Evaluation

Topic of Project

The topic of my project was to create a product on flash that was interactive using the skills that I have acquired through tutorials with my tutors or even past experience. This meant that I could show the advantages to using digital means to create work for a specific topic and brief. I have concluded that using digital means to create my work has a lot of advantages because I can not only keep all my work in one place it is easier to transport to different areas to do work in other places or even import and export into different programs to give my work diversity and flexibility in creating the best piece of work I can. My work combines both traditional and digital means of production as I got my initial design from the story board I drew. I then took my story board and by hand painted into Photoshop using a graphics tablet. Then because I was using Photoshop it became very easy to move each image of my story board into flash because both Photoshop and flash are compatible. However at times flash did limit the ideas I had about my work It became simple after getting used to the rules of the software to adapt my design to run very smoothly in flash. I have come to realize that there is a lot of potential in working digitally although I feel that the traditional ways of doing things shouldn’t be forgotten or stopped being used because I feel with the right tools you could always make something better using your own hand and not having a computer calculating every click or movement on the graphics tablet.

Outcome

For my outcome I have created a flash video of my mutant running from a crime scene in which he has killed a human. After he jumps from the first roof top he has to run and jump over many different roof tops because he has a spot light following him. Eventually his escape fails and he is shot down and falls off screen to a gruesome demise.  I create my final piece I used Photoshop and illustrator to create the individual piece to my work. Character design was done in illustrator to give me more drawing movement and flexibility. I used Photoshop to create backdrops and rooftops and save them as Jpegs to fit to the pixel size of 550 by 400 this meant easy transitions between back drops in my final video.  Creating the movements in my flash video was done using classic tweens and key framing the path in which I wanted each object to take. Each character was saved into the library in flash to make easier position switching. I know that making this in a completely traditional medium would have been extremely difficult because I would have to have each frame on different pages therefore to use digital means in creating this specific product was the best way to create a visually interesting piece of work. To acquire the skills that I have used to create this product I have done many different styles of work and using many different programs to enhance my diversity in style of working. By having skills in many programs I have been able to get more than just a basic way of doing things because if I a program cannot do something I see in my design I can simply export into a program that will do the action I couldn’t take in the last program. Each piece of work leading up to my final outcome has been me learning new skills from scratch because I have not used many of the programs used in my work to create in my final video. Such as flash and illustrator I had not used before I started this project therefore being able to incorporate them into my work with such ease took a lot of concentration and patience. On a whole I feel that I have learnt to focus my work on the specific out come because in my last project I was very varied in ideas and didn’t quite focus on one specific outcome this in turn has helped me really drive my work on and work past all the problems I encountered to come out at the end with a flash video that I am very proud of as it was my first attempt at flash. After using digital means to create a lot of work over the course of this unit I think digital medium of working unlocks endless outcomes into the world of art and that it will truly enhance capabilities of future artist and that the level of work will just increase in difficulty and complexity as technology continues to advance.