Annotation 5 - Motion Methods
Method 1 - Analogue Storyboarding
Sketching typographic layouts on paper served as a crucial spatial translation method. Visualizing "Brick by Brick" in physical sketches exposed the composition limits, which allowed me to recognize the problem and pivot to "From the Bricks Up" to better suit the canvas of the poster.
Method 2 - Peer Critique
Gathering feedback from a variety of people including non-designers shifted my focus towards the audience perception. When my initial brick animation felt too static other perspectives prompted me to introduce an organic bounce and also have simpler staggered entry timings for subtext to preserve the typographic hierarchy.
Method 3 - Animation Experimentation
Iterative testing in after effects allowed me to tell a story through movement. Frame by frame masking for growing the plants and a subtle background building slowly growing allowed motion to conceptually reinforce the main message without overcomplicating the visual layout.
I think this all makes sense and doesn't need that much change - I started writing this out by listing what my three main methods were and how exactly I used them and what I did - my original blab draft was this:
Starting with sketching - so after formative. I did explore the same poster for awhile until I switched to my new phrase which at first I thought would by “brick by brick” which is what I had started sketching out - I decided to sketch out the words brick by bricks made out of bricks which I had found that I really liked but translating it onto the computer. I decided to change the phrasing into “From The Bricks Up” as I thought it would look nicer and more balanced on the poster which I only thought because I had seen brick by brick sketched on paper and it just looked quite squished and not fitting for my poster size.
I had a lot of discussions with peers but mainly peers that didn’t actually do design, for my animation I wanted the bricks to fall from the “sky” so top of the poster and fall into place - after animating this which took a very long time to animate each individual brick I had discussed with others and found that it was to stiff I had gotte na suggestion to make the brick bounce which I thought was a great idea and followed through with it - I also had discussions with a lot of people about what to do with the rest of the type - I was very proud of the brick animation but a bit lost on what to do with sub text as I didn’t want to overcomplicate the whole poster so I needed something simpler. Which I settled for doing text coming in from the side and the small texts just appearing on screen in specific order. I tried to help keep the type hierarchy in with the animation by doing slightly different animations and timings with all the text.
My third method was experimenting in after affects. Obviously the bricks falling was my biggest experimentation to see how natural I could get it looking. But also using a mask to show the leaves slowly growing - I wasn’t sure that would look good but editing the mask little by little each frame allowed it to be positioned well and let the leaves grow at a nice pace. I also experimented with the background building growing it wasn’t something I wanted to take a big part of the post aka I dint really want it drawing that much attention but just a little thing in then background that you don’t notice as much because it just seems natural that its happening - but also the building growing was meant to reflect the saying from the bricks up.
But I had condensed it down and hope I got across the main points that were needed - I honestly am worried that it doesn't say the details but the methods I explain can come across in any poster I think and that was the idea of this annotation in the explanatory document, that it didn't come across as an explanation of your poster, step by step guide kinda thing, but methods that you used and a reflection on them in more of a broad sense.
