-:]Steve Design 1.0[:-

A current brief for my design module at Uni is to take a scene from a movie and re-create it using animated typography. Most people are doing the project in Flash having 2D text appearing as the dialogue progresses.

I have decided to do mine in 3D drawing inspiration from “The Child” by Antoine Bardou Jacquet.

I am re-creating the end of Star Wars:A New Hope.

I have edited the original 15min sequence down to 1min 50sec (the brief was for 45secs). The animation is being done in 3D Studio Max, this will be the first time I have used 3DS Max for animation and everything is self taught, learning it as I go along.

This is the video so far, the sections with stills and original footage will be replaced with animated shots in the final version.

Comments welcome, especially from anyone with experience in this area.

A recent brief for a design project at University was to create the alphabet using photography. The examples we were shown were mostly photographs of letters off road signs, food packaging etc.
Wanting to do something a bit more original and challenging, I made mine with fire.

I created the letters by setting up my camera on a tripod my back yard. A 4sec shutter speed was used to allow me to burn (no pun intended) the letters through each shot. My girlfriend Louise operated the camera while I waved a flaming torch through the air to create the letters (think I may have freaked out my neighbours).
Taking the photos took just under two hours , had I been doing it on my own it would have taken about twice as long as I would have had to use the self timer on the camera.

For the brief we had to layout the images as if on an A2 page so they were imported into Photoshop, adjusted slightly,cropped and arranged in a grid. The background image is a photograph of fire I took on a camping trip in 2003.

Oh and just in case you wanted to know the “flaming torch” was actually burning kitchen roll soaked in cooking oil on the end of a fork.

This music video was on the Drawn blog, they use retro logos for the song lyrics. Pretty cool idea.

I spotted this sign in Belfast on the way to the Design College today. It is a bus- stop poster for the
Belfast Film festival and they have filled the inside of the sign with “popcorn”. Thought this was ingenuous.

What would be more impressive is if they could incorporate some kind of popcorn vending machine in the sign, something like this…

Playing with ND filter

For one of my University projects I had been playing around with light painting and I had wanted to try it around my University. The problem with this is that there are a lot of lights around the Uni and so I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere dark enough to give me long enough shutter speeds. So I have purchased a ND4 filter to put on the lens of my Fujifilm S6500fd. Simply put a ND filter is like putting sunglasses on your camera. It cuts down the light entering the camera and allows you to use longer shutter speeds in brighter conditions.

As well as allowing me to try light painting it also allows you to blur moving objects in a scene while keeping the surroundings sharp. i.e. people walking around. Anyway to have a play around with this I headed to Northern Ireland’s newest shopping experience, Victoria Square.

I was in a hurry to get back to my car to beat the traffic so I only got a couple of photographs. I would really like to head back at night and try more like this.

Over the past couple of days I have been adding content to the Portfolio section of the site, so feel free to have a look at my work. I will post notifications of any major additions in the blog.

I have now customised the theme for the site and added my own header image by replacing the original one which came with the theme.
I then had to go and edit the CSS stylesheet for the site to adjust the layout of the header text and the position of the Navigation to match up with the new image.

While the site works well as a blog I had a few problems when it came to making the other pages as there is limited control over the way you can layout content. Text and images tend to bunch together and the “code” view in the editor doesn’t give you the same control you would have if using a true text editor. But despite this I have found workarounds to any problem I encountered.
For example I had to create a mostly transparent image with a line in the middle to allow me to put in proper line breaks, as otherwise all the content bunched together in Internet Explorer.

After searching on the internet I found that a lot of people were having the same problems with the Rich editor so I have now switched it off and will be writing my posts in HTML from now on.
One issue I havn’t solved is that images which are links have a blue border in IE instead of orange, so I shall have to go and tweak the style sheet again to try and fix this.

I have installed several plugins to the site including one which displays random photos from my Flickr page on the sidebar. I also installed a plugin so I can easily embed Flash content and one for YouTube and GoogleVideo.

As of this post I am now updating three different blogs, this one, my personal one and my University design blog.

To begin, or second (?) with the main purpose of this blog is going to be a Portfolio site for my work, which will be on the portfolio page, over yonder.
The reasons I am using Wordpress for this are mainly that I currently do not have time to go and completely design a Porfolio site myself, also it is much faster to update for me as I can update the site from anywhere without FTP access.
Yes I know I could do that on a normal site if I was to go and set up web scripts, but again I don’t have time.
One final benefit of using a blog is that it allows people to post comments, and in my experience any type of critisim about my work results in it improving.

This blog page will be used for me to post about new things in the world of the web and design that I have learned, found interesting or just amusing. I will also post up a new photograph from time to time, from my Flickr. Perhaps boring the reader with intriate details of how it was achieved.

So feel free to comment, with compliments, insults, jokes or even some genuine advice.

Oh and I apologise in advance for my spelling and grammatical mistakes, I’ll do my best to keep them to a minimum.