Exercise: Book Ads — Positive, Negative, & Metaphorical

Exercise: Tuesday’s in-class exercise was to choose one random, everyday object that we found we carried on us. From that object, we would then create three sketches of ads: the first would be positive, the second would be negative, and the third would be metaphorical.

I chose a book, since I always have a book with me so I can kill time. So I began to think of positive, negative, and metaphorical ideas for books.

Positive: kills time, increases intelligence, stress reliever

Negative: distracting, heavy

Metaphorical: makes time fly, get lost in another world

Final Sketches: For the positive, I showed a person sitting on a bed, engulfed in a book. The negative has one girl who dropped her book and lost its page(this  has happened to me so many times) while another person has a Kindle. This shows that they won’t have to worry about losing their spot. The metaphorical,  would be a book pulling them into another world.

Exercise: Build a Robot

Build a Robot

Assignment: For this assignment, we had to construct a robot out of everyday household objects. Once we have chosen the objects, we then draw out how we construct the robot. Then the directions are given to a friend to build in less than ten minutes.

Items: Exacto knife, tape, scissors, 1 water bottle, 2 toilet paper rolls, 2 note cards, 1 pencil, and 1 poof ball

Building of Robot

Steps:

• Take the plastic bottle and use Exacto knife to make holes in the bottle without damaging its shape.
• Take the toilet paper rolls and measure 1/3^rd of the way down the tube. Cut along dashed lines and use Exacto knife to cut a whole in between the two cuts.
• Then take the two note cards and fold at lines and tape shut.
• Push pencil through bottom holes on bottle.
• Cut the note card box on dotted lines to create a tab and fold outward.
• Push tabs of the note card box into top holes on bottle. This creates the arms.
• Stick pencil ends into the e hole on each toilet paper roll, create legs of the robot.
• With tape, stick poof ball on lid of bottle.

My roommate seemed to have fun building it. It didn’t take her to long to build the robot. I think the only thing that was challenging for her, was to stick the note card arms into the inserts on the bottle.

Robot

Exercise: Storybook

Assignment: I had to take 30 minutes to sit in a public place and watch and listen to my environment without talking to anyone or having no access to any electronics and then jot down my experience. Then, I had to take those ideas and try to come up with a story for an audience ranging from three to seven-year-olds. I then had to take seven minutes to create a 10-12 panel storyboard. I also need to try and come up with a plot, explain the story through sketches, and try and find a moral to the story.

Info from my notes: The people around me were talking of the costumes that they were thinking about wearing for Halloween and favorite books.

Plot: A young boy who loves to read is sucked inside a magically book and learns to befriend its unique inhabitants.

Moral: Kindness is important and it can affect the lives of everyone around you.

Story: The beginning of the story will have a sickly boy name William, who could not sleep, wandering the library of his family’s mansion. Since the boy is always sick, his only escape is reading, so whenever he can, he engulfs himself in a book. While wander the library that night, he runs across a large book that is flipped open and radiating light. As he nears, he sees words lifts off its pages, which then surround him and pull him through a portal into the book. Once he begins to adventure the world, he sees all kinds of interesting creatures; knights, dragons, fairies, giants, tiny giraffes and other animals, and flowers as tall as trees and trees as tall as a blade of grass. He then befriends a fairy named Lily and her faithful friend, a tiny giraffe named Geoffrey. As the story progresses, the fairy gets William to hide from the creatures that evoke fear in all of the inhabitants of the land. There, he saw Vlad the Vampire King, leading his servants: witches, werewolves, skeletons, ghosts, jack-o-lantern men, and vampire bats.  William asked Lily and Geoffrey why Vlad the Vampire King and his minions were feared, and she said they were terrifying everyone.  William ended up discovering that Vlad and his minions were actually really kind and only wanted to become friends with the inhabitants of the strange world.  When William explained this, Vlad and his minions befriended William, Lily, and Geoffrey, and things soon changed for the better. Before going home, William promised them that he would visit again real soon. The End.

So, this was challenging for me, I have a hard time coming up with ideas for children’s books. But it was fun anyway. The challenge is good though, and this is a good way to come up with creative ideas.

6 Panel Storyboard: Colacious – The Apple Shaped Popcorn

Panel Ideas

Assignment: Today, our in class assignment was to split into two groups and create a six panel storyboard. First, we each had to choose three adjectives that had three syllables and choose our favorite adjective out of the three. Then as a group, we had to choose three of all of our favorite adjectives and rank them. From the ranking adjectives, we had to take the first syllable from the first adjective, the second syllable from the second adjective, and the third syllable from the third adjective. Then we had to combine all the syllables in order to create a new word. From that, we must then create a six panel storyboard for a motion graphics piece of a made up company.

3 Adjectives I Chose: Beautiful, Ferocious, and Simplistic.

My Favorite Adjective: Ferocious

Groups 3 Favorite Adjectives: 1. Colorful, 2. Flammable, 3. Colorful (the adjectives are ranked in order of what we chose)

Syllables: 1. col, 2. a, 3. cious

Combined Syllables: colacious

Notes

From Colacious, my group decided that our company would produced apple colored and shaped popcorn. Colacious would genetically alter popcorn to produce a giant apple shaped kernel that would produce different apple flavors of popcorn. In the first panel, you see a top view of a giant apple-shaped kernel in a microwave. In the second panel, you see the apple pan down into the side view of the apple kernel. The third panel shows the skin of the apple pealing back. In the fourth, you see the apple exploding popcorn. The fifth panel shows  a popcorn explosion. The last panel shows us an apple kernel in a wrapper that says Colacious and sits atop a mountain of apple flavored popcorn.

This in-class assignment was interesting. It was also fun since we were all coming up with random ideas. The reason why we decided that Colacious would be a popcorn company, was because we decided that the word sounded like culinary and delicious. Placement for the panels was a little challenging when we were trying to figure out how we could place the brand.

Exercise: Poster design

Final Poster Design

Assignment: My assignment, was to take 60 minutes to come up with an idea for a poster incorporating: Sleep: It’s What You Need. From my sketches, I then had to draw out the poster while using text you normally don’t use. (When I use text, it is usually very fluid. I don’t like rough plain text. I’ve always been that way.)

Sketches for Poster

Sketches: The first sketch that I came up with was of a girl who feel asleep in the middle of studding for her exam. The second was of a person sleeping. The next showed one student sleeping in class while another wasn’t. The fourth is of a kid who got an ‘A’ on a test and another kid who got an ‘F’ cause he fell asleep in the middle of the test. The last sketch, and the one that I turned into a poster, is a zombie with the words, “Don’t be a zombie! Sleep: It’s What You Need!”

Poster: When I first got this assignment, I came up with the idea to create a zombie since Halloween is a week away. I also think that zombies are good at representing people. (We are lazy and don’t really want to do anything and we don’t get enough sleep which then makes us constantly complain.) So I figured that this would be a good way to explain that we need more sleep than what we get.

I also have never drawn a zombie before, so it was a slight challenge. The coloring is also strange to me. To get the zombie coloring, I used light green, black, purple, blue, red, and white. (The white helped blend the colors and pale the zombie’s skin tone. I also inked it and thickened some lines just to give variance.

In Class Exercise

Today in class we were given an assignment that involved use to break into two small groups to brainstorm and develop a design, logo, title, and boxing for a new line of baby diapers that worked for Urban parents who wanted their babies to become more stylish through an edgier feel.

Assignment: We were given 60 minutes to design and create a logo, design, title, and packaging for a fictional diaper company.

Logo

LOGO: An inverted silhouette of a Victorian baby’s rattle framed by a baby’s bonnet.

Packaging and Designs

DESIGN & PACKAGING: In order to create an edgier feeling baby’s diaper for an Urban mother and her child, we wanted to do something that could be considered sophisticated and stylish. We ended up deciding on a style that played on old-fashions, such as the Victorian era. To do so, we created two different lines of diapers; the first for girls, which is frilly and tied with bows, and the second for boys, which is designed with an old fashioned baseball uniform in mind and is fastened with tiny baseball bats. The Packaging has the brand and product names written in fancy writing. It is split into four different squares; the top left has the brand, the top right has the design for the for the girl’s diaper, the bottom left has the design for the boy, and the bottom right has a the product name, these for sections are separated with a ribbon. The sections with text appear to be old-fashioned paper. The other sections are colored with black and white for an edgy retro feel.

This assignment was kinda tricky. It really made you think and try to incorporate each others ideas. the time limit also forced us to have limited range and in a since cramped our creativity. But, I also felt as if it increased the amount of creativity we produced. After we got one idea, the ideas seemed to just keep on flowing. It was definitely an interesting experience.

Class Exercise: Designing a Banner

Assignment: The other day I was assigned with this interesting exercise. We were given four random places to choose from: the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah(one of the largest salt flats in America, remains of the Pleistocene Lake), the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan(a city in Canada with pretty scenery and interesting weather), the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner(the only coroner’s office that has a gift shop . . . weird), and the Corn Palace(the world’s only corn themed palace for concerts and so on). Once we chose our place, we had to spend 60 minutes coming up with ideas on why we should go. Once we got those reasons, we then needed to sketch up an animated banner to advertise the place and explain to persons on why they should go there.

Chosen Place: The Bonneville Salt Flats

Steps: These are the different storyboards that I came up with and why.

1. The first storyboard would just be a beautiful photograph of the Bonneville Salt Flats emphasizing its unique beauty.

2. The second storyboard would have a UFO flying the letters “Bonneville Salt Flats” in. This may seem a little random, but it’s not. The UFO represents the alien spacecraft in “Independence Day.” This is because of the fact that part of the movie was filmed here.(“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” and several other movies, had scenes filmed here as well.)

3. The third will have cars and motorcycles lined up at a starting line.

4. The fourth will have the vehicles in the third storyboard racing to the finish line.

(The third and fourth storyboards represent the five largest land and speed races in America that take place here.)

5. The fifth one emphasizes the fact that the Bonneville Salt Flats are disappearing due to increase mining for the salt.

6. The last storyboard tells the viewers to go visit the salt flats before they are gone.

I choose to create these banner storyboards for the Bonneville Salt Fields, because I thought they were very interesting and there are a lot of different things that make them special. The ideas for them are a little challenging but it is good that I face these challenges.

In Class Exercise: Create Theme and Concept

Annual Report Design Idea: Invisible Children

Exercise: The other day in class, we had to create an idea for a theme and concept behind an Annual Report. As a class, we had to think of three different, completely unrelated things from the categories: Animals, Places, and Nonprofit Organization. For each category, we had to come up with the first thing that came to mind, and then as a class, we would choose one for each.

What we choose:

Animal: Giraffe

Place: Venice

Nonprofit Organization: Invisible Children

What to do: We had to come up with the theme and concept for an annual report representing Invisible Children and incorporating giraffes and Venice. So the first thing we did was to brainstorm for ideas in how we could connect the three. Then the class split into groups and among our group, we would pass our ideas one to all the other people in the group so they could expand on our ideas while I added to theirs’. Then we came together after ten minutes, and took out any repeating ideas. The we went through and choose the best concept. For the best concept, we then designed an image for the cover of the Annual Report.

My Brainstorming Among Group

Finished Image

The final drawing ended up being a boy dressed in military garb peering into water and see a reflection of a little boy holding toys. We wanted to emphasize how these children are affected.

This exercise was a little challenging because we had to find a way to work with each others differing ideas, but then again that is what made this in-class exercise fun. It was good experience and it helped us become more creative.