The meaning of life; Art, Design and Consumer culture.

The meaning of life

Art, Design & Consumer Culture

“Culture is everything we don’t have to do.

We have to eat but we don’t have to have cuisines

like Big Macs or Sushi.

We have to cover ourselves against the weather

but we don’t have to be concerned whether we put on

Levi’s or Yves Saint Laurent.

The ‘have to’ activities are functional and the ‘don’t have to’ stylistic –

The main basis on which we make choices is in terms of stylistic differences” - BRIAN ENO.

Graphic design is the activity that organises visual communication in society.

·      Efficiency of communication.

·      Technology for implementation.

·      Perceptual and behavioural concerns.

·      Advertising affect on beliefs and actions.

·      Cross-disciplinary communication.

·      Active dialogue and communication networks.

Graphic design cannot be understood in isolation, but within a communication system.

- The emphasis should be on the interrelation between the audience and the design, actively participating in the construction of the message, decisions made based on the study of human communication- an awareness of psychology, verbal communication, sociology, computing science, marketing and other disciplines.

All aspects that make up the “new” designer:

Character animation, After Effects.

Character animation from Emma Perrett on Vimeo.

For this weeks process and production session, using Adobe After Effects, we created our own shot character animation. 

The very first thing we needed to do was create our little character using illustrator and to make sure that any sections that we wanted to animate would be on separate layers. Once I was totally satisfied with my character illustration, I imported it into After Effects using the format: illustrator/pdf/eps

Before I started any actual movement with my character, I created anchor points on each layer and selected a "parent" for each path. Meaning that if I was to make the body of my robot move, for example, After Effects would make the legs/arms/head move with it automatically.

Once I sorted this, I just played around with some of the shortcuts for After Effect compositions to make my character move.

A: Anchor points.

P: Position.

S: Scale.

R: Rotation.

T: Opacity.

U: Open up layers with key frames or changes.

I really enjoyed doing this particular process and production session, not only because it was fun, but I felt like, as this was my first practice at a bit of animation, I learned a lot.

Next time I re-visit this kind of character animation, I think I will maybe try and add a couple more characters in there and a bit of music or some form of sound to the background to make it a little more interesting. As a whole, however, I think this worked really well for my first piece of animation.