Posted: 04/04/17
An explosion of creativity at college
A series of explosions have taken place in the creative arts department at West Nottinghamshire College – but all in the name of interactive media design.
Richard Lindle with Luwis Hall and his advert
Students on the Level 3 Interactive Media programme welcomed Richard Lindle of RSL Design back to the department last week to see the results of a project he set, which was to ‘explode’ a product via animation techniques.
The challenge was to select a product of their choice and animate it using LightWave, After Effects and Photoshop software packages, depicting it exploding.
Each student had to research their product, explore how it was made up and over a 10-week period plan their initial idea, storyboard the animation in 2D and finally produce the 3D animation showreel.
On Friday (31 March) Richard Lindle, whose company RSL Design is based in Yorkshire, was invited to see each student’s 3D animated advert. Products that were animated ranged from watches, to popcorn machines, to blenders and guitars.
He said: “Every student has pulled off this project brilliantly. They’ve worked enthusiastically and concentrated on easing in and out of the animation, considering linear flow, transition and camera angles carefully.
“This was a complex project because generally, the first rule of design is you don’t model what you don’t see, but with this project making a product explode, the students had to model and plan some very intricate parts.”
Student Luwis Hall, 19, said: “Richard said that my animation was very smooth, very well-branded from start to finish, and he said the transition was professional and the fade outs looked like a proper commercial.
“It was good to get Richard’s professional point of view on our work and 11 of us proudly achieved distinctions on this project.”
Luwis’ advert can be seen here http://www.wnc.ac.uk/downloads/watch-animation.mov
