The week of the 11th of November
We sat down and compiled some notes together as our starting point for the neurodiversity campaign. We all had somewhat different ideas on what we wanted to talk about which ended up being really helpful because we had different perspectives to look at and different ideas to work with. I started by creating the document and getting my ideas down, I then shared my ideas with the group and we evaluated and grew the idea from there. We ended up coming up with around 20 different hashtags for this project, we then narrowed this down to six as the brief stated. We decided to narrow down the project to surround university settings rather than our more generalised idea from before. This was because we felt like us as students need to be more educated on these issues and this was a good task to come up with ideas where we felt that we could see the difference clearly. We looked in depth at how we could make more neurodivergent friendly spaces within university settings, we found that this helped our research a lot because we could hear what people with these disorders had to say about the accessibility in universities and also how this affects their daily lives, this helped us with our ideas because it felt more impactful and also felt more personal.
We sat down in a small group and presented our ideas (elevator pitch). We sat and listened to each other's first ideas and gave feedback. Everyone's ideas were so different and it made a massive difference to hear. Although we had the same brief everyone had a different approach. Our feedback was that we have raised awareness for the issue and also solved it at the same time, which was the best case scenario for this brief. The process of presenting and explaining ideas worked really well because it meant that we could develop our ideas with feedback and also gain new ideas and viewpoints from others in the group. After presenting our work we got set on an independent research task.
The week of the 18th of November
On Monday we had a workshop looking at motion graphics and 3D design. This was really interesting because it was something that I haven't personally looked at before, but I really enjoyed the process and is something I will definitely be looking into for the rest of this brief and potentially the future as well. We worked on creating red blood cells and letting them move and collide with each other, creating the shape of them from a square. I especially found this workshop helpful because 3D design was something that used to feel quite intimidating to me so I never really thought about using it before, but now I realise it isn’t actually as hard or daunting as I thought and I would be able to use it for future projects.
In the Tuesday morning seminar, we talked about some technologies that interested us and how we would use Ai in the industry, this was helpful because it started the conversation about how we could work with Ai rather than fear it or avoid it, this worked well for us because it also meant that we could hear other peoples opinions on it and think about how we could make our old work better. We then got set on a task to look at some old work we did and think about how we would use a new technology to make it better, so I decided to look at the wayfinding brief from first year and look at how AR would improve it, I ended up deciding to use the video I created originally but didn’t use, this meant that the experience would be different for everyone who viewed it, and this worked really well for the brief.
The week of the 25th of November
In the monday morning workshop we carried on working on our 3D animations in the workshop, looking at rendering our red blood cells and adding new elements (white blood cells). This was good because it kept us thinking about how to do the 3D animations, and it started to make a lot more sense this week compared to last week.
In the seminar we went over different workflow tools, looking at mainly mac based programs, plug-ins and apps that would help us create and work quicker, this is good because it's something i've never really considered before, so it helped me think a bit deeper about how i work and how i can help myself.
The week of the 2nd of December
In the workshop on Monday morning we added a spline to the blood cell 3D animation, in this case we added it to act as the vein in the piece, so the cells could flow through it. We also added texture to the white blood cells by creating a new texture and adding ‘maxon noise’ this made the cell appear more textured for the animation, this worked really well because it made the whole piece come together more. We then added a camera that flowed through the spline so we could see the cells moving through, we then widened the camera so we could see everything that was going on, and gave it a capsule so things wouldn't go through the camera and make it harder to see what was happening.
We started a two week brief where we pick one of six briefs and learning outcomes to work on. Initially I found it really hard to find an idea, I knew I wanted to work on the brief that was titled ‘amplifying the overlooked’ because I thought it was a really interesting brief and I thought that I would be able to do a lot with it, however when it actually came to finding an idea for it I was stuck, I couldn’t figure out what I should do. I decided that it was probably best if I try to find an outcome to work from as well, considering I didn’t have an idea yet, this would hopefully move the process along. The outcome I decided to look at was the Data Visualisation outcome, so this let me go into depth about the topic and make it a little bit more educational, which helped me in the creative process because it felt like I had a purpose for creating the document. The initial idea that i had was to create a document that shows a deconstructed car tire, because unless you are an mechanic, you probably don't think about car tires on a daily basis, however this proved quite difficult at first because well, I am not a mechanic, so I don’t know how car wheels and tires really work. I then began to think about how I would possibly display this document publically, and I decided that projections would likely be the best way to do it, this was everyone's experience would be slightly different when viewing it, and this would be really good for publicity of the piece and public engagement when taking into consideration the sharing on social media.
The week of the 9th.
So, when it came to this final brief of the year I originally had an idea and I loved it, I was set on it, until I got bored. It doesn't interest me and i figured that if it didn't interest the person who was quite literally making the piece then it would not wow anybody who was marking it, now I am not particularly sure what it was about the idea, maybe it was the fact that whenever i tried to explain it to anyone they wouldn't react, i lost the love for it. This idea was to create a pice that looked at car wheels and tires, because they are overlooked but they are also very important, I had an idea to show the wheel with each element separately, a decomposed image showing each bolt separate from the wheel, however it felt like someone had already done it, and as i had already mentioned, i found it boring. It was too literal to the brief, and that felt too easy for me. During the time that we started this brief I was designing racing helmets, as a fan of formula 1 I really liked the new Lando Norris helmet, something about how simple of a design, with adding his name in, it really intrigued me, so i started to make some designs, now these started as being completely separate from university. However, when looking at things that are often overlooked, and having my first idea scrapped, I decided to look more conceptual rather than physical. What if I made racing helmets to draw attention to different neurodiversity disorders? Now yes it was a stretch at first, but this was something I felt like I could do really well, and I could involve projections and animations to show off the new idea. As the brief was shorter than usual, because of the upcoming christmas break, I needed to work quickly, I already had three designs for the helmets alongside three posters I had made for them, so now all I really had to do was figure out how to incorporate a new part of technology to coincide with the brief.
Looking at the work that I have been doing, I think I want to make projections and posters for public spaces, showing the helmets with their neurodivergent disorders, and make the helmets look 3D on the posters.
Processing:
Looking back at the work I have done over the past fews weeks, my attitude has definitely changed. Before this module I thought that 3D animation as a whole was completely out of my reach, but the workshops we do on Monday mornings have proven that I am actually a lot more capable than I thought, and I actually really enjoyed it. I also really enjoyed the concept of having more time and freedom to think of the things that I would enjoy to do with the new technologies that we have been looking at. I think that being able to really make some of the briefs more personal (like looking into the neurodivergent spaces) has really helped me be more creative with my work.
