Animation Context: Finishing the Hard Bit and Starting the Fun Bit

May 1, 2017 I've managed to finally write a first draft of the article. I have found this part of the task, harder than I originally anticipated. I have always considered myself good and apt. at academic writing, however in this case (perhaps because I found myself becoming very passionate about this subject), feeling satisfied with my writing came a lot harder to myself. I'm almost certain that many amendments will have to be made upon review, not to mention referencing citations, but during the writing of this article, I found I had a lot to condense in, the 'research funnel' was a hard concept for myself to grasp, because I have gone over the word count by about 400 words. I'm eagerly anticipating a review from my course leader as I'm anxious to just get this part of the task out of the way.

Have drafted up a reference list for the main sources that I have used to write this article. Changes will be made once I go over with Johny, how I must cite within my article.

In the meantime my only choice is to now focus on the more fun part of this task which is finally aesthetically defining this article within InDesign. I firstly opened up Photoshop and created a blank document for a double page spread, (with the amount of text I have, I am almost certain, I shall need two double pages, but for now I am working with one). I created the new title following the design that I had implemented on the front cover of my statement of intent:

The colours this time were more vibrant and I wanted to utilise a background that truly reflected the psychedelic art that I had been researching on Pinterest. I therefore sketched out a base layer of various symbols and patterns that I had seen reoccurring throughout the psychedelic artwork I had been researching.

With this sketch, I could gage how my text was initially going to fit onto the page, (it was here I made great use of the 3x6 guide for the layout of my page. I was already excited about how the article was coming together.

As expected the article has overspilled onto another double page spread, this does not worry me though, as I am going to utilise a layout similar to the first two pages.

Before I did that I decided that getting the colouring and title done for background was a more pressing (and fun) matter to do. I really enjoyed just being to splash colour all over this project. It was here I could really try and emulate the psychedelic artistes of the swinging' sixties.

I could also implement the experimentation I had done in the previous week into the white space.

I simply cut out the warped section of the image and pasted it into the white background.

I muted the colour and blurred the image as well as repeating and resizing it. This was a fantastic and original quick fix for how I could fill in the otherwise boring background.

I imported this image as the new background for the InDesign document to work off. I had to add a pillars of magenta colour to the columns so the words could be more easily read, I found that using a white font was easier on the eyes. I have also justified the texts boxes so that it looks more like a document for news/magazine print. I'm still trying to work out how I can change the opacity settings in the columns of writing, so that the magenta colour can be more muted to reveal slightly more of the background image, without the cost of the writing being impaired, of course.

For now I shall have to direct my attention to other subjects that require more catching up. I hope to have a good discussion with Johny in my tutorial about how I can improve this piece, it is then, that I can finally finish the InDesign article aspect of this piece and submit my work.