It is week 3 already and I haven’t made a blog post about my Level 3 Digital media Project ideas, I was really rather busy , so I’ll catch up on that now.

My first idea was to work alone on a 3D animation, tackling the topic of Bullying. I looked a bit further into 3D animating in Cinema 4D, because my last assignment for Level 2 failed. I did pass and got a good grade, but that’s not enough for me. I came across animating problems that I couldn’t resolve, my objects didn’t move for a reason I still don’t know to this day. So I had to do my whole animation in 1 week in 2D and that just simply got quite messy and I was not satisfied with the result. My tutors kindly graded me on what I handed in, which was screenshots of my 3D work, a teeny-tiny animation sequence and my 2D animation and let me pass.
Back to the current year of study : I wanted to prove to myself and to my tutors that I could animate in 3D, so that’s why I wanted a 3D animation to be my 3rd year project. The first feedback I got for it was, that a simple animation is not high standard enough for a level 3 student, which I understand. So I thought about engaging the audience somehow, but couldn’t come up with anything good.
Then I was asked by a group of friends to be their 3D modeller for their short film ‘immort…’. It is a low key sci-fi story inspired by the greek myth of Sicyphus. If you want to read more about the progress of the script and the story of ‘immort…’ have a look at Jacob’s blog.
We got a new tutor for Digital Media this year, his name is Jon Holmes. He has a huge amount of knowledge in 3D modelling and is a huge fan of Blender, so I decided to switch from Cinema 4D to Blender, since Blender is free, easier to use and has hugely improved from the last time I used it. Since Week 2 I’ve been messing around in Blender to get to know how it works and what I can do in it. Nothing worth showing since I only followed tutorials so far, but I will post some of my creations in the weekend.

I attended a master class about projection mapping today.  Dead Skull, a lincoln graduate, told us about projection mapping and showed us his work.  Art work such as his is what I wanted to do from the start, but I didn’t know how and thought that I couldn’t do it. That’s why I came up with my short story. After this very inspiring lecture I decided that I really want to do something like this. My tutor advised me to combine this kind of projection mapping with my original idea, so that it’s something that looks ‘pretty with meaning’ , instead of just a normal animation with characters. This is my new challenge.

Our task for this week is to find good and bad examples of user interfaces. My assigned area is ” energy consumption”.
I found a lot of apps on how to save energy and apps that help you to keep track on what you used. I decided to look into apps that help the consumer find out how many energy he used and how much money he spent on it. One App called ” Energy Consumption Analyzer” helps the user to keep track of his energy consumption, it even let’s you add data of your gas meter and water. The idea is very good and probably very helpful, but in this case the design is not the best. It’s dark and there’s too much text and information on it.

The second app I found is called ” Energy Saver “. The interface design is good. It’s bright and friendly. It’s easy to use and doesn’t slay the user with information.

Welcome

My name is Samantha Dos Santos, I prefer to be called Sam it’s less stiff, I’m 20 and I’m from Luxembourg.

Thanks for visiting my blog !