take small ideas from them to incorporate into her final design. She uses sites like Smashing magazine, iStockphoto, Digg and delicious to help her get inspiration.

This led us on to some of her recent project and the various steps involved to get to the final product. Fiona obviously has a keen eye for design and I+ really enjoyed seeing how she developed a logo from the preliminary images all the way down to the customer approved  final piece. This is the final design that was chosen for the Scooter Island logo:

Throughout the design process Fiona might buy the some images from iStockphoto that fit the theme of the project, even if she does not use them for the current project they can be put into her catalogue of images and used in future projects.

The next design she showed us was for the Fat kitty Films logo.

This went through many design phases like the previous logo. As you may notice the little star vector in the top right of this logo is the same as the one used in the scooter island logo. As Fiona has the rights to this she can use it wherever she wants in her designs.

Glimmer.ie also makes flash banner adverts (something we recently had a go at ourselves). The success of an advert is based on the number of click-throughs it gets and i think this particular one for MyHome.ie got several thousand.

I really enjoyed this lecture. Fiona gave us a great deal of information about the digital media industry in the short time she was here. Her profession allows her to be creative and have great command over what projects she chooses to do. All this makes a job in this industry sound like a throughly rewarding one.

Our lecture was late on a Thursday evening for a change but no one seemed to mind as it was an interesting look  behind the scenes at how an editor works and what projects he has been involved with. He uses the term “editor” loosely to describe himself as he actually is involved in a variety of different things in media production.

Ian’s lecture was like a brief overview of how he became the self-employed editor that he is today. He originally started out in the National College of Art and Design doing an industrial design degree (something i originally had down on my CAO form) and then went on to do a masters degree in Trinity College where he studied digital media. His view on our course was that it gave us a great advantage in the digital media industry by having a wide skill set coming out of it.

Ian got in contact with James Yorkston (a music artist) through MySpace after sending him a short video that he made in his spare time. James was so impressed with his video he asked Ian to make an Electronic Press Kit or EPK for him. An EPK is a short video documentary about the artist that normally goes out to the press when an album is released. To film this he flew to Scotland and spent several days filming James recording music along with a few short interviews. Through making this EPK Ian made connections which led him to make videos for the music artist Lisa Hannigan. Although not getting paid much for the videos Ian said he benefitted greatly from doing this by gaining more connections in the industry. The videos he made also helped Lisa get noticed on YouTube and helped get her an interview on an a big American chat show (i think it was the Carson Daly show).

This is one of Lisa’s videos that was edited by Ian.

Recently Ian has been working on projects for RTE. These include shows like “The School” and web only shows for “We Own The Streets”. He gave us an idea of what its like to be an editor for these programs and some helpful advice to always organize your video files as some shows can have hundreds of hours recorded for just a few minutes of used footage. Somewhere around 1/20th of the footage recorded is ever used in the end.

Ian’s lecture was interesting and felt very personal. It opened my eyes to just how much work goes in to making films, even short films and what to expect working as a free-lance editor.

Edward has been a project manager in ICAN for eight years. But what is ICAN? It is an advertising and communications agency which specializes in helping its clients advertise online effectively. They do this by providing the following:

• Online Strategy
• Web Design / Multimedia Design
• Advertising campaigns
• Search Marketings
• Online PR
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Project & Campaign Management

As you can see its quite and extensive list of things that they provide for their customers. Edward then gave us examples of this by showing us some of there recent work which included sites for the WRC and Fifty Three Degrees North.

The aim of these projects is to “convert” people. What they mean by converting is when they project whatever it may be gets a sale, a download, a visit, an open, a click, a new member, a cross-sell, an enquiry etc.

Edward then explained why people ask his company for help. More and more people are online so it makes sense that more advertising evolves accordingly. The process ICAN uses in its projects is structured as follows,

Meetings > Strategy > Brief > Proposal > Concept.

Planning > Creative > Approval > Production > Testing > Release.

This shows shows the scale of work that is required before a final project is released. Edward showed us his role in the company and what he does as project manager. This included managing time frames and ensuring the customers expectations are met. The work place is described as fast paced and stressful but also rewarding and fun.

We explored the creative side of the industry and learned that no idea is entirely original. An example of this was the iFart application on the iPhone that someone created and made $300,000 in a few months.

Finally he gave us some advice on how you can develop your skills and get your foot in the door at a company (making a free website for someone, being an intern etc)

I really found the lecture interesting and looking back at it it feels like i was actually there rather than just looking at a video of the lecture. . I checked out their website shortly after to find out more about the projects and companies they have been involved with. Its definitely worth a look with some really nice flash based animations.

http://www.ican.ie/flash/

Learning styles can be roughly broken down into 5 groups:

1. Channel or mode of learning: How information is taken in.
2. Cognitive strengths in learning: How we remember things we have learned.
3. Manner or style of learning: How a person process information.
4. Personality type influences: How your personality affects your learing.
5. Types of leaning behaviour: Types of intelligence.

Each person takes in information differently and we each have our preferred way of absorbing it. This is the “manner” or ” mode” of learning and is broken into 3 channels:

Visual: Visual learners remember best from seeing information. There are two different types of visual learner however, visual spatial learners and visual linguistic learners. Visual spatial learners will learn best looking and diagrams, charts and videos while visual linguistic learners will learn best looking at written information.

Auditory: Auditory learners learn best when they hear the information being presented to them. They learn best from listening to lectures and discussing topics.

kinesthetic: These learners benefit best from getting a hands on approach to learning. These learners benefit greatly from field trips and physical demonstrations.

Most of us are a mix of these three channels. Geraldine explained that we tend to have and equal mix of these up until the age of 8, then as we get older we become more geared towards certain channels of learning.

Cognitive strengths in learning: Information must pass through 3 modes before being utilised. They are as follows:

Linguistic – verbal communication, watching.

Non linguistic – kinesthetic, tactile, auditory and taste.

Affective – feelings, emotions and mood.

The next topic we covered was how our personality affect our learning. The Myers Briggs MBTI model describes how a person perceives the world and make decisions.

By choosing what best describes your personality from the following list you can find yourself on the above chart and see if its correct for you:

Extraversion (E)————-Introversion (I)

Sensing (S) ——————— Intuition (N)

Thinking(T) ——————-Feeling (F)

Judging(J) ———————- Perceiving(P)

I found the  lecture very interesting as I have never thought about my style of learning before this course. In case you were wondering I seem to be mainly a Visual / Kinesthetic learner.

Our Visual Language module is nearly over and we are on to our final assignment

This is the base sketch i drew of myself. Tomorrow ill have a go at photo shopping  it and see what i can come up with.

… and here it is.

My Face In Words

I created this portrait using photoshop in the Mac labs. It involved a lot of free transforming text and over 130 layers :O . As you may be able to see i created each part of my face using the words for that particular part. Im pretty happy with the end result. Hope you like it

We were given this short video to watch which describes what typography is. I thought it would be a boring tutorial but this video is definitely worth watching, as it was made by the Vancouver film school.

We then got a brief history of typography and how it evolved from cave paintings.

First written language to be based on an Alphabet was Phoenician.

The next step towards the alphabet we know today was from the Greeks. Their alphabet is the source for all modern European scripts. Below is a diagram showing the names of different parts of modern day font.

We were then given our final assignment for Visual Language. We are required to draw a self portrait then convert this into a Typographic Portrait. I’m going to draw a simple pencil sketch then use Photo Shop to make my final piece, watch this space.

We were asked to compose three celebrity portraits supporting a myth or ideology associated with three of the following different statements:

• I am masculine
• I am feminine
• I am wealthy
• I am intelligent
• I am evil
• I am popular

I used Paint Shop Pro to create my 3 images as i don’t have Photoshop at home.

I started off with this base picture of Jessica Alba as she is a well-known celebrity and hopefully won’t be used by anyone else.

I thought about which statements I would portray in these images for quite some time. The first statement I eliminated was “I am feminine” as the image of her is feminine as it is and wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

I AM EVIL: The next idea that came to mind was when I was thinking of a theme for the “I am evil” statement. The first image of evil that I thought of was that of the Joker played by Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight movie. I think the image of this character is a very modern image of evil and suites this theme perfectly.

Evil Jessica

This is the final image i submitted. It took quiet a while to get her face looking as evil as i wanted it but i am happy with the end result. I learned a lot about Paint Shop creating this first image and it helped me greatly in creating more elaborate images.

I AM MASCULINE: The next statement I chose to portray was “I am masculine”. This seemed like a challenging one and I thought carefully about what I would add (or take away) to make the image look masculine.

Masculine Jessica

This final image was a hard one to create as i had to edit out her hair (and give her a new left shoulder which was pretty awkward).

I used George Clooneys hair and beard to make her look more rugged. I then gave her a camouflage  dress and gun to give her a masculine soldier look. Again I’m happy with the result and learned a few tricks with the clone tool that helped me create the next image.

I AM INTELLIGENT: For my next image i chose to make Jessica look intelligent. Although I could make her look like a teacher or scientist i decided to make it a lil more interesting with a pop culture reference to a very smart man, Dr Emmett Brown from Back To The Future.

Intelligent Jessica

I would say i spent the most time on this image as it required a huge amount of blending and resizing. The final image has Lindsay Lohans  foot, Michael J Fox’s jeans and the Docs hair on Jessica. If you think she doesn’t look smart… shes just invented time travel.

Hope you like the final product as it took for-freaking-ever.

As in Digital Photography we learned about the rule of thirds and how it is used to compose a picture. When taking a photograph you should split the image up with into thirds horizontally and vertically using imaginary lines. You should end up with an imaginary grid over the image that will look like the picture below:

The Rule Of Thirds

A viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to the intersections of these lines rather than the center of the photograph.

Next we studied Gestalt Principles. These were:

• Figure and Ground
• Similarity
• Continuation
• Closure
• Proximity

At the end of the lecture we split up into 5 groups and each given a Gestalt Principle to portray using only our bodies. We got “Closure” as our principle… and made a complete mess of it, ha ha.

In our labs this week we continued with our semiotics assignment.

• Balance: There are two types of balance rules that you can be used in images, Symmetrical balance and Asymmetrically balance.

This is an example of symmetrical balance were their is an invisible line vertically down the middle of the poster, each side has elements that mirror the other side through the center line.

Asymmetrically balance is when the objects do not mirror each other through the center line but have elements that make it seem equally weighted on either side, like Arnies shotty and bike on the left of this poster and him to the right.

• Contrast: This simply means difference. To much of the same thing = boring so its good to have contrast in an image. Contrast creates tension and draws the viewers eyes in. My favourite example that we were shown was this one:

• Movement: This can be created in artwork by using line, repetition, and rhythm. Movement ties different elements of the piece together. The diagonal line created by this dancer and her unstable body position give a real sense of movement.

• Emphasis: The picture above is also a good example of emphasis. This can be placed on a particular point or item by using colour, placement, scale or simplicity. This picture of the dancer incorporates nearly all of these things to emphasis her.

Ah but is is

Signs & Signifiers: I found this a lil hard to explain to ill just use this extract “All signs have two aspects: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is any material thing that signifies, e.g., words on a page, a facial expression, a picture, a bit of graffiti. The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.“

The next thing we got to look at was interesting adverts that use syntagmatic relations. My favourite ad is the one for Kill Bill

Ideology:This is the next thing we looked at. Ideology is something
embedded in a culture’s “common sense,” in the everyday habits of
thought that shape how we think and act as we go about our day to-
day, routine activities. It is a subconscious idea that we take for granted.

At the end of our lecture we were given our next assignment titled “Semiotics Collage”. Ill explain all in my next blog