Through My Eyes.

Sandwich Examples

2009-01-19T09:09:00.002Z

Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3 Week Two

2008-11-03T11:31:00.002Z

This week was all about random maths and more complicated things like if statements. these were quite new to me compared to week one but it still all made sense to me, some people were having a bit of trouble with the pervious weeks.

When i tried to do the work this week i think i bit off more an i could chew, i could get the random dice to work properly but the problem was getting things to happen when the counter reached a specific place on the screen.

I went back to this after getting in touch with our lecture Liz and had another go and went even further with it, i had fixed the problems that had been plaguing me before hand and i was loving it, Im not one that usually lasts long doing something if i get stuck so for me staying with it and working out the problems was a great successes.

Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3

2008-11-03T11:15:00.005Z

Actionscript is something i have been interested in for quite a long time now, and have been dying to expand my abilities in the flash department so i jumped at the chance to learn about actionscript.

Week One

The first week was reactively basic just learning the ins and outs of instance naming and the like. these kind of things ive worked with before to create websites and the like. So i didn't learnt that much during that first week, but it was still really good to learn the basics again because there were somethings i needed a refresher on.

Homework - we just done some work on the basics that we need to show to make sure that we knew it, moving and changing properties like size, speed, alpha ect.

I created quite an elaborate changeable little program, which you can move, change size, alpha and rotation on one object. it was quite nice, the typography lesson i had earlier was already showing through in this.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week Two

2008-11-03T10:49:00.001Z

In week two we were focusing on layouts, and how to layout a page with Columns to keep people interested and things easy to read, this was really interesting to me because print is something i am very interested in going into and will give me good ideas for my layouts in the future, one of the main things to remember with these kind of things is you can go away from the column structure and not to be limited by it.

Columns - It can range from a two column page to anything up to 7-8, the line spacing between them shortening with each added column.

Homework - We were asked this week to create some creative layouts which go well with our previous week one work. So i had to create a page layout for my light type work, at first i was a bit stuck not really figuring out a decent acceptable layout, took me quite a few goes to get them working with my uneven type style.

How it will help my Play Brief - I think this layout work is going to greatly improve my design theory when approaching my flash game, it will defiantly make me think more about the weighting of each of the elements as i keep the natural readability.

i am actually looking forward to working out the design properly.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week One

2008-11-03T10:20:00.002Z

So extended techniques has now finished and looking back on them i feel that i've learnt quite a good deal, first up we have typography in which were learning the basics of type, i've had a few lessons on the subject before but it was really good to get a refresher on the subject.

Serif - A serif font is like Times New Roman, where there are little flicks on the end of the characters, this is supposed to help with ledgablily/readability when smaller. It is also widely considered more professional than the other font styles. So its more acceptable to be used on a lawyer sign than a kid's store.

Sans Serif - This is basically the same and serif but without the little flick (the Serif) so the typefaces in this family are mostly straight and clean, the two most well known are Helvetica and Arial.

Script - Typefaces which are derived from human handwriting. these are considered more personal.

We then went onto how type can be made out of everything and anything, and how that changes the feel of the subject.

Homework

Feeding in from the examples he just shown us about how type can be made from anything, we have to go away and come up with a good idea on creating out own experimental typography.

I wanted to use my camera and capture something with motion in low light, so it would become blurry and directional.

I captured each letter separately using my camera, it was working really well and i did try to create the whole letter in one go but it was really difficult to keep the kerning right with ledgablitly, i had a few attempts before i decided to just do them separately.

Personal Website

2008-05-20T09:29:00.006+01:00

For the last few weeks i have been working on my personal showcase website, This is how i am going to present my work online in a digital format. As usual i started off designing what i had in mind in my sketch book also begun with looking at what websites i like and why i like them, the one i chose to emulate was this by Dragon Interactive, i love how they used 3d in a traditionally 2D medium like a website is.

Im not exactly new to HTML, but i haven't really utilized CSS before, This project also gave me the opportunity to use my Actionscript knowledge.

Joseph-Eshmade.co.uk - You can view the full interactive version of my website at this URL.

I have enjoyed working on the web as a medium, i have been interested in doing them for a long time but i have to admit the coding part always made me shy away from this line of work and more into print, i am still interested in print and wouldn't mind doing both.

Week long - Team brief

2008-05-13T09:33:00.002+01:00

I didn't enjoy this brief quite as much as the other, in some ways we worked well as a team and others we just fell apart, after the first day we just didnt really get in touch with each other again untill the week after when we had to present it to the client (in this case it was Adam). So when we came to actually presenting it we just didnt know what we were talking about and just fall apart basically, our main problem this time was that we 'presented' the idea and didn't pitch it. Since we signed a non disclose agreement i can't really talk about the brief its self, but i found it alot harder than the first because of its specificness, and i didn't really enjoy it.

One Day Breif

2008-05-13T08:51:00.002+01:00

This week we have been set a one day brief, the topic of the number '7' and how it related to Britain. This was actually a tough brief but most of us really enjoyed it, we got put into pairs and and had to pitch our ideas to a third party at the end of the day, which was really daunting at first but in hindsight i am so glad we done it this way, it gave us some valuable experience in the design world but also gave us an opportunity to talk about our work to a 'client' which most of us had never done before.

I was teamed up with Mike who had come from another class to do the work with us, i really enjoyed working with him because we could bounce ideas of each other without us both fighting for our idea to prevail over the others. In the end we actually blended a few of our previous ideas together in a non obvious way.

Our final idea for this project, the one we pitched was to have 7 men sitting on the tube ignoring the world around them, ignoring each other whilst reading the papers, and on the front of those papers we have the 'Seven British Sins' such as 'Obese' and 'Sarcasm'.

Our pitch went very well which was surprising seeing as thought we didn't have time to organize it, we bounced off each other in the pitch whilst also delivering all he infomation to the clients.

Character design progress + other briefs

2008-03-10T11:58:00.004Z

Its been a while since i've updated this blog, which i really need to do on a much more regular basis to keep it updated with my progress and work during the weeks, not months. The other week we had another new round of briefs, so we finished our heros & heroines (presentation) and character design briefs a before we started the new ones, i only recently completely finished my digital version of my characters, i didn't do alot with them digitally anyway, i wanted some more classical medium's in my work as i tend to lean towards digital the majority of the time. The feel of the whole peice is what i love, it feels immersive and very graphic novel esque.

Sketch:

Final work:

2008 - New year, New breifs

2008-01-14T21:14:00.000Z

After we finished up our joint projects with the creative lense course we went back to our Digital media Groups which i actually pefer to be honest its alot more organised.

We've recived two more briefs when we came back from the winter break, we did also have one over the break that links with one of the new ones, you can find the start to my Heroes and Heroines berif by clicking here, we have to research on a list of high profile artists, designers and companies then later on select one to produce a 10 min presentation, supported by a grid based flash animation to go on in the background, the vast amount of research for the start of this breif aint really up my tree, but i will really enjoy working with flash as i already have a good knowlage of the workings of it. I'm looking most forward to learning some basic ActionScript, and hopfully be able to make my presentation a little more exciting.

The other breif is Character Design, I do enjoy drawing but it can be quite annoying to me if i have alot of it to get done which in this case i do, But i think i can overcome it to produce some good work in the coming weeks.

I'll keep you posted.

Project 2 - Audio

2007-11-26T11:05:00.000Z

Well this week we had too splice two or more audio files together and make it feel like a fluid convosation / piece, At the start i found it relatively easy, i had discovered the two audio files i wanted to blend early on so i didn't have to worry about finding more, then i pushed forward listening to the both audio files multiple times writing down key and funny lines as i went and then went on to piece them together on paper.

Once that process was finished i went onto the digital program Audacity, which is a powerful freeware audio editing program, cut and pasted the various clips together.

i am relatively happy with the result i achieved although now i go back and listen over it some of the clips don't make a while lot of sense together.

Jux Finals

2007-11-24T23:11:00.000Z

Creative lens : Week one - Film 1

2007-11-20T08:59:00.000Z

Group: Dani, Me, Chris, James and Gaz

These last two weeks have been nothing short of chaotic and crazy, with some people not showing up others being ill and then the iceing on the cake on the last few days of the second week our 'director' snapped the tendons in his foot so we had to try and finish the project with three of us, i only heard from James in the second week, he'd been having out of college issue which was fair enough, but with that and Chris hurting himself it really messed things around for the rest of us, i'm just glad we got it finished off.

Unfortunately people wasn't one of our biggest worries, it was the equipment we had used, Gaz kindly let us use his camera (originally) we were going to use Chris' but with his sudden departure from the able team we had to resort to using Gaz's. We were quite happy going off and filming with his camera but when we got back to the studio all hell broke loose, we had so much trouble trying to get a piece of software that could read the format that the file was in, it saved as a .ASF file (the camera uses a memory card and not film as well so it was alot harder to convert) if it was just in film we could of just captured it directly into a video editing software program such as Final cut pro, a really good professional program. Unfortunately once more we had trouble, the good editing programs just simply could not read the .ASF file type and in the end we had to use the very amature program Windows media maker because it was the ONLY program that play the video which we finally exported to a .WMV file type thinking we could trick the computers into playing it on the good programs for final edit tweaks.

Could we be so lucky?

no.. seems not.

We handed it in yesterday, i am quite happy with what we got in the end (with all the problems we had that is), but i know i am capable of so much more and watching it yesterday with everyone made me a little annoyed we couldn't of got it to a higher standard.

Also after seeing everyone else's stuff it really did help with some of the future breifs we have to do since we are doing 5 briefs in rotation, i really enjoyed the other film groups video and hope to outshine them on the next video project, lets just say i learnt a lot from out first one on how NOT to do things. :)

---------------

This week we have Audio, i am relatively confident that i will be able to get this one done since i am quite competent in editing and audio.

but i thought that about the video too, so i guess we'll find out soon enough! haha

Ps. The ones i am most looking forward too are the Photography ones which i have in week 3!

Test Shoot - Chess

2007-10-25T13:23:00.001+01:00

This is probally the Shoot i am most unpleased with personally, i really dont think they came out right, i am definatly going to have to rethink my approach to it, i think the lighting is what has messed it up for me, too dark of a background on some, too light on others and the chess peicies being too close togeather. So i will definatly be redoing this shoot before the handin date.

The Black and White toned ones i dont think work, i might just keep it in colour, or just make the chess peices in black and white, and the background in colour. It would keep with the 'seeing in black and white' feel then with my Ally and Enemy twist to it.

I actally love the colours in this one, the slight green tint really plays off the cream and brown of the chess peices, Thats something else i really need to figure out and that is which chess peices i am going to use, which one makes you automatically think of 'chess' for this one i tried the queen, i think it could work if there was a little more head room.

I do like the perspective and tonal range of this one, the black and white actally works and you also get a sense of it being chess with the prawns and checkered board.

As i said i fell this was one of my weakest shoots out of the three and am going to have to seriously have a think and redo it later today or possibly tomorrow.

You can't win them all huh?

I'll have you updated sooner or later, stay tuned.

Test Shoot - Silence is Deafening

2007-10-25T12:48:00.001+01:00

Yesterday i met up with a good friend of mine who was going to help me with my Silence is deafening part of the project, we had quite a good time, even though he kept complaining about lying on the dirty ground underneath a bridge, so in the end i moved him too a rock but that didnt look right and just led to more complaining.

I'm quite happy with how these photos come out, However there are only a handful that would work for my inital concept drawing, and some of diverations from my drawings.

^ This specific one works both portrail and landscape, i'm not too sure which way i'd pefer it if this was to be of my final peices, the landscape one probally has more drama about it.

During doin this shoot i had one photographer in mind on how i would like the work to come out like and that is Lara Jade.

Here are Lara's Deviant art & Flickr accounts. I've been a huge fan of hers for some time now.

Unfortunatly i dont think this one looks right, he dosnt look injured or murdered, he seems very posed and awake, but i still think the picutre it's self came out very nice.

Now then, i do like this one and fits the theme i was going for perfectly, BUT it was not one of my ideas, or atleast it wasnt portrayed like this, once again i feel that the shot came out rather nicely.

haha, I moved my mate to a set of rocks because he was complaining about lying on the dirty ground, so i made him lie contortedly on the rocks close by, but i had a hard time getting a good shot in with the bridge in the background because it was so close, i think i could of made it quite nice if i could of gotten it in, but once again it looks posed, but also looks painful.

I have also taken some for the 'Seeing in Black and White' but ill post them later today once i have a good look though.

Soon it will be onto the post manipulation stage on whichever of the photos i choose.

Till later, bye.

Test Shoot - Ice

2007-10-23T10:32:00.000+01:00

I have started to experiment with ice and how to make the most out of it, I have found out that ice actually photographs very well especially on a dark surface, i did try it on a white on and as you can see (one of the photos) it just didn't work, but i also feel if i put too much light onto the ice then it will not look right, low-ki lighting may be what i need to fulfill the ices potential.

^ This one was without a flash and works quite well but the odd colour really throws me off, obviously i could fix that in photoshop but i would prefer it to do as much as i could in the photography stage and not the post production.

^ These two have been experimented with a flash and i think it makes the ice look beautiful, the light brings out all the reflective qualities within the ice its self without reflecting much else such as the one without the flash.

I wonder if i would be able achieve the same effect with normal non-flash high-ki lighting?

^ I tried it upon a white surface at home just to get a jist of how it would look i was intrigued with how the light played off it from the flash so i thought a white background would compliment it well, but in practicality it just does not work at all, its like complete overkill on the senses too bright, I know if i done this properly the lines of the tiles would not be present but i am still quite sure that it would still not work on a pure white background.

^ Close up of the ice, i am quite sure this wouldn't work for my cigarette idea but it's still quite a nice effect, maybe could be used in aid of digitally putting the cigarettes in the ice

I feel that i will be able to archive the 'Blowing hot and cold' quite nicely now all i need are some of the cigarette and some finals of the ice (which i have in the fridge at home waiting for me to go take some more pictures of them, i might even try drilling into on of them and placing the cigarette inside.)

Tomorrow i have planned to get my Silence is deafening one complete or atleast the photography part done, i have a friend of mine modeling for me, i will update this tomorrow when i have some test shots.

Until tomorrow, toodles.

Juxtaposition Week 2

2007-10-15T09:27:00.001+01:00

So it's the start of week two, and i am very close to fully cermenting my concepts for my three peices, during this next week i am going to be doing some photography tests and decide upon the color schemes i wish these pieces to take. I am having a little bit of trouble with the 'Blowing hot and cold' i've got my idea for it done.

Final idea's

Blowing hot and cold

The idea for this one was to have a cigarette in a block of ice, I would also light the cigarette so it looks like the ice is burning from within kinda thing, not sure how i am going to go about it just yet, weather i should actually going to freeze it with the ice or if i am going to digitally put it in afterwards. obviously i would have to put the fire in digitally because i couldn't exactly put a a lit cigarette in ice huh?

Silence is deafening

Would you be talking if you found someone murdered or whom had committed suicide? i didn't think so, That is what i based this idea around, the silence there would be in such a situation, i am wanting to create a very eerie feel for this peice, i have not yet decided if i am going to shoot from a birds eye view or if i am going to do it from a low distorted angle with the person closest to the camera, i have someone in mind who i want to do this photo with and i think he's available next wednesday for us to have a go with it.

Seeing in Black and White

Ally.. Enemy.. You can't really get much more black and white than that can you? I chose to represent this with a game everyone knows and loves and that is a Chess board, the classic ally and enemy scene played out on a checkered board. The angle is what is going to be important with this one, i will HAVE to make sure i light it properly as well, i am more than likely going to use my macro lens for this one but it might distort the background too much in the process and i might have to settle for the standard lens.

Juxtaposition Ideas

2007-10-09T11:06:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Through my eyes, the personal blog of designer Joseph Eshmade.

For my first post in these niftly little blog of mine i am going to talk about a breif i've just started which is Juxtaposition, to produce three photo manipulations of a specific saying. They are Silence is Deafening, Seeing in black and white and also Blowing hot and cold.

For those that didnt know:
Main Entry: jux·ta·po·si·tion
Function: noun
the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side; also :the state of being so placed

When i first started to mind map these sayings, i found out that it was going to require a little more thought than i first imagined, it was alot harder to think of diffrent ideas apart from the most obvious ones that have probally been done 100's of times before, i so started to take my mind maps onto further tangents and seeing if i could relate them back to the topic.

i have only been working on this project for about a day, i have only a handful of ideas so far for each of the subject.

Ill update this after i have developed my ideas generated via my mind maps which will be when i have a final idea in mind and how i will be able to achive it effectivly.

later,
joe.