Philosophy // Video / Earthly substance

Philosophy // Initial Animation

I began animating using the sound file as a guide. I used markers to visually indicate when each word was spoken and this allowed us to align the graphics and voice. At this stage we were mostly playing around with the edited text and finding the best ways to make it fit with the sound. The voiceover was soft and the hand lettering was so strong on its own that it made sense to do away with the initial wipes and transitions we had been experinmenting with and really focus on paying on the contrast between black and white. 

The benefit of this is that the actual animating itself became really straightforward, and the really time-consuming part was listening to the speech word by word and mapping every syllable with a marker to use as a guide for animating. Hannah took over the animating later in the day and we started to see it come together quicker than expected.

Arranging the screenshots in chronological order and scaling to correct size

Dropping markers at the start of every spoken word and arranging the text to appear at these times

At the end of the day, we evaluated what we had done and both agreed that the imagery was most effective when the visual effects were minimised. For all 4 of the animations, we chose to remove several of the transitional effects we had used and instead had the text pop in and out. 

Tomorrow, we hope to finish the Earthly Substance animation and evaluate it. From this we can start to plan the remaining two. I would like to have the two other soundtrack files finished to continue working tomorrow. With two of us animating, I am hoping we can beat our deadline and have all of the animations finished by the end of the day on Friday. 

Philosophy // Sound editing

Today we took our scripts to the sound studio and recorded different versions of our voice-overs. We decided that we would read one each and one together. I choose the Interplay of Opposites script and
Hannah chose the Earthly Substance script. We both recorded the longest one and will edit our voices together later on to create a dialogue.

As I had used the recording booth before it was easy to get a few variations of each of the scripts to pick between. I thought that the contrast in our two voices gave the extracts of the book a different flavour from each other.

After I had edited the audio files to splice together the best bits of various recordings, I was left with files that were unpaced and without music. Using Hannah's voice-over as a bed, I created an ambient soundtrack to accompany it. I had to manipulate the spacing in places to make her pauses fit in time to the beat for emphasis. The technique was really effective and should fit well with the graphics we have produced. Hannah really liked the outcome and we are both agreed that we should take a similar approach to the other two recordings. 

Philosophy // Scanning and editing

Today we scanned in the sheets of lettering and edited them. Splitting the workload between us, we cleaned up the scanned files, inverted the colours to give us the blackboard effect we were looking for. I found that Japanese water brush gave a great variation in tone and this also worked well as white on black. One problem was that some of the letterforms had become very grey from the ink wearing out on the brush, in editing we needed to try and combat this without overcompensating and making the words look unnaturally even and white as this would reduce the charm of a handdrawn solution.

These large pages of script needed to be chopped into individual words, and exported as separate files in order to animate them. This gave us a super messy file with all the words overlayed on top of each other.

Using a PS script, we exported all the layers as separate png files. This saved us a load of time and gave us all the files we needed to start animating without all the manual work this would otherwise involve. 

We separated all of these scans into folders to make them all more manageable. Scrubbing through these in the finder gave a really interesting effect where the words enter and leave from either side. 

Doing a quick animation test, everything went to plan and the white on black makes the text seem really clean and calm. Tomorrow we will carry on chopping up the other scripts and begin to experiment with a few different animation styles. 

Initial animation test. 

Philosophy // Key words

We identified the words that jumped out to us as having particular associated imagery, such as grow and diminish. These would add emphasis to our animation and start to bring the passage to life. We spent a day just working on these words through various versions trying to really injects some personality into these key words which would enhance the storytelling and make our animations more engaging.

A sheet of Hannah's key words

A sheet of my key words

Philosophy // Day 2

Today, we wanted to establish the visual style for the lettering which would make up our animation. Taking loads of mark-marking equipment into college, we spend the morning experimenting and were able to produce a range of different typographic styles:

This thick black was achieved with a heavy paintbrush and I thought that the effect was particularly strong and interesting. 

From these experiments, we loved the Japanese water pen best for its flexibility. The reliance on water gave the type character and a range of tones that would be difficult to achieve through other techniques. Others, like the paintbrush used for war, or the crayon for infant we will implement for emphasis on the key words we highlighted yesterday. 

Using the japanese water brush we both wrote out one of the passages. This was a time consuming process, but we were both really pleased with the results. Here were some of my attempts:

Here were some of Hannah's:

We scanned these into the computer and found that they scanned really well. We thought that inverting the colours removed the 'on paper' appearance of the text and would allow us to work with a totally darken background on the projector.

Due to CoP tutorials tomorrow, we will have to resume next week. Here is our plan for the week:

Monday - Finish writing out third passage

Tuesday - Edit all the letters -> Where should there be reaplacements? what needs redoing?

Wednesday - Storyboarding

Thursday - Scanning and editing 

Friday and Saturday - Animation 

This will be a crowded week, but the final result should be worth it. 

Philosophy // Quotes used for our script

The Faculty of Wonder

'To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. 

This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable--bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might say that throughout his life a philosopher remains as thin-skinned as a child. 

So now you must choose, Sophie. Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? 

If you just shake your head, not recognizing yourself as either a child or a philosopher, then you have gotten so used to the world that it no longer astonishes you. Watch out! You are on thin ice. And this is why you are receiving this course in philosophy, just in case. I will not allow you, of all people, to join the ranks of the apathetic and the indifferent. I want you to have an inquiring mind.'


Nothing Can Come from Nothing

These three Milesian philosophers all believed in the existence of a single basic substance as the source of all things. But how could one substance suddenly change into something else? We can call this the problem of change. 

From about 500 B.C., there was a group of philosophers in the Greek colony of Elea in Southern Italy. These "Eleatics" were interested in this question. 

The most important of these philosophers was Parmenides (c. 540-480 B.C.). Parmenides thought that everything that exists had always existed. This idea was not alien to the Greeks. They took it more or less for granted that everything that existed in the world was everlasting. Nothing can come out of nothing, thought Parmenides. And nothing that exists can become nothing. 

But Parmenides took the idea further. He thought that there was no such thing as actual change. Nothing could become anything other than it was. 

Parmenides realized, of course, that nature is in a constant state of flux. He perceived with his senses that things changed. But he could not equate this with what his reason told him. When forced to choose between relying either on his senses or his reason, he chose reason. 

You know the expression "I'll believe it when I see it." But Parmenides didn't even believe things when he saw them. He believed that our senses give us an incorrect picture of the world, a picture that does not tally with our reason. As a philosopher, he saw it as his task to expose all forms of perceptual illusion. 

This unshakable faith in human reason is called rationalism. A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.'

Opposites

'Heraclitus pointed out that the world is characterised by opposites. If we were never ill, we would not know what it was to be well. If we never knew hunger, we would take no pleasure in being full. If there were never any war, we would not appreciate peace. And if there were no winter, we would never see the spring.

Both good and bad have their inevitable place in the order of things, Heraclitus believed. Without this constant interplay of opposites the world would cease to exist.'

The Big Bang

If it's a clear night, we can see millions, even billions of years back into the history of the universe. So in a way, we are going home." '

"I don't know what you mean."

"You and I also began with the Big Bang, because all substance in the universe is an organic unity. Once in a primeval age all matter was gathered in a clump so enormously massive that a pinhead weighed many billions of tons. This 'primeval atom' exploded because of the enormous gravitation. It was as if something disintegrated. When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves."

"What an extraordinary thing to say."

"All the stars and galaxies in the universe are made of the same substance. Parts of it have lumped themselves together, some here, some there. There can be billions of light-years between one galaxy and the next. But they all have the same origin. All stars and all planets belong to the same family."

"Yes, I see."

"But what is this earthly substance? What was it that exploded that time billions of years ago? Where did it come from?"

"That is the big question."

"And a question that concerns us all very deeply. For we ourselves are of that substance. We are a spark from the great fire that was ignited many billions of years ago."

"That's a beautiful thought too."

"However, we must not exaggerate the importance of these figures. It is enough just to hold a stone in your hand. The universe would have been equally incomprehensible if it had only consisted of that one stone the size of an orange. The question would be just as impenetrable: where did this stone come from?"

Philosophy // Day 1

This was my first day working with Hannah on the brief, and we had aimed to decide on passages which we would carry forward to animate.

In the morning, we read through Sophie's World independently and discussed the passages that we thought stood out. We were looking for passages that were fairly short and self contained, and which didn't contain too many historical facts. We found sections of Sophie's thoughts to be the most interesting dialogues, and we could easily see which could easily be brought to life through animation.

It turned out that we had picked similar parts of the book and settled on three themes straight away:

The faculty of wonder - a curiosity that children have about the world that is lost as an adult
The big bang - The improbability of existance
Opposites - The polarity of forces in the world i.e. you need sadness to appreciate happiness.

Together, we selected the passages that most succinctly explained these themes and printed them out:

From this, we read each page out slowly, timed how long it would take and recorded these times. 

We found two of them could be shorter, and started to edit down the passages

After lunch, we printed out the revised copy and highlighted words which stood out to us as particularly visual. This will give us a basis to derive imagery tomorrow. 

Plan for tomorrow:

Explore how image be used to enhance this spoken word

Experiment with styles/marks

Conduct animation tests

Plan some transitions/flows between sections of speech

Philosophy //Inspiration

For this project, I was really inspired by the opening credits of old Jacques Costeau films such as La Belle et La Bete, where the credits are all written by the director in white on black. The handdrawn type and lo-fi animation give a warm and genuine appearance that is perfect for the films. In this collaboration, I wanted us to combine our separate skills to produce something outside of our usual scope of design practice and experiment with new techniques and aesthetics.

We also looked at audiovisual installations, in particular spaces that create a peaceful and tranquil environment and have a kind of educational purpose. I really liked this idea from Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin which I was abel to visit the Science Museum. The tone and music creates a strange atmosphere that is slightly overwhelming and communicates the content really effectively. 

Philosophy // Background and Brief Rationale

I have chosen to work with Hannah as she is skilled at handlettering and we were both interested in combining this technique with animation to create something fresh to both of us. We chose to construct a brief around a topic that neither of us was familiar with, and after some discussion we picked Philosophy. I remembered a book I had read as a kid called Sophie's world, which used a fictional story to introduce a lot of beginners Philosophical concepts to children and adults. We looked this up and found some more information on the book:

Sophie's World (Norwegian: Sofies verden) is a 1991 novel written by Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder. It follows the events of Sophie Amundsen, a teenage girl living in Norway, and Alberto Knox, a middle aged philosopher who introduces her to philosophical thinking and the history of philosophy.

Summary from Google Books:

One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

We agreed that Sophie's world would be a great place to learn about Philosophy and wanted to use design as a tool to communicate some of the ideas of the book through animation.

The brief:

Background:
Philosophy is a complex subject and many of the concepts can be difficult to understand. The book Sophie's world is a popular introduction to the world of philosophy. It was published in 1991 and has won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1994. It was originally written in Norwegian and became a best seller in Norway. The novel was later translated into fifty-three languages, with over thirty million copies in print. The English version of the novel was published in 1995. It is one of the most commercially successful Norwegian novels outside of Norway. The book has since been adapted into a film and a PC game.

Concise Brief:
To communicate some of the ideas contained in Sophie's world through the use projection, motion and typography. 

Brief:
Research sophie's world and choose content that introduces the audience to the world of philosophy. Communicate this content in an appropriate visual way for display to an academic audience withouts an existing interest in philosophy. There should be a strong emphasis on typography supported by the use of accompanying visual material and sound, with an aim to create a physical installation to be viewed by small groups. 

Concept:
We wold be looking to make the ideas of the philosophers come alive through the use of hand-drawn, expressive type and animation. We want to create an experience that both informs and provokes reflection in the audience with the use of light, darkness, sound and projection. 

Deliverables:
Installation
Edited recording of the experience for use and promotion online.

Tone of voice:
Awe-inspiring, informative, concise 

TBM // Heritage Flag Development

We did some research into British and UK alternative flags and found some really interesting use cases: 

The Northern Irish county flags are simple two-colour flags divided down the middle. We really liked this construction and could see it working as a basis for a new flag. 

These naval flags were also of particular interest, showing the unity of separate nations on one flag. 

We tried to utilise this kind of format for the new flag but came into difficulties when we realised Scotland would have to be removed, leaving 4 sections to be filled by 3 flags, and giving one flag twice the space of the others wouldn't represent unity so we had to drop this idea. 

We looked at the idea of representing equality of all 3 countries and used colour separated thirds to do this. This worked as both circles and square so we used the N. Irish county format to include both in an unusual flag arrangement:

The negative space was being wasted on the flag so we used the waves found in some world flags to represent our positioning as an island. This looked too busy however so we used a block blue to serve this purpose and this made the flag cleaner. 

We also wanted to inducate how this format would work in colony flags such as Australia's:

Newspaper // Ubergine Final Newspaper

Here is the final design for the newspaper. It was great to see it all put together as we had worked so quickly following the design sprint plan that we hadn't really stopped to appreciate all the work that had gone into it. I thought that the newspaper came a cross really well, making good use of pictures, pull-out quotes and fake ads to enhance the articles. I felt that the design worked effectively and subtly to support the tone of satire in the content

Indie Game // Final Animation

This is the completed animation. The music, pacing and character animation help to create a really distinct tone that is inkeeping with the indie games that we had identified in our research. By splitting the workload between us, we were able to combat different scenes and support each other during the production of the different sections. This made the entire process easier and created an outcome thatw e were both extremely proud of.

TBM Flag // Data Flag Development

We liked the idea of producing the new UK flag using data visualisation about the countries, inspired by the beautiful patterns of infographics such as those found in Information is Beautiful by David McCandles:

We looked at a few different data sets and produced our own representations of these:

UK industrial sectors ranked by contribution to GDP"

UK population proportional:

Cities by population:

Landmass of counties in each country: