Visual Elements

I'm going to animate the chalkboard at the top so the text appears as if being written. The 'bin' and 'yogurt' are visual elements to illustrate the statistics, and the 'UK' is part of the animated text.

Red. White. Blue.

The Flashing is going pretty well so far, we've been doing a 3 hour session every Tuesday night, and hopefully I should come out with an ABC qualification in Adobe Flash by the end of it. I've already decided how I want some of my animation to look, and have begun storyboarding. I'm going to call my animation, 'Why We Shouldn't Waste.' These are the statistics I have found;

• If somebody throws away a newspaper every day for a year, they will have wasted the equivalent of a 35 foot fir tree.
• If someone throws away a coke can every day for a year, they will have wasted the equivalent of an aluminium wheelchair frame.
• £10 billion worth of food is thrown away annually in the UK, including;

         - 5,500 whole chickens each day.

         - 440,000 ready meals each day.

         - 1.6 million yogurts each day.

The style of animation I want to create will be mainly typographic. Any visual elements will be created typographically, e.g. the dustbin will be made up of the word 'bin'. As the main statistic is based in the United Kingdom the colour scheme will be mainly red, white, and blue, and I may possibly use the Union Jack in it somewhere.

So far i'm concentrating mainly on the food statistic, as this can be broken down into a further three, and after storyboarding it I feel it may take as long as a minute to animate this section. As the animation has a maximum length of 90 seconds I may run over that if I animate the other two stats. I'm just going to crack on with the first section now, and see how that goes.

Unit 3: Screen Based Communication 1

It's finally here; the unit I couldn't wait to get stuck in to. Since starting the course I have been looking forward to learning Flash, as it's so unlike anything I've done before. So far I've found the brief slightly strange; the animation has to be based on a statistic, and has to persuade others in to your way of thinking. I suppose I'll have to get used to working to working on strange/difficult briefs at some point though. 

   So far I have been researching existing animations, my favourites being the typographic film quote animations I found on YouTube. I've also been researching every kind of interesting statistic I can think of. I think I could be on to something with a wastage/recycling route I took; apparently £10 billion worth of food is thrown away annually in the UK, and the statistic is broken down further into how many yogurts, whole chickens etc. is thrown out each day. I was also thinking of looking in to what could be created with the stuff people waste, e.g. if somebody throws away a coke can every day, how long would it take to have wasted enough aluminium to make, say, an aeroplane?

Visual Thinking: Final Outcomes

Much to my annoyance I can't seem to get my work to upload in it's normal colours, no matter what I do with it. However, these are two of my final outcomes for the project. The one on the left is a further development of my final mock-up, using photo's I had commissioned by a Photography student, when I found out I wouldn't be allowed to use AIB's photography studio's as I hadn't had an induction. I removed the amnesty candle from the final design as it wasn't my image, plus I thought it looked a little out of place floating in mid-air. I had the full case study on the board to support the main statements, and detail how the audience could help Amnesty with cases like that. The design on the top right plays on the 'trial' theme. I had the model hold the board out to the side as though being photographed after arrest.
<--- This is my T section advert, which is obviously quite difficult to see. The image in the bottom part is one of my models holding the board with the amnesty logo and website on it, looking down at the floor with her legs curled up underneath her. This was my favourite of all the outcomes.

More Mock-ups...

Once again blogger has decided to play with the colours on my pictures, but I guess you get the gist of them.
The image on the left is the mock-up I took to PAL for the crit, where I received some positive and constructive feedback;

• Exchange 'the' for 'a' as the is too excluding.

• Find a way to highlight the word 'rape' as it's the strongest word on the page. possibly do it the same way as 'adultery'.

• Lose the capital letters on the tag line.

I then went on to create the image on the right, having made those changes. I feel that this piece will be very effective once I have a set of photographs to use for it.

Wouldn't Happen To You. Shouldn't Happen To Anyone.

<-- This is another of my mock-ups, however, I think I'm actually going to run with this idea.
I have come up with the tagline 'Wouldn't happen to you. Shouldn't happen to anyone', and although the image is a shoddy one off google images, I feel the poster has potential once doubled with my own images.
Basically, I want the poster to be something teenagers can identify with, as the kind of hard hitting facts I've been researching are so far removed from anything the typical British teen has had to deal with it could alienate them from Amnesty's work. Therefore, I'm going to photograph people the average young person could relate to, then couple that with a high impact fact/case study, plus the tag line, hopefully resulting in an campaign that highlights the differences in the lives of British teens and those abroad, without alienating the target audience.

A World Gone Mad.

This is a 5 minute mock-up of an idea, which for some reason Blogger has uploaded in this fetching blue colour rather than the Amnesty yellow I designed it in.

The idea behind this came from something Barry Tempest (Mr. Amnesty) said during his talk.
He told us that whilst campaigning for Amnesty he has encountered many cases of people not understanding the fundamental concept behind the charity, human rights. One lady in particular told him, 'Oh, human rights, I don't agree with that' obviously getting human rights confused with the kind of political correctness gone mad that is all over the tabloids. I decided to take a light-hearted approach rather than going for shock tactics, and drew up this cartoon of two office workers inadvertently brushing against each other, with the female character taking this to be 'sexual harrassment!' I basically wanted to portray the character blowing an innocent mistake out of all proportion in typical if maybe slightly exagerrated 'PC gone mad' style, with the tagline 'In a world gone mad, find time to care about the things that really matter.'

I have decided that although I quite like the simplistic, cartoony style of the ad, it doesn't tell the audience what 'the things that really matter' actually are, and I don't feel they'd be inspired to join Amnesty as a result of seeing this, therefore it misses the entire point of the brief.