Monday 25 January 2010

Loosing my marbles

Continuing on with the Collection 100 brief, the next part was to make our own brief based on our inital collection (mine being toys). I have to produce something relating to product & packaging, product & promotion or product & distribution. Whatever I create must include 100 in some way. I thought about what part of my collection I could use, some of my ideas were...
  • A timeline of 100 years of 100 toys
  • 100 LEGO sets
  • 100 different Crayola wax crayons in 100 colours
PICTURE OF SKETCHBOOK

In a chat with Amber I changed my direction to focus on marbles for many reasons, such as unable to obtain 100 crayons, unable to find timeline of 100 years of toys and other classmates doing something similar with LEGO. I began researching into marbles and found there are so many diffrent types, but these days they don't seem to be aimed at children as a toy. When on the search for 100 marbles in Leeds, I came across 1 market stall to have any marbles, and they were only cats-eyes... pretty standard in my opinion in comparison to others you can get.




















I began to think about what I could do with these marbles and decided upon my brief to be aimed at children (5-11 years) and to promote marbles as a toy again. I thought about an advertisement as marbles are a moving toy... they roll everywhere! A book would be too static for my subject. Also what 7 year old would read a book on marbles? Very few I would guess. Stop motion animation has always been something I have wanted to explore and I really think this would be an ideal opportunity. After my Quick Time workshop I cracked on with making a basic stop motion... pretty much documenting my 100 cats-eyes marbles.

QUICKTIME VIDEO

This turned out pretty poor quality but I think the idea worked ok. I bought some nicer marbles to use for my final pice and attempted the same thing. This one includes greater variety including more colours and sizes and think this would keep the attention and be more exciting for a child viewing my animation.

I also tried to create a large marble out my 100 cats-eyes marbles. I positioned all the cats-eyes to go round in a circle, hopefully to create more of an effect. Unfortunately it doesn't appear rounded enough on all sides to look like a marble. I reckon I would need alot more marbles to create the impression from afar of a huge marble.
























I created a design direction board to show in a crit and it went down pretty well. I also got some advise on stop animations to research, I aim to make a stop motion which lasts 100 seconds and consists of 10 sequences. Each sequence will be 10 seconds long and will involve 100 marbles. The whole thing will run and 10 frames per second. This means it will require 1000 frames to make he entire animation! I will also need to design packaging for my animation which will probably be on a DVD but I am looking into other possibilities... maybe a USB? I would like the packaging to be interesting and related to the product (animation). It would be really nice if I could make the packaging interactive aswell.






3 comments:

  1. Talking to you today Hazel, I really liked the idea of having the animation to promote the idea of marbles becoming more popular and bringing them back into focus of kids. And I do think it would be good as said today to experiment with packaging the marbles themselves, as then they could be displayed in a shop beneath the animation you are creating, rather than maybe the animation. Otherwise I think it is really good idea with the animation as it is different and effective!!

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  2. I agree with Kim- I think you need to think about the packaging for the marbles themselves, since that's essentially the product you are marketing.
    Perhaps just something simple, keeping with the simplicity of marbles themselves? Like a tin with a simple colourful label. Or a box or something. Maybe look at the patterns in the marbles for a more abstract/fractal effect for a background or something?

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  3. I really like your idea as its different and working with a quicktime video is something new to experiment with. I think the video will look really cool but have you thought about how you would package it, because i think the packaging could be a great way of selling and promoting the product and making it appealing for children.

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