Unit 1 visual recording

My Saul bass research

Scouring the net i have found these 6 inspired saul bass themed movie posters.

As you can see the overall them/style judging from the lines, shapes and tone its very simplistic and to the point giving clear understanding which was always one of saul bass's goals. 

Here i have attempted my own saul bass inspired movie posters by looking at the previous research of secondary resources of saul bass movie posters, and tried to capture the retro-minamilist style you see below.

Font research

A collection of letters designed as a saul bass inspired typeface, looking over various type faces across the net that fit the saul bass theme, i have created my own version of a handmade/cut out typeface (which spells out napoleon dynamite)

Animated title sequence

Napoleon dynamite

Moodboards

These food products appear alot within the napoleon dynamite film although some may not appear as often as others they hold some attachment to an iconic/memorable scene in the film. 

Colours here are the main collection derived from the main characters themselves more than anything, so for instance the brown would associate to napoleons brown suit in the prom. this helps me give an overall colour scheme to follow when creating my finished title sequence.

Again more iconic items that stand out among others within the film, the objects themselves gives me stuff to work with for shapes to create within flash.

Below ive compiled a variety of areas/surroundings of which the majority of the is film is situated and shot, also giving me ideas on what sort of scenery/background i can use for sequence.

Initial development of ideas

Mind map + Y chart

Thumbnail sketches

Although this collection of images shares no relevance with napoleon dynamite it still helped give me and idea on how to look at objects and apply visual metaphors to them to create something new e.g character, setting, enemy.

Development of initial ideas

for each of the images below i took an iconic item/object (from my mind map of ideas) and initially drew a rather detailed sketch of each chosen object. i then proceeded to work on simplifying each sketch to its basic shapes, helping me to get an idea of how to work with them in flash animation.

Tina the llama

Debs camera

Napoleon's (famous) brown suit

steak (everyone was eating it)

Swing ball (one of napoleons skills)

Napoleon's choice of refreshment

Storyboards

Initial draft

Final draft

Evaluation- Unit 03 Ideas and Concepts

What did I learn?

A new way into finding research and how to go about it, for example not only did I find collections of images of Saul bass inspired movie posters I also had a go myself at trying to reproduce or design some of my own movie posters.

Worked with flash and all its quirks, helped me understand more of the limitations and just general things I can do or play around with because before my flash animation knowledge was very brief and basic.

Perhaps as well gained an improved drawing technique or gained more confident lines in drawing.

The effects on how negative space can create a clear contrast of images and induce symbols that can tell more to a story than more complex images containing more than two colours.

Why did the Saul bass style interest me?

The one thing I particularly like about the style of his work was for instance in how each of his movie posters told a story of the film using the most basic of shapes/colours and yet it seemed to always give you an impression of what of what the general gist of the story was, and I just found this to be really clever.

Strengths

·      time management with the flash animation

·      my scans of images were all clear and easy to read when uploaded on to blogger

·      found a good source of images with research

·      my own attempts movie posters and general grasp of the saul bass style

Weaknesses

·      didn’t experiment enough with the features of flash stuck mostly to shape tweens

·      not enough links from my primary research to saul bass’s work

What would I change?

Used different and more various features within flash other than having used shape tweens for most part of my animation, so possibly use of more motion tweens to reduce complexity and more frame-by-frame to give it more of an animation feel.

Completed certain tasks before going on with my work on flash e.g with the initial storyboard and final draft to help me plan and come up with better ideas for my animation.

My overall graded performance

7/10