CD Studio Diary — Part II
Introduction
This blog post is a collection of notes and reflections on a project in my course Communication Design Studio, a part of the MPS program at the School of Design in CMU. The project in context is themed ‘Making the Abstract Concrete’. I and my classmates have each received a seemingly complex topic, and our mission is to communicate how it works, through a creative video in a style of choice.
Learnings from Comics
The last time I read a comic might have been a decade ago. So it was fun to read about the concepts of design in comics, through a comic book itself! I found the types of transition really helpful in analyzing and deciding upon my storyboard to explain ‘lightning’. It was also really interesting to learn about the differences between western and eastern comic styles.
My favourite part from the two readings was about the ‘magic in absence’, relating to how we imagine elements in a gutter space while reading.
This magic in spaces is evident not only in comics but many other kinds of creations. For instance, in some films, we find characters who are almost never completely shown (remember Mammy Two Shoes in Tom & Jerry?!). Another day-to-day example is Google search, which doesn’t highlight their search functions — instead chooses to eliminate everything else, and we users figure out its purpose subconsciously. I have come to believe this also from my experience with designing interactions for MakeMyTrip India Ltd — if I can get the “key” frames right and give my users the autonomy to imagine and infer, they feel empowered and stay in love with the product.
Lightning
I received a prompt to explain the phenomenon of lightning. I am happy about understanding this beautiful yet scary wonder, and explaining it to the class. I looked up how lightning works on websites like howstuffworks.com (one of my personal favourites for scientific insights) and came up with a narrative, manifested in the form of simple line drawings, and set up into a deck of cue cards.
Take One
We had this fun exercise in class, where I got to be the audience to three of my classmates explaining their abstract concepts: Anuprita (genetic engineering), Ji Young (concussions), and Nandini (impeachment). Then I got a chance to present my first cut about how lightning works to Stefania, Hannah, and Amrita. I got a lot of constructive feedback and!
Take Two
With the feedback I received from my peers, I refined this storyboard. This time, I also thought about it in a video form. I figured out the keyframes and sketched out a rough idea of the motion between them. I figured out the transitions more specifically, like:
- Subject-to-subject transitions (eg. a cloud to a battery)
- Scene-to-scene transitions (eg. air to ground)
- Aspect-to-aspect transitions (eg. lightning travelling to ground)
Moodboard
I have been thinking of how to represent my storyboard, and I would like to explore the style of digital animation with simple line art illustrations. Here is a moodboard of some beautiful examples by artists put up on Dribbble (it is a Google Slides presentation with 7 pictures):
A Test Animation
Here is a visualization of a small part of the narrative (just testing out stuff, please don’t judge me!):
Pausing to Reflect
How does this project fit in the larger picture of my goals?
- The best part of this project, I feel, is to be exploring a foreign concept like lightning, and learning about another bunch of concepts from my classmates like genetic engineering, impeachment, solar energy, volcanos, static electricity, or cloning!
- I always like following the design process religiously, pausing to think, iterate and diverge, take feedback from multiple perspectives, then narrow down and converge to keep going.
- One of the challenging aspects of this project (and life!) is to be letting go of what is unnecessary and staying anchored to what’s really important — to communicate.
Take Three
The story of how lightning works is much more refined in my mind now. The narration script of my video is gaining a form as well. The idea of my video has become considerably refined on paper, and I am now transcribing that structure so as to materialize in a video of illustrations with voiceover.
Peer Review
Thank you — Anna, Bhakti, and Diana for all the feedback on my video plan. And also, for helping me understand a lot more about Static electricity, Volcanoes, and Solar energy!
As I am working upon the feedback points from my peers, my script is transitioning from an expression of personal understanding — towards a reader-slash-viewer-friendly demonstration: https://tinyurl.com/y2gy8v83
Learnings until now
I love how an idea becomes clearer through the iterative process of attempting to communicate it. I noticed how different forms help receive different levels of feedback. Drawings on sticky notes encourage feedback on transitions (the magic of gutter space!). Text narratives in a google doc encourage feedback on ease of conceptual understanding and voice (inclining towards usability). An animation encourages feedback on visual form and voice.
One of my personal beliefs helped in this project’s iterative design process: Pen and paper are angels. They help you materialize your abstract ideas before they fly away, and also before get too invested in a single idea.
Adjustments
On one hand, I am working on the digitization of the idea of my video that seems to be working the most. On the other hand, I am refining the narrative of my video. I am also Feedback loops with my peer review teammates. Writing and editing tools Grammarly and Heminway have been very useful too.
Stacie’s and Brett’s feedback has been really helpful and encouraging. I realized that I personally need to make a conscious effort to write more correctly. I need to be writing easier phrases instead of long sentences. I also need to be aware of using words that are most apt to the context. For example, saying “seek cover indoors” instead of “get cover indoors”. Another example would be “air expands densely and quickly” than “air expands so much so fast”. One funny note: I had used “the bottom surface of a cloud” in a lot of places and corrected it to “the base of a cloud” with Stacie’s suggestions. Brett helped me so much by editing the script and shortening so that it became animate-able!
Head Down
Last week, I worked upon the digitization of my storyboard with Adobe Illustrator. Before the weekend, I rehearsed the refined script (a lot of times) and recorded it on the phone. Very soon, I am going to record it in the CFA studio. I discovered some interesting techniques in Garageband, like the ‘Narration Vocal’ effect. Over the weekend and on Tuesday (today), I continued working on the animation in After Effects. A lot of time was spent googling of course! But it is alright, it still seems like AE is the way to go!
The Three-Sentences Exercise!
In today’s class, we recentered on what this project is mainly about. The Moyer reading from the first project came up in our discussion, and we talked about relationships.
I thought of abstraction, and how this project would need metaphors to connect my audience with deep scientific concepts. It could be through visual symbols like icons, or verbal explanations about how the concept is connected to your life.
We did an interesting exercise to explain each of our concepts in just three sentences. It was really tricky but fun! This is how I figured lightning can be explained in three sentences:
A thunderstorm cloud develops a negative charge at its base because of air movements and temperature differences. The earth’s surface below the charged cloud develops a positive charge, and the air in between becomes a good conductor. Electrons get transferred from the cloud to the ground through the air, and we know it as a lightning strike.
Video Design
The exercise of designing the video was a play of synchronization, effective time management, and improvisation! I imported illustrations from Illustrator and animated them in After Effects. (A tip if you use this technique anytime: Create some extra empty layers in your Illustrator file, so that if you need any illustrations at the last moment, you won’t need to do the importing exercise every time ;)
The final narrative
(also published as a separate medium story):
It’s a rainy evening, you got home just in time before it started pouring. The sky outside is a deep purple-blue. You can see bright flashes of light all over, and hear roaring sounds once every few minutes.
Lightning is a beautiful phenomenon, even if it is alarming. I always thought of lightning as a spark between two clouds! But it is much more complex and interesting. Here is how lightning works:
An interesting fact is that the air near a lightning strike is close to 28000 Degrees Celsius, or 50,000 Degrees Fahrenheit, which is even hotter than the surface of the sun. This heat causes the air to expand densely and quickly, releasing an intense sound wave, and that’s how we hear thunder.
