Homework assignment #3 was awesome. Hands down my favorite so far, but that favoritism progresses with each class. This week's assignment was exactly what the title of this post suggests. While learning about a few design techniques within photoshop and illustrator, along with some workflow best practices, the two biggest takeaways were the importance of communicating the narrative and how to be resourceful. Sometimes as designers all we get to work with are a few images and the tools that live within our favorite Adobe products. If you've built an asset library over time you're in good shape, but those less diligent who are also faced with the less than ideal situation of a client giving you bare bones to work with can present quite a challenge. That's where this class became super helpful.
When working with limitations, workflow becomes even more important. We were introduced to asset management and narrative build-out within Adobe Bridge, which up until this class, I have never touched. In fact, whenever I've accidentally clicked on the application in the past I've never known it's purpose so learning how it can apply to early concept development was super beneficial. Before we jumped into Bridge though we were tasked with creating a mind map. I've used mind maps in the past for projects where I've had a decent amount of time to dedicate to preproduction, but it was a great reminder to hear Ash talk about how important this step is no matter how much time you get in the beginning of any project.
“A documentary exploring the politics, science and heroism of the Apollo missions”
After reading the client brief (premise) above we were advised to jump right into our mind maps. Below is the one I put together. It was interesting to see how individual artists could really spin the brief in all sorts of directions given their personal breakdown. The heroism portion of the brief was what piqued my interest the most, and as a result, keywords around heroism really played out in my final designs.
mind mappin'
Following our mind maps, we were given a set of forty NASA images and whatever could be generated from scratch within photoshop and illustrator to craft six original styleframes for the hypothetical film One Small Step. That's it. No additional assets from your personal arsenal. No fancy plug-in's. No nothing -well, that's how it came off to me. And honestly, it was a particularly rewarding challenge. Of course, the stunning images that we were given to work with made the art of composition happen naturally, too.
I was impressed with what I was able to achieve with only a few images and a few tools. I was forced to look beyond each of the photos as simply photos, but also as assets like textures, lights, frames, etc. As previously mentioned, I decided to focus on the heroism aspect of the brief more than anything else, and I felt the imagery supported the theme well. In the end, I felt that my compositing made that theme evident. One setback I noticed while building these styleframes though was that I developed a tunnel vision towards the heroism theme without acknowledging some of the other themes I wrote down, and I hope that this is something that will change so that my narratives are more well rounded as I continue to go through the course. So while the other themes of politics and science aren't incorporated much into these styleframes I think the general idea of the Apollo missions is there, but I'll let you be the judge of that ;)
PS -Ash, if you ever decide to drop the whole film thing you'd be great a great professor!