Our discussion forum this week asks you to reflect on a portion of Naomi Klein's book No Logo. Her work covers many cultural concerns of visual culture today. Often the responses in the discussion forum have a common misinterpretation of the question. Rather than examples of the "unexpected" in the content of advertising - the question is meant for us to reflect on the context with which we find advertising. Many students remark that advertising is everywhere. This is definitely true - but do you really expect to see advertisiments everywhere? How does the ubiquity of advertising affect us? Is it okay for advertising to be everywhere?

Screening Commercials and Project Work Time

During the last class we session we screened a mix of commercials that were student projects, some commercial with satire or parody, and some professional commercials. The examples could be considered different ways of approaching our projec topic. For today's class session we will screen more commercials. These examples incorporate motion graphics, composite imaging, and visual effects other visual effects. Although we don't have time to address every processes, if there is something that you see that is interesting to you, please ask about it - we might be able to fit some of it in. As we watch each one, we will take a minute or two to break them down into what effects are happening (as much as we are able to).

• Claritin
• Brizo Faucets
• Adobe Marketing Cloud
• Reissued
• Samsung
• Verizon Droid
• Mountain Dew
• Guinness
• Adidas
• Toyota
• Cartoon Network
• MTV
• NatGeo
• PBS Kids
• Nickelodeon
• Sony Playstation
• Microsoft Xbox

Project Planning

The first stage of this project is to focus on design thinking, planning, and research. There are several ways to begin. For example, you could begin by sketching or drawing out some of your ideas with paper and pencil. You might also do visual research online and collect reference images, screenshots, and links to examples that you are interested in. For our current project there are too large areas to focus on: Concept (satire, partody, critique) and Content (visual design, aesthetic style, animation). Your visual research should probably include both concept and content.

As you do your visual research you should begin building Design Boards. Design Boards are similar to both Story Boards and Mood Boards. They all relate to how you want things to look on the screen. Within that range of planning and research, you can choose to focuse more on sequence, script, visual design, or style. In this course we use Design Boards as a sort of umbrella for motion graphics planning and you are welcome to incorporate as much as you would like to. Some designers begin creating assets for a project as part of their preliminary work and include them in their Design Boards. More details in your planning process will help to guide your work.

There is an upcoming critique for this part of our project development. You are encouraged to consider the layout and presentation of your design boards. Some students might also wish to print their design boards for our critique... but all students will be expected to submit one PDF file with their Design Boards on D2L.

Project Work Session

The remaining time in class is work time. It is expected that when there is project work time, it will be used efficiently by working on our assigned project. As you do visual research, you should also be developing Design Boards and considering what content you will need to create for the project. All of these things can be done in the lab, where you might also ask questions or discuss your concept. During the next class session we will review and critique your Design Boards.

For the UN-Commercial and Ident Bumper Projects, focus on the following:

• Workflow:
• Identify existing commercials/brands for reference
• Consider how you can alter or transform their message (388 only)
• Design Boards for what your project will look like
• Develop project assets and workfiles
• Plan and organize
• Develop project assets and workfiles
• Animate and work with effects
• Combination of media that you know how to create:
• graphics
• illustrations
• photographs
• live-action video (some of you)
• hand drawn images/illustrations
• image textures
• voiceover, narration
• other audio, sound effects, music

This project, more than any of the others, can become very large very quickly. Remember that we only have a limited amount of time to develop and complete work. It is important that you take into consideration the things that you are comfortable doing, and that you have a sense of how you might be able to complete. The work you choose to do should be something that is manageable, that lets you reinforce and expand on the skills we have focused on all semester. Any new processes should be built off of those we have explored in project, tutorial assignments, and processes demonstrated in class or in our notes.

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