Individual Critical Analysis
Introduction
As the brief was provided to us, I remember thinking to myself, this is a great opportunity to show off my design work and graphics, and so, my role as lead graphics designer and editor was decided. I believe, as a student and team member, I responded well to the brief and carried out work beyond what I thought I was capable of. The measures of my motivation are evident on the Yola website. When it comes down to my progress as an individual, developing my After Effects skills is the main strength of this semester. I believe I have achieved this positively, and I aim to discuss how I have in the following text. The key points I’ll be discussing are:
• Design/Production of Trailer
I’ll also be looking at the purpose of each of these items, how well I think I achieved them and why.
Critique
My photo-essay, I would say, is the piece of work I could have improved on in terms of technical skill. I don’t believe my pictures to be elite at any stretch; however I think they did well in carrying out my intentions for the photo-essay. Though photography is not my main area of interest, I still appreciate the hard work and decisiveness involved in pulling off a great photo. The aim for my photo-essay was to show all the different types of people from all walks of life getting their haircut. To begin to understand what kind of life each individual leads on a daily basis, and something as trivial as getting a haircut could provide entrance into such an interesting part of oneself. Maybe they intend to change the way society views them? Maybe they want to change their image to fit in? Maybe they simply want a different style? One way of capturing their understanding was to focus on their facial expressions as they’re sitting in the chair. As they stare at themselves in the mirror, an interesting chemistry forms. I reference the picture of the man with the hazelnut coloured hair. His intense stare into the mirror suggests a great many things. Perhaps he leads an unhappy life, who knows? The point being that the intention of the photo-essay was achieved through my photography.
The design of the trailer came to me after watching the movie “Spiderman”. I learned that the character "Peter Parker" works for the "Daily Bugle", a fictional newspaper company, and he is forever trying to please his boss with the perfect picture that will make the front page. The idea came to me of exploiting this idea for my own work. By finding a template that I would later alter as my own, collaborating 503 layers of newspapers into an extremely large composition in After Effects, I was able to create a panning effect that is often seen in movies. I used the newspaper image placeholders as templates for our work. Director John Bird created amazing pictures of Kuda Mutinta and Michael Dunningham pretend fighting, which he then imported into Photoshop to create a cartoon graphic novel feel about them. I then took these images, replaced the newspaper originals to our own, and there we have our own superheroes in the papers. After some colour correction, masking and cropping, the pictures look like they belong in the papers originally. The trailer then explodes into a gripping finale of title sequences accompanied by an epic orchestral and hip hop influenced score. The sound design for this piece was my own doing. I used a pre-recorded score from the Video Copilot collection “Pro Scores” which resulted in adding my own percussion to create the hip hop base. The low drone bass notes then we’re added for added punch during the finale to illustrate the power of the documentary. In terms of how well the trailer is received by an audience is yet to be known, as it hasn’t been released yet.
I identified that my motion graphics work has been the strongest area of study for me during this semester, for many reasons. Not only was my graphics created for technical practise, my own skills development and plays a major part in our documentary, but was also used for promotional material for JMUK, therefore covering many areas with just one person performing one role. Although my role doesn’t involve creating promo material, considering how influential motion design is in the marketing world, I decided to whip up a few graphics to advertise our company, which was well received by my peers. They can be seen on the site.
Though we flowed smoothly as a group, and the work we produced I am very proud of, I would like to acknowledge a few hiccups along the way. For example, the composition in After Effects was made on my home PC, which lacks the processing power to render out such a large composition. So therefore I needed to bring the files into the University to exploit the RAM and processor of the Macs available to us. I was amazed and overwhelmed when the Mac said the video would take up to 9 hours to render completely, so I compiled the composition, set it to render, and left. In the morning, the file was completed and perfect. I think in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a major problem, but when you decide to change a small variable, the entire composition needs rendering out again for the effects to take place. All this time adds up, the days just fly by and before you realise it, you’ve been rendering approximately 30-40+ hours of time.
Conclusion
I believe our groups work to be a great triumph in team effort, technical skill, support and co-operation. Each member of the team carried out their role flawlessly with no arguing and mocking of others. I don’t recall a time where one of us was lagging behind or fearing for lagging behind. We moved onward as a group, and remained solid in our discussions and decision making.
