Visual Communications & Media Design

Introduction

Might be a little late in starting a blog but guess its better late than never, so here we go.

Hey, how you doing? My names Colin, I’m a student at University of Abertay Dundee and I’m currently studying Visual Communications & Media Design. This is my first year at uni (direct entry to 2nd year), I previously attended Angus College in Arbroath and completed HNC & HND Interactive Multimedia Creation.

Its week six of semester one already! Only seems a week or so ago we started. Classes this semester include:

• 3D Illustration
• Digital Media Context
• Entertainment Design
• Typography

3D Illustration

In 3D for task one we have to create a 3D representation of one of the following books, The Forever War, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Book of Lost Things. The book I have chosen is The Forever War, the reason I chose this book is because I am hoping to capture the emotional side of soldiers who are fighting for their lives in the heat of battle. People always speak about how horrible war is but its not very often that people speak about the struggle and hard times that soldiers have to deal with to overcome unimaginable odds. At the moment I have currently purchased an audible copy of the book and I am currently in the middle of listening to that to find some inspiration and/or ideas of a concept.

Digital Media Context

Digital Media Context is probably going to be the most challenging class this semester as we are learning about different artistic movements and how art has changed over the past few centuries. The reason I think this will be the most challenging is because on Dec 12th I have to produce a 800 word PowerPoint presentation on a chosen artistic movement or artist and it has been almost 5 years since i have studied traditional art. I have a rough idea of which movement I am going to do my presentation on, the Abstract era.

Entertainment Design

Entertainment design is our only 2 semester class, semester one; task 1: create a concept design for a large scale interactive game/animation, task 2: create an interactive game/animation. In semester two we are split up into groups and have to produce our own group interactive game. 

For task one and two i decided to kill two birds with one stone and create an idea that could be used again in task two. I have decided to produce an interactive animation rather than an actual game as im not a strong coder and can produce better work with animation. Now bare with me for a second as my animation idea might sound a bit strange to begin with.

One night while sitting at home trying to come up with an original concept design i was having a bit of an issue of trying to think of something, so I decided that the next thing I would see I’ll make that into an animation some how. The next thing i see are a packet of biscuits open on the kitchen counter, I walk through to the living room and my step dad is watching a film about gangsters. Thus an idea popped into my head - Gangster Biscuits! Title - “Inglorious Biscuits”.

I have hand drawn the characters and i am in the process of digitally drawing them (images will be posted when all characters have been drawn). I have a few rough ideas of a story behind the biscuits. Ideas will be posted at a later date.

Typography

Typography is probably the most enjoyable class so far in my opinion. It makes us think outside the box and push ourselves to come up with original ideas. For task one we had to produce a poster entirely out of fonts, the minimum amount of fonts allowed was 50 fonts then in that font describe what the font represents to us. Getting the fonts was simple I just randomly downloaded 50 fonts that seemed interesting to me.

I had researched ideas on how to create posters out of nothing but type; the ones that caught my eye the most were ones which have fonts inside of fonts (i’ll go into more detail about this at a later time, and also provide images that helped me achieve my final piece).

For task two we simply had to identify different elements of fonts such as:

• Serif
• Stem
• Counter
• Ascenders
• Decenders
• X-Height

and more…

I am currently working on finishing off task 2 then i will proceed onto task 3 which i will go into more detail at a later date.

Outro

Well that’s what ive done so far during my 6 weeks of uni. My blog will be getting updated every other day or weekly - depending on my schedule - so be sure to keep up to date if you are interesting in anything I am working on. Any feedback would be highly appreciated, if you would like to leave any questions or anything i will reply as soon as i can.

Thanks

Colin.