Mini Art School Part 4

I definitely had a lot of fun with the 60 second video which you can see below. Also I can authoritatively say that while it's a huge pain to learn and it takes much longer to export files, I am super way more happy with Lightworks than I was with Filmora. Though seriously, it takes a very long time to export files. That's the main reason I'm posting this so late, some things popped up in the exported file that I had to go back and edit before re-exporting... several times. But since I'm really happy with the end result it's all good. (Edit: Ahahaha... so it does not take super long to export. I was just exporting 29 minutes of blankness which meant a 30 minute video over and over and over again. *facepalms*)

As for my story board, I'm still working on that, but it goes something like the following:

1. People looking at a swingset thoughtfully, titled, "Finding something interesting to examine"

2. People jumping from the swings with a tape measure on the ground. "Observational Experiments"

3. People with pen and paper. "Form a Hypothesis."

4. People strapping on padding and weights. "Design an Experiment to Test Hypothesis"

5. Nailing a stake in the ground at a certain point. "Use Hypothesis to Make Prediction"

6. Person midair with large question mark. "Reflect on How Well Hypothesis Held Up"

The above storyboard layout is representative of how the students will be making their projects as opposed to what I will be doing this semester. My end of things is almost a test drive of showing how this could be done for a group. Incidentally, do please let me know if I'm way off base about how that's supposed to go.

Multimedia Project Proposal

1)  Purpose/Goals: This project will be for high school students to investigate their phenomenon of choice and record their findings in a digital format.

2)  Rationale & Summary of Project: One important skill of scientists is to be able to make your own data and share it with others. As such, students in class will be set in groups where they investigate some phenomenon of science of choice and share their findings including data of their results, video of their experiment, and a writeup on a blog.

3)  Audience: My audience is high school physics students. They'll probably already be familiar with many technological tools already, and at the end they'll give a presentation about what they looked into.

4)  Overview of Your Instructional Plan and Your Learning Objective/s: Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results.

5)  Technological Tool/s & Rationale: Students will use video recorder technology, any video or audio editors they feel are useful, and a wikispace that I'll have set up for them to upload their projects.

6)  Learning Theories/Principles: Using the Next Generation Science Standards, this project will support cross cutting concepts of 1. Patterns and 2. Cause and Effect. In the 21st Century Skills, this will assess Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, Communicating, and Technology Literacy.

7)  Timeline: This would be a project which takes place over roughly a month. In the first week students would give a suggestion about what they would like to investigate. I'll consult with them about the appropriateness of their project and help them come up with alternate ideas giving them a week to conduct their preliminary experiments which they'll use and analyze to make a hypothesis about the patterns they've seen. Following that I'll give a bit of a buffer so I can look over their results and give feedback while students look at each other's posts, suggesting critical tests which might disprove the hypothesis or put it to a real test. In the final week, students will choose one suggested test or make their own and make a prediction about what will happen according to their formed hypothesis. Finally after actually performing the experiment which they should record and post online, they'll decide if their hypothesis actually held up or if they disproved their original hypothesis.



List of 21st Century Skills can be found here: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills

NGSS Crosscutting Concepts: http://ngss.nsta.org/CrosscuttingConceptsFull.aspx

NGSS Core Standards may apply depending on project chosen.

Mini Art School Part 3

For this week's art school, I picked exercises from Color Echo and Thematic Agreement. For the second of these, the task was to create a book cover for something called 'Flirting with the Bully'. The theme, age group, etc was completely up to us and I decided to try subverting the expectations a bit with this. Instead of 'flirt' as in romance, I opted instead for a takeoff of 'flirting with death'. In my mind's eye, this book is about a teen who has frustrations in his life and ends up taking them out his peers who don't deserve it. This person finds himself walking down a line towards being a person that he doesn't like, but at the same time he can't quite stop himself. I thought this picture on the right had a lot of promise, so I cropped it to focus only on the skateboarder. This worked perfectly for what I wanted by not showing the person's face, the person departing from the viewer, and the prominent display of his shadow or 'darker side'. This book is an urban look at some of the darker themes of growing up. It's not a fluffy look so for the wording I chose simple black with thick lettering. The fonting on the lower case ls keep it from being too boring and the author's name is completely overshadowed by the title. It felt like it needed just a bit more than that though so I added a quip in a lower corner. Just to make sure, I tried showing this blindly to a couple of people with the prompt 'if you saw a book like this and didn't know the summary, what would you think its about?' and they all more or less came up with what I was going for which I consider to be a big success.

The other two prompts were the mandatory crop and Color Echo. You can see the results of the cropping at the bottom which I'm happy with but don't have much to say about. Color Echo was about taking an image and selecting colors from it to use as a background. You can see how I progress from left to right. I'm much happier with the right most version since that's where I realized I could accentuate the swirling parts of the bottles with ovals. For the cropping I did some mixes between medium far and close shots and posed them all together. I saved them in a .gif with a transparent background, but it seems this blog doesn't like those. I will continue to struggle with the white backgrounds on this blog but in the meanwhile enjoy the corn, wheat, barley, and other crops.

      

Mixed Digital Media Critique

Below I review the three tools in order of Gimp, Audacity, and Filmora. I don't know if you guys can tell, but I used Filmora to touch up all three videos and put them into a uniform file format. It's subtle. Add that to one additional item for the 'con' column of that program. That said, go ahead and check out the three screencast reviews below for various tools. They go in order as I actually use successive tools to edit screencasts of the previous tools, but the most ridiculous one is the third. If you only watch one of these, watch that one. On a side note, I only used Audacity to clean up the audio track of the first screencast so see for yourself if it makes much of a noticeable difference.

 Gimp (Still Image Manipulator):

 Audacity (Audio Manipulator):

Filmora (Moving Media Manipulator):

Mini Art School Part 2

I had so very much fun with this week's assignment. Gimp might be really awkward to learn in the first place but boy howdy was it helpful in making my art posts for this week and you'll actually see me use it in my screencast to start making one of the two following pieces. So first I want to start with the one that took me much longer and that I only just finished because I want this to be the image that the google plus post automatically pulls for you guys to see.

So a brief explanation of what you're looking at up there... I chose the challenge from the Design Basic Index book on page 145. Basically using only repetitions of a simple image that can be rotated and resized, make three images for each of four categories. As you guys can perhaps tell, I ended up doing more than just that because I had so many good ideas when doing the sketchwork. So first of all to start, the simple design that I repeat is the one all the way in the upper left hand corner. Everything else on that page is built out of that one image. The other two up in that corner are other basic images that I thought it might be useful to keep on hand so I could quick copy them whenever I needed that particular design. The right one of the three in that corner I ended up not using, but it can also be grouped with the starburst type designs to its right. In the upper right corner are five velocity designs. You can probably tell that three of them are variations on the same idea but with pointing into, along, and out of the circle they form. In the lower right corner, the fern, flower, and bug are all part of my serenity designs. Honestly these ones are kind of my favorite, followed by the starbursts. Finally the three sets lined up on the left side are all strength based designs. I found that category to be the trickiest to conceptualize and wound up going with 'strength of unity' although the bottom left one makes me think of scales when put upsidedown so that could be an angle too.

The second challenge I chose was from the White Space book in Chapter 7's type related challenges. I chose #6, to make a restaurant menu. I wanted a nice, but not super fancy pizza place so I used Sans type font for the cover while using various Serifs for the inside spread. By bolding menu item names and using a smaller italics for the item description, I was able to emphasize grouping and make things visually distinct. I further grouped concepts by using some free dingbats I found online and you can actually see me putting those in with gimp in my screencast. For the background, I borrowed a few pointers from chapter 8 on color to go with a pizza-ish yellow. Since this seemed boring on it's own and I had a rather large space under the restaurant name even after the dingbat underscore, I thought about putting something to spice it up. White space isn't my enemy, so I didn't want to fill it so much as accentuate it, meaning I decided to go with an idea to sprinkle 'oregano' across the cover but I don't think it ended up working for me. The sprinkles weren't distinct enough and ended up just looking like a greasy blur. In retrospect I should have used the paint tool instead of the airbrush and chosen my particle shape a bit differently, but I'm not going back to fix it right now. Additionally by the advice of chapter 8, instead of just using green, I may want to also balance out with yellow's other complementary color orange. If I have reason to revisit this later this semester I might take the advantage to do something with that, but for now this is what I'm showing you guys.

Mini Art School: Introduction

For my first look into using design I will be looking into everyone's favorite seasonal food. I'm not talking about turkey, Halloween candy, pumpkin spice, or the Christmas goose, no. I'm talking about cookies that get sold by girls in uniforms every January. Specifically here I will be taking a look at the design on a girl scout cookie box.

On a side note, does this count as a beginner sin of a naked photo? It's easy to see where the border ends, but the cut from white to my blog background is still rather jarring. I do wish I was able to find a version of this picture without the white background. Regardless...



Audience
One of the main core driving principles of sales is that the money raised by selling girl scout cookies goes to fund the girl scout non-profit organization. Thus people buying these cookies are doing so as a sort of charity to fund a community of people that are well liked because of their good nature and community service goals. By placing an image of three scouts working on a project on the front of the box, people are reminded just why it is that they buy girl scout cookies. And just in case they're in it for the cookies and not the scouts... they also put a picture of the cookies on front too. Just in case.

Balance
This design does an excellent job with balance. The picture of the cookie is front and center while up top there's an off balance logo that allows for the picture of a girl scout doing community service to take the center. The girl scout logo with a quote in the upper corner is neatly balanced by the net weight marker in the lower corner as well.

Contrast
The strongest contrast on this box is between a concept and its description. There is also the center trefoil done in solid color over the background of an image. Aside from these points there is no distinct and blatant contrast, but it doesn't really need to go big or go home since the various concepts are not strongly distinct.

White Space
The lower left and upper right corners are left with nothing to occupy them except grass and sky.  There is also some blank space in the green trefoil the cookies are in and on the left, but most importantly there's no orphaned white space in between two elements.

Repetition
The trefoil is a girl scout associated logo. Repetition is typically considered bad, but is often a way for corporations to emphasize branding. Here the repeated trefoil (one large and one small) is another way to tie in to the fact that it is the girl scouts that sell these cookies. Additionally you can see on the side of the box that the picture of the cookies is repeated so as to be identifiable on any side, but I'm focusing my attention mostly on the box front.

Proximity
There are three main groupings of information on this box. The first grouping is the upper left corner where the girl scout logo is next to the words 'girl scouts' and  a quote about who the girl scouts are. It is put out of the way as a way to indicate that girl scouts are humble and even though these cookies are totally sold by them for funding, this product is about the cookies themselves which are front and center with their name 'thin mints' and an appetizing description of what thin mints are. Finally 'net weight 9.0 grams' is put out of the way not associated with anything else. It's mostly there because as a food item it is required, but this way it's not distracting to the consumer.

Alignment
Text is typically aligned with the side of the box it is adjacent to while the cookie name and description in the middle is center aligned to give it proper room amidst the middle of the trefoil.

Emphasis
There are two elements of emphasis on this design. The first is the cookies themselves and the second is the girl scouts. As the most important elements to address the audience (see above), they are the largest items on the cover. Meanwhile the small text of the net weight and girl scout logo de-emphasizes those aspects as does placing them off in corners.

Color
The featured color of this box is green. It is absolutely a coincidence that the girl scout logo is always done in green and white. Though perhaps not that much of a coincidence because thin mints are arguably the most iconic cookie of the girl scouts, though somoas and tagalongs are tough competitors. However the girl scout cookies keep a different reservation for their colors. Green is the color of thin mints while somoas are purple and tagalongs are red. Every other main color is assigned to its own cookie.

Typography
It is considered bad to have too many types of typography in the same design without reason. However the thin mint box (and other girl scout cookie boxes) breaks this rule successfully by using proximity to sidestep it. Each grouping of information addressed above had at most two types of font. The smaller font size and altered typography comes in primarily with the quote and the cookie description. Both of these are in small and subservient fonts to the more important title above them and the quote is practically unnoticed next to the background.

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Optional Activities

Activity #3:

In the first of these pictures my idea was to use straight lines to try to make repeating star shapes of various sides. In it you can see at least one five pointed star and two six pointed stars. I'm not super happy with it. In the second design I started with a fractal build, filled in some connecting lines, and in the end was left with three huge spaces in the lower corners and upper middle. White space isn't my enemy, but it wasn't doing anything here either so I decided to put in some prechosen icons there based on a whim. I will be very impressed if you figure out why I chose the three icons that I did. There is still white space overall, but now it's used to frame the icons in their spots rather than just sitting there. For reference, I used the rule for the lower option that all individual shapes can have at most four sides and all angles must be less than 180 degrees. And yes, this is two sides of the same napkin. I worked on this activity while having dinner. Old habit of drawing math equations I guess.

Optional Activity # 2 (repetition)

 In these three images I tried setting a background image to be transparent and use the overlay of repeating footprints to emphasize an idea of walking. There are definitely some rough edges on this like for instance my decision to break the cardinal sin of staircasing my title. I think that since there's overlap however it doesn't make it hard to read and I like especially the way the right hand one frames the mountain in the distance. I don't like how the text of the left hand one turned out, but I suppose that's why we did three. Honestly my favorite of the bunch is the one on the right because it strikes a chord of adventure along with personability, plus the footprints coming towards the viewer somehow works better than leading away or the abstract 'down the trail' of the middle one. Photos pulled from clipart, photostock, and google maps.

Primary source of advice used to analyze design:

Design Rules of Thumb. (n.d.). Retrieved February 03, 2017, from http://www.writedesignonline.com/resources/design/rules/index.html