Guess Who

We had to take a picture of ourselves and edit it to make it look like a character from the Guess Who game. We had to edit the picture bit by bit and make it look like a cartoon icon, which would fit onto the board.

The first thing I edited was my eye brow. I used the pen tool and zoomed right into my eyebrow and traced around it. I then used the eye dropper tool to match it with my hair.

I used the circle tool to try and re-create my eye in a cartoon version.

Then I started to re-create my eyes. I drew a white oval and sent it to the back, before drawing 4 circles and arranging them so that they looked like eyes. After that I used the pen tool to draw eyelashes, and then copy and pasted them to fill out my eye. 

I carried on with the rest of my face, colouring in my hair and adding more details to my face. 

Killer Coke

For the first hour of the lesson we watched and took notes on a Channel 4 dispatches documentary about Coca-Cola.

The documentary was filmed undercover and was exposing Coca-Cola for their crimes against nature and humanity. After watching this, we need to create a poster about Coca-Cola, to show what they are actually doing. Before we get around to actually making our poster, we have to do some research and draft some initial ideas. 

Initial Research

These are some posters that I liked the look of and gave me ideas when I first saw them. 

The first poster was the main inspiration for my own poster because I really like the wording on it and also the whole style of it. It is quite a traditional and vintage poster and I think it would look good to try and recreate it in that style but instead it could be advertising 'Killer Cola'. 

My Poster

This is the very first stages of my poster. I'm trying to use the same layout and look as the poster that I got my inspiration from, but rather than having a Coca-Cola factory behind all the bottles, i'm putting a picture of a child cutting down sugar canes, as in the documentary we watched, they visited the sugar plantation that Coca-Cola and found out that they employ children. 

This is my finished poster. I'm really happy with the way it's turned out and how it looks. It doesn't look like an exact copy of the poster it is originally based on, but I still think it's quite effective.  The main colours i've used are Black, White and Red, and the Brown of the coke in the bottles. For the background colour, I used the eye dropper tool to select the background colour of the original poster, because it has an off-white colour that is difficult to mimic in Photoshop, and I think it makes the poster look a little bit worn as opposed to having a crisp white colour as the background. I used a picture of a little boy cutting down some sugar canes because I wanted to make the poster about child labour which was a big part of the Dispatches Documentary we watched in class. The font I used was called 'Rockwell' and it was the most traditional looking text I could find. I chose to go for this because I wanted to keep the poster looking as old fashioned as possible, as I think it makes it a bit more effective and also looks similar to the original. 

I placed the picture of the child towards the back of the poster, because if people were to look at it quickly, the chances are they would see the Coca-Cola logo, and then do a double take as they see the picture. I chose to do it like this because it is more likely to make people think, rather than just going straight for the 'Shock Factor'. 

Unit 19: Digital Graphics for Interactive Media Objectives

Ethical Designer Evaluation

My main influence was Barbara Kruger. I really liked the fact that she had a really basic picture in monochrome colours and then the bold red text over the top, I think it was really effective and i wanted to bring some of that into my design. 

I think the area that needs the most improvement in my advert is the timing. The transitions between the frames are quite slow and the word 'worldwide' seems to be quite jumpy when it comes in. If I were to do this project again I would spend a lot more time perfecting the timings and how smooth the animation is, for example I would make the words in the first couple of frames come in and flow a lot smoother, so that the finished gif would have a more polished look. 

I am very happy with my final outcome, and am happy with the way it has all come together. My initial idea was to have a picture of the world and to have facts and statistics written in bandages, however I do prefer my final animation. I still kept my original idea of having the world in the background, and still kept my inspiration from Barbara Kruger, however I decided to have a bandage over Africa instead, which is one of the countries that Arms Around the Child help the most, and had a plain font that looks as though it has been written using a type writer. I went with this because I wanted to keep it simple, but still effective, and I feel that my final outcome is simple yet effective. 

To make sure that my piece represented the ethical theme, I wanted the base of my animation to be a picture of the world. The reason I wanted this is because Arms Around the Child is a worldwide charity, and i wanted to make sure that this was obvious to anyone who was hearing about the charity for the first time by watching the animation. I also wanted to make sure that Africa had some focus during the piece, which was why I chose to place the plaster/bandage onto Africa. I chose to place it here because although Arms Around the Child helps children all around the world, the majority of their efforts take place in Africa. 

In the future, I will approach projects with a more developed idea of what I want my final piece to look like. The reason for this is because, after looking back at the Arms Around the Child project, I had an idea that I knew I wanted to use, but I hadn't developed it enough to know exactly what I was going to be doing. I think it could have saved a lot of time if I had planned more of what I was going to do, rather than develop it as I go along. 

Arms Around A Child inspired artwork

After writing down my initial ideas I chose my favourite one and developed it more so that it could be made into an advert. My favourite idea was using the world as a basis for the advert and having a fact come in around it.