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Introduction

In the introduction to this project, I was immediately thrilled to get to work with a partner. I believe the most fun part of the creative process is getting to bounce ideas off of people and getting to share some interesting conversations.

Exercises

One of our first exercises was to explore different types of paper mechanisms. This was incredibly fun. I made a few quick mechanisms that got me a pretty good understanding of how to move things with paper. If you have kept up with me during my process as a designer, you know by now that I love sports. So, my first mechanism of course was going to involve sports. I decided to use a penny as a weight to make a slider. I attached an image of a football to the penny and made it travel down a filed and go through a set of goal posts. Here is what I came up with:

 

I still play with this on a daily basis because I really just think its quite fun. Next, I wanted to do something with a face, and what better face than Mickey Mouse? None. So, I made a mechanism that moves his eyes with a paper pulley. Here is what I came up with:

Ideating for the Final!

Because we are finally working in partners, I can finally bounce some ideas off of a partner. Jarrett and I spent our first day just talking about each other’s interests. This helped us narrow down some ideas. Here were some of our original ideas:

– Cat and Mouse concept (Tom and Jerry)

– Paintball match

– Archery

After some complications with the cat and mouse, we decided that we needed to stick to a less unoriginal idea. So, we decided to start working with the paintball idea. We had decided early on that I would make the gun and he would make the explosion. So, here was my first iteration.

This video was quite simplistic, as it was done through Snapchat. However, it did a great job of showing us what needed to be done in order to make the visuals successful.

I drew some quick sketches of what this could possibly look like in a more complex sense. I just wanted to see if there was anything else I could do to make this more interesting for the viewer. Here are some of those sketches:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We decided to go with the gun and mask idea because we thought it was 1) the easiest for the viewer to understand and 2) the most intriguing design.

Once our idea had been finalized, we decided to get a little bit more accurate and head over to the laser cutter. Here is my image of the paintball gun that I made using the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator.

 

Once my file was complete, I sent it down to the laser cutter! 2 days later we ran into a little bit of a problem. All of our papers were burnt in the laser cutter. So, this knocked us back a few days, but it was noting we couldn’t handle.

After the quick set back, we were back on track and ready to roll with the final production.

Final

Everything was cut and ready to go! All that was left was tweaking some small details to get ready for filming the stop motion video. When working on my final piece, I began to realize how difficult it is to work with very small bits of paper. Not only was everything difficult to cut, everything was difficult to situate and place in the correct location. This is especially difficult with large hands that sweat quite a lot. So, I began using tweezers to hold things into place.

My video took me incredibly long to make because of how tedious it was with small details.

I decided that the best lighting was in my bathroom, so I taped down my phone on top of a little stand and shot everything from above. Here was my set up (it worked great):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what I ended up with after a lot of tries and mess ups!

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBMH33CblD0

What I learned

Because this was our first partner project, I definitely learned some things about how to work better with a partner. In a high school setting where you are together every single day, it is a lot easier to plan out a project because you automatically are with your partner for a few minutes a day. However, in a situation like this where you may only see your partner once a week, communication is key. You need to agree on set deadlines for yourself and your partner in order to make sure everything gets done in a timely manner. This was evident to me at the beginning, but I definitely think I could have done a better job with it. Overall, working with a partner is absolutely amazing, especially if everything is planned well and executed well.

Project Intro

At the introduction to this project, we were told it was going to be a story-telling project. I immediately thought about my grandfather and it got me excited right away. He had a way of telling stories that made a normal day seem like a movie. When brainstorming for this project, I tried to keep that in mind.

On our first in person class day, we were given time to create our own stories. This was an incredibly good time and I had a lot of fun doing it. We were given a prompt which we had to respond to by creating a story that matched the feeling discussed in the prompt. Our first prompt was:

One of the worst feelings in the world is when you realize you weren’t paranoid after all. 

In response to this, I wrote 2 stories. The first one was slightly boring because it was the very first thing that popped into my mind. Here it is below.

• Edward is in the woods and he stumbles upon a pack of little lion cubs who have lost their mothers
• He raises them and watches them grow
• He eventually gets eaten because they turned on him

Now, I was warmed up and ready to get creative. Here is my next story.

• Mark is a incredibly wealthy American diplomat who is stationed in Moscow. He was reading a book in his penthouse
• He sees a drone out of the window
• A week later he still sees this drone
• Now he is worried someone is watching him
• He goes out in the street one day and he sees the drone start lowering to the ground and start to chase him.
• When he was being chased, a team of mercenaries filed him into a dark alley where no one else could see, and then they tickled him so hard that he peed himself
• They gave him a high five, left, and never spoke to him again

This was incredibly fun to dive deep into my brain and come up with some weird stuff. I loved this.

Next, we worked on a story with a group. Here, we illustrated our collaborative stories in panels (just like we would end up doing for the project). I had so much fun doing this and it really brought me closer to my classmates.

Our story was created by combining elements from everyone in my group’s stories. We each played our own characters in these stories. Here are the panels and explanation of our first story.

This story starts with Nolan and Danny walking down the street. They were blissfully going about their day until they saw a shadowy figure out of the corner of their eyes. Nervously, the turned around to see what was going on, but nothing was their. They shrugged it off and just assumed they were seeing things. They turned around, and the figure jumped in front of them and screamed. The figure was me, and after I let off my menacing scream, I pulled two feathers out of my pocket, and began to tickle them. Very wholesome!

 

 

 

Our next story was odd. Very odd. Here it is:

One day, Alex, Nolan and Danny were walking around with their pet monkey and realized he was incredibly dirty. So naturally, they took him to take a bath back at their apartment. As the bathroom got steamy, tensions arose. Their monkey summoned the boys into the bathtub. Slowly, each of the three boys made their way into the bathtub with their monkey. It didn’t take long for this to take a turn. Before long, roses and bubbles filled the bathtub, romantic music played in the background, drinks were shared, and love was in the air. Just three dudes and their monkey.

 

 

 

Online Class day

During our online class, we had to come up with a story and find images that paired with them. I decided to go with a story that my brother was very fond of growing up because he is a Green Bay Packers Fan. Here is my story in a collage of images.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First experimentation

When first deciding on my story, I wanted to make sure it was cyclical. Because I am very inclined by sports, I did a simple basketball shoot-around for my first experiment with this. I was very pleased at how easily the flipper was made. I am definitely going to use as flipper in the future for my own use, just because it is very fun to do. Here is my very rough first experimentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After seeing this, I realized that I wasn’t using the natural ability of the flipper: splitting the images into multiple frames. Once I realized this, I had an explosion of ideas in my head. I immediately began to think about what a typical shoot-around actually feels like. When you are in a focused shoot-around, you tend to put yourself into in game scenarios. So, this is the direction I went for the rest of the project.

I made one more flipper just for fun at this point, and this is how it turned out:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one was very good for my practice because it was so large.

Graphics

The actual images in my piece are my favorite parts. For this, I thought a personal touch was very necessary because the story is very personal to me. I did a little photo shoot to view my shot form. I used those images to make a “dream-like” image that corresponded to the faux situation that I think about while I am shooting around. I imagine myself as a OSU player making a buzzer beater, so that is what I went for. Here are my images paired with my drawings:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once I did this, I needed to set my scene. Here is my general scene for most of the piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After doing this, I made small tweaks to the scene to describe what was going on. For example, the scoreboard changed throughout the scene.

Here are the 4 final panels:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final scene shows the retraction to reality. The scene goes back to normal and I look normal again.

Construction

Because I had never used the printer before, I was actually a little anxious about how I was going to get this to work. I accidentally printed about 20 black and white versions, 12 that were the wrong size, and a couple that were just blurry. I finally figured it out, and I was very excited. I had my flipper already constructed so I was ready to go. Until I decided to glue the images on in the wrong order! Total restart! It was no big deal though because my craftsmanship could’ve been better anyways. Here is my mess up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After this, I was completely focused and ready to get this thing done, and done well. After a couple hours of careful cutting and assembly, I finally had my flipper! Here is an image of my flipper and it’s panels:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a pdf for better quality, along with my CONCEPT STATEMENT.

INFINITE FLIPPER PDF

What I learned

Using personal experience to tap into your design can do great things for you. Never forget how much your experience can help you. Along with this, early ideation is a very good thing in terms of getting everything done smoothly and with design intention in mind.

 

The Introduction

When this project was introduced, I kind of freaked out because of the name of the project. I have never been the best at drawing people, especially their faces, so I was not very excited. It took me a few days to truly understand what was going on, but then I finally hunkered down and understood that this was a representational abstraction. This made me super excited because I could just picture what I wanted to do from the beginning. I am excited to keep the ball rolling on this project

Exercise 1

The beginning of this process was pretty fun. It started with me looking deep into myself and categorizing my main mental states. I had some help with some leading questions. Here are the questions and my responses to them.

How do you think through a problem?

• I typically tend to just roll with whatever I am feeling in the moment, or I consult a bunch of people that I trust. I am very optimistic and seldom think there is a problem I can’t get past or work through.

Is it methodical?

• There is no method to my madness when it comes to problem solving, unless it is something that actually requires some sort of construction of something. Outside of that, I tend to just go with my gut and let everything work out. 

Is it spastic and unorganized? 

• Yes very much. This is sometimes problematic, but most of my problems are solved quickly because of this so it also has some good consequences to it. I don’t get caught up on things, but I sometimes make the wrong decision.

How would you describe your thought processes using an adjective/energy/feeling/emotion?

• After answering the first few questions, I realized that my problems are mainly solved socially, empty-mindedly, and after the decision is made, reflectively. Socially because I sometimes require other opinions, empty-mindedly because I make quick gut-felt decisions, and then I am reflective afterward so I can improve my decisions later on. 

 

Overall, my mental state is slightly odd. There are some things that I think through incredibly methodically but some things that I do not think through at all. If I need to be really focused I can be, but most of the time I am just rolling with the flow.

3 words:

Social

Empty Minded

Reflective

After finding my 3 main descriptive words, I made a mind map to help with my shape creation and ideating. Here are my 3 mind maps.

My 50 Rapid Prototypes

Now that I had my descriptive words mapped out, I knew what direction I had to go in next. The problem was figuring out how to display each word through shape. Here is my thought process on how each shape should look.

Empty minded: Rounded edges and very bubbly, no straight lines, and very unpredictable.

Social: Elongated shapes that look as though they are reaching out.

Reflective: Compact shapes that represent the inward-looking on my own brain.

After I had an idea about what needed to happen to display these feelings, I started rolling on my iterations. This was actually pretty fun to mindlessly doodle (with a little bit of direction of course).

The shapes that are starred are the ones that I originally selected because I thought that they best represented the words I wanted to display. However, I ended up changing it up a little bit. The shapes below are the ones I ended up working with.

Blob: The blob displays my empty mindedness. I go through long periods of time each day where there is nothing happening in my head. This is a good thing. I am able to completely forget about everything and even dream a little when this is happening.

Crown: This is not an egotistical thing. This crown is laid over the top of my blob shape that displays my empty mindedness to display that I have control over my mind when it is empty. 

Star with 4 triangles: This is my insightful shape. I am decently good at getting a read on people and this helps me help myself through helping others.

The spinning hexagon: This shows who I am socially. I am always moving. This is to represent my eyes constantly moving around and searching for new people to connect with. 

The oval: This shows the talkative aspects of my personality. I am usually leading the conversation, which is why there are a bunch of ovals connecting to the big oval (me). 

The Triangles connected by a tube: The way I get in touch with my own heart is through words, so this shape connects my mouth to my heart.

Now that I had my shapes, I started ideating about where I want to place them on my head. It doesn’t usually work like this, but the first iteration I made actually made the most sense to roll with, so I did. Here is my first iteration where I simply placed where I thought the shapes should be located.

3D Exercise (Coil method)

For an online participation activity, we worked on the coil method where you use coils to make shapes extend into 3D. This was actually really cool to me. Here is what I ended up with for the exercise.

3D Ideation

Now that I had my placement iteration, I began to start making some ideas for how the shapes were going to look in 3D. Below are multiple ideas on how I thought the shapes could possibly look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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