NA: Project 8

Throughout this project I overcame a lot of technical skills, especially with in Flash CS5. Learning how to write script was neat, and really frustrating, because half your mistakes are all so tiny that it ends up getting lost in the detail, and then you lose site of even trying sometimes. Thank goodness for patience and kind people helping me, I worked out the kinks and made something I'm proud to say I scripted. Due to me learning this new skill I was intimidated to make my idea complicated, so I'm glad I went with the idea I did. The examples I show I think help the whole communication model really come together, although, I should have managed my time better so I could have made those nicer examples.
Having someone out the design studio/class/experience look at this was also a nice step. It either make you realize your design passes the "unexpected user" test.

NA: User Feedback

NA: schematic storyboards

NA: Non Linear Schematic

Here are some analog sketches of my initial brainstorming for my non linear schematic. After doing the demo with Garrett I think that some of these idea may be a bit ambitious for my current skill level, but the demo was super helpful. And I'm excited to get started writing script for this project. Just a little scared as well. I think for now, I'm going to use the "click to show up" possibly. I think it may be interesting to start with a blank screen with text and then all the information comes to life.

New Schematic

Here is the new schematic that Bethany and I created by meshing our two original schematics together.

Detail shots will come later.

We kept the basic shape of Bethany's original, and built off the idea of my color scheme and noise idea.

Here is my improved schematic with Jamie's feedback and corrections.

I personally am feeling that the one that Bethany and I meshed together fills the page better, and feels more clear...I'll continue to look at how I can improve mine. Any suggestion are welcome :)

NA: Linear User Experience and logo build!

Ditto_linear from Taylor Pruitt on Vimeo.



Ditto Logo build from Taylor Pruitt on Vimeo.

 Working through this process I have learned a lot. My understanding of a linear narrative has improved with the idea of how much detail is needed to be included in one specific message. Within my web video I concentrated on the yarn being my consistent guide to the next step. I feel that I consolidated the over all message in a nice and short video that people wouldn't get bored watching. Using all communication channels was nice actually, I used: Typography, music, voice (if you count the singing), and image. It was much more freeing, and I felt that all components were needed to make this piece interesting. It makes me want to go back to my screen-printing video and music to that for fun. Deciding on how long to hold my "freeze" frames was difficult, because dealing with after effects and getting the time remapping tool to behave correctly was difficult. But, in the end I feel that it's just right, (it may be a little fast, but that could be because I'm a slow reader. It was difficult adding music, because I'm not the most skilled with editing music o loop in certain areas, my craft is just not up to where I would like it to be, but it's definitely a technical skill to know how to do that, also to take lyrics off of an mp3 would help too. Over all I wish I had done the text in different way, Towards the end of this, while I was putting it together I was thinking about cutting these phrases up and laying them on the photo, like I would have done while photographing the stop motion piece. A stop motion always takes longer than you expect. So, I planned for that, thank goodness....I started over many times, and had to edit every single photo to color correct it, to look nice and how I wanted it to look. The automate button is my best friend now. I also learned than making everything before hand, and testing what a certain frame would look like is a good idea. For this, I had all flat images, so I had to figure out a way to get the feeling get dimension, which was by cutting out the images and putting them on photo core.
Over all I'm happy with the result. The type and the sound I know need a lot of refinement.

On my logo build it was interesting to see the process of this play out. Learning a new program is hard, and it takes time so this one took me awhile, and quite frankly I was intimidated to start. It's kind of over whelming jumping into something that you don't know how to start. BUT, I did get it, and the result worked out, so I learned new after effects skills as well as the idea of how motion can work.

NA: Detailed Story board

Here is a detail storyboard for my second half of this project. I wanted to concentrate on the handmade quality of my company, so I'm planning on making it mostly stop motion, with some digital feel added as well.
Basically the yarn takes you through the steps of using the website.

My logo build is coming along as well. I had a bit of a moment paused there because the software was intimidating me, but I'm ready to just knock it out, and get'r done.

NA: Content Outline

Seeing that "ditto" is a online based company, and community I thought that yes, the internet is now very well known, but every website is different in how they approach buying and selling product. Thinking through some initial ideas of maybe making an interface to have the base of what it may look like, so the user could have an experience. Talking to Tyler about this idea though, he expressed that keeping that idea in mind for the last project, because he wanted this project to be more of a designer-based linear narrative, rather than user-based non-linear narrative.
So, I went with my back-up plan of user experience. Which I'm excited about. I've been looking online at a lot of "how-to" videos, some more expressive than other, and it's interested to see how each are different with how they have their step-by-step process. Some have 10 steps, others have 3.
This brought to my attention of how long I should spend explaining this process. I've pretty much gotten down what my content is:

Introduction
Step One: Browse
Step Two: Choose
Step Three: Order/Purchase
Step Four: Wait around for approximately 7-10 business days.
Step Five: Receive fabric in the mail!
Step Six: Make something! Be creative.
Step Seven: Take some pictures of what you made
Step Eight: Upload and share on our website what you made!

Now, just so you know, I was intentionally being very nit-picky about the step you take (I could have probably added much more). There is obviously too much detail, and some steps are just obvious and arbitrary. So, fitting everything in the right category so that I could mesh two or three steps into one large step I thought would help the process speed up, and be boring.
This is what I ended up with

Introduction!
Step One: Browse, choose, order/purchase
Step Two: Wait for approximately 7-10 business days, and receive in the mail!
Step Three: Make something!
Step Four: Upload and share online

I figured I could possibly make into three steps by combining step three and four, but thought each deserved their own.
Now moving on to the actual content about what each will say and express is a different step.

NA: Logo storyboard

Color and none color. I decided to go with the white background for it to be more versatile for color and different textures in the ditto part.  Also, I'm not sure if this five frame storyboard is hard to tell, because I feel there are so many other steps in between, but maybe that was so it could be more simple as a whole.

NA: Logo Animation

Here are some ideas for my logo build, Ditto. Talking to some classmates about them, they thought it would be a good idea to maybe include more than one idea into two...because a lot of my ideas were quite simple.

For the one I am planning on working further on I'm intertwining the idea of the of the stitching into the final logo, but also making it very up close and abstract by it following the line throughout the handwritten text. We'll see how it goes.

Ditto: Logo

Here is some logo process. I turned in a logo earlier into Tyler, and it had a rough texture on it, because I wanted to maybe elude to the idea of it being handmade, but I further explored it being a vector piece because it could be a cute, clean cut and uneven look.

BEFORE:

 NOW:

I'm definitely favoring the second one because of the clean cut line, but it still looking hand written becuase of the uneven t's and different line strokes.

Here is also a version with a texture/color inside.

NA: Project 5,FINAL

Here it is, with frames and everything.
I wanted to emphasize the process by putting an ornate very feminine frame to it. I decided to mimic the screen printing line to make a similar, but different line for the photots.

NA: Project 5, conclusing thoughts

Throughout this process of combing two narratives was a bit of a struggle due to my completely different medias. Things I got out of it was that I need not to be redundant, because with this poster/time line I have a lot of information, and I needed to be careful of not repeating my self too much with in this. I also learned how to add image to something that isn't necessarily meant to have image in it. When designing the time line with added photos, it was difficult to have them have a good feeling for open space. It's a pretty crammed area with a not of information, so I had to work with that. Also, typographically I learned what and endash was, and that dates don't need apostrophes.

Initial Ideas for two channel narrative

Film to Print:
-Simple solution by putting final screen printed piece as a background image for time line
- having another time line with steps and images of screen printing. OR put the images along the "handmade" line.
- Interesting cropping/integration of images while text overlays with squares for legibility issues.

Print to motion:
-Edit in and out of a film documentation of the actual piece.
-Edit in and out stills of the vectored time line from the computer.
-Film printed piece in similar way of the screen-printing piece and have them integrated.

TWO OPTIONS FOR FINAL IDEA:

ONE: Have a separate time line for the screen printing stills for process. I would probably had more space for this line so the piece could still have some white space and be less over whelming.

TWO: FLASHY FLASH. Make a motion piece while weaving in and out of my time line and and showing the imagery of the process, edit it down to essential process parts.

NA: Project 4

Working through this time with a different communication channel I decided to use text, rather than using audio/music/sound effects. I thought since I hadn't touched enough on the history of my brand in my poster I should revisit it. So, my goal to achieve in this project was to make a time line basing information about different subjects that could possibly relate to my brand identity.

By splitting up three main subjects to focus on I decided to have three different time lines streaming in and out of one another to show visual appeal, but also a different look on the time line. My three different subjects were: Handmade, social craft, and networking. Within the handmade time line I focused on when ways of making textiles came about. Although this one was problematic, Tyler pointed out that why is it called, "handmade" when it all about screen printing. GOOD POINT, and takin'. But, while making this, I felt that putting screen printing on my backdrop would elude to a different idea about what I'm researching. I could be wrong. I also should have added more information if I am going to use the general term, "handmade" to the time line, I think that could have helped it. Within the second category/subject I used social craft and concentrated on when doing craft with a group of people came along. So, my main focus was knitting circles, and quilting bees due to their history.
My third subject was networking, due to how imperative it is to my company. The internet these days is how most people shop, so I wanted to focus on how networking could and has helped the industry.

In critique Tyler mentioned that my type in the background read as a image and not type, and I'm not exactly sure if that was a bad or good thing, or if it was meant to be anything at all...I meant to say something after class, but it slipped my mind. BUT, my reasoning for intertwining them and having them translucent was to show how they can all intersect each other and work as one.

NA reading response 1

This reading was fun, and understandable, AND it kept me going, which is hard...for me at least.

BUT! I got a lot of important and insightful information out of it. I was interested in the word, "closure". Throughout the reading I didn't quite understand why they decided to use that word, maybe it is what it means. (hey, I'm making an example of closure! I think...) I thought of it as we just let things be, and don't fully investigate our questions. Which can hinder our thoughts and process but sometimes we just have to let things go and have closure because going to the moon and seeing if the world is round would be impossible for me, right now. But this all has to do with a story/narrative, an idea, and how we begin to think of something, then try and process and figure it out, then let it go.

The next part of the reading was also interesting because different types of transitions which how closure can come about...moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and the last is no sequitur, which has no relationship, a lot of random images. All of these are pretty self explanitory, but within the reading they gave comic books as an obvious reference, which they have the gutter, or the gap which lets the reader make their own assumption of what happens next in their mind, so that they become part of the story.

NA project three, Detail Narrative

Screen printing with one channel from Taylor Pruitt on Vimeo.



Throughout this process in applying one communication channel to my detail narrative I learned how to manipulate time, and with maniupulating time, I learned how to be able to focus on certain aspects of a narrative. For my communication channel I chose image, and by this I learned that I had to make the image a good quality and interesting one. Either by angle, color, or motion. Throughout this I really focused on having a lot of detail shots to get the entire idea within the frame so that the viewer could understand what my project was all about.

The way I used narrative throughout this video was to show the process of screen printing, and by this I used time to show certain points off with most of the time having the speed of the video sped up, but with some key elements slowed down so that they could remember what I was doing. Editing the footage had a large part to do with what I know about narrative and how I could tell a story. Cutting down a seven minute video to 40 seconds was also challenging, but watching through the process I figured that a lot of it was useless, because it was very repetitive, and I didn't want it to get boring. As in the idea of a narrative there is a beginning, middle and end...not a beginning and thirty middles, then an end. Therefore that helped a lot when I thought about the video and it's own narrative.

one week poster concept

For this experiment dealing with historical references was difficult for me. I guess the idea of a research poster never made a connection with me. I was really stuck on the idea of a promotional poster telling the customer what we do and how we go about it. Over all, I think this concept is nice. Having the close line with pictures and little samples of the fabric we sell with the mouse cord actually being the clothes line eluding to the idea of it being all online.

I definitely want to go back and revisit the idea of a research poster and how I can go about using it, and setting the composition up.

15 second video

My final idea: To have a handmade textile company/studio that sells their fabrics online and then their buyers can order and share on our website what they made with our fabrics.

Our audience: The DIY, women, colorful, and adventurous.


Working with motion, image, and text was exciting, but also intimidating due to the time restrictments (haha...right, restrictions!) I wanted to show color, excitement/fun, and inspiration. I started with a stop motion with a pair of scissors going around in the action or cutting to get the idea of it having to do with fabrics. Then to lead into the idea of you ordering something online, and thennnnnn sharing what you do with the fabric you buy. Although, my message wasn't exactly clear. I spent to long on the stop motion piece, and made the last part an after thought.

Throughout this process, I figured that I need to really develop a name, and a message to send out there. Also, an interface since what I'm doing is really reliant on the internet...something that won't take too long, and too much thought just because I need it now.

Some comments that were made were that I should show the product that was made with the customer, also show my message a little better. The audience is pretty clear due to color and music.



15 sec experiment from Taylor Pruitt on Vimeo.

Semester Topic Choice

Through out brainstorming and thinking about what I'd like to concentrate for the semeseter in N.A. I was wanting to go two different ways. Either an informational way of seeing how women in the Middle East are decorating their own burkas, and how some younger women are completely designing their own with custom colors and different patterns. Another way is to build on the workshop that I did earlier this year in the Spring semester Frankie, from Liquid 9. I decided to make up my own company that made textiles. Due to additional information, I feel that the textile company would be a more accessible idea, rather than over stepping my boundaries with dealing with the way women dress in the middle east, even though it is a very interesting topic to me.

So, moving on to my brand-based narrative.

I will be making up my own design firm/company that either has their own textiles, or that makes items out of their textile line.

I'm really in love with this company: Bokja Design

They are obviously a fun high end type of company, and I am really attracted to something like that. Although, I thought it'd be nice to have something that the average person could enjoy, due to me being that average person but still looking high end. So essentially, I have to ask myself what type of audience do I want to attract? Who am I competing with? What is my story? And, what exactly do we make?

After interning at Porter teleo this summer, and then also continuing my internship with them, I think will help me a lot in how I can see how an actual high end company is ran, and what sort of image they are portraying to their audience. I need to find something different about what I'm going to do, and make it special.