Story board for our story
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The new assignment is a visual story told without boards.
This is the storyboard of the story I’m going to tell. It’s starts with an unlocked door and someone entering the flat. It has a twist ending of course, as part of the requirement.
I’d work out an alternative storyboard to the same story by today and hopefully start shooting this weekend.
Comments are welcomed as usual.
Edit:
This is the second storyboard. It tells the same story but I combined some of the frames from the first storyboard and more frames for the interaction between the 2 people.
Here are some of the feedback given during E-Week:
- Main concern is the sharp transition and loss of details from 3 to 4. This is my bad as I try to rush through the abstraction within 5 steps and had to drop a lot of details very fast. I’d be working in a couple stages of transitions between 3 and 4 and perhaps between 4 and 5.
- Boxing up / dividing / giving a border to both 4 and 5. Many felt uneasy about the lack of outline for the 4th and 5th step. I agree that giving a divider or simply an outline would aid the transition and completeness of 4. I’d still like to keep the final abstraction as the 5th as the dual screen itself is representative of the DS at its simply state and has been adopted by Nintedo as the DS’s logo.
- Some has suggested me dropping the stylus for my final symbol. I am hesitant to do this as the stylus, to me, is a identity for the DS that sets it apart from its competitors. I’d work out the new transitions and see where the stylus fits in.
Thoughts of this assignment:
As with each assignment, there is something to be learn from Needful Things about visual design and communication. I believe many would find the main difficulty in this assignment lie in the choosing of a subject. From what I experience and observation, most of us end up choosing something easily recognizable and distinct. Most of them are mechanical objects or gadgets.
For a well-established objects, such as radios, fans, gadgets, their mere silhouette is sufficient to convey its category. A few more details would then reinforces it’s identity within the category. Mechanical objects have the advantage here over organic shapes as they have well-formed shapes whereas many shapes in the natural world often resemble each other. For example, a flower and a butterfly may very well reduce to the same shape.
In terms of visual design, this assignment is a practice for us to reduce distraction and concentrate on the essentials for communicating an object’s identity. (Hence, “needful” things?) Very often in a piece of design, we have many objects and we’d need to reduce each to its simplest, purest form to reduce details, complexity and distraction. Or to reduce every object to the same level of simplicity/complexity so that one object won’t stand out from the piece compared to the others (unless that’s the objective of course).
For me, this assignment also lets me examine product design and why companies spend top dollars in design R&D so as to establish a distinct and easily-recognizable shape for their products. There is a trend currently for sleek, streamlined and rounded design even for digital gadgets, as demonstrated by the Ipod, Macintosh, Playstation Portable, Nintendo DS Lite.
Here are my 5 levels of abstraction of the Nintendo DS Lite
The 1st level is different from when I conceived it in my thumbnails. I initially had it done in perspective view where we can see more details like the power switch, stylus holder, headphone jack and volume control. I decided to do all them in the same forward facing view to better demonstrate the abstraction and distillation.
The last and 5th level might be too abstract for some. While the two screens represents the core of the system (after all it’s the Nintendo Dual Screen) and resembles the official logo, it has become more of a symbolic instead of an iconic representation; and it lost the sense of the entire system.
There, I’d probably be selecting the the 3rd level of abstraction as the final piece. My inclusion of the stylus is because I feel the stylus is an important part of the whole DS system.
Rather busy weekend coming up so I whipped up fast thumbnail sketches for the coming assignment.
First one is a watch and the second a Nintendo DS Lite.
Depending on how much time I have, I could either explore several more options like mobile phone, computer or car, or work on one of the two options
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