Learning Agreement

For this unit I have been asked to provide a learning agreement to define my practice. I am required to explain my intent for this project by answering the 'how's' and 'why's' as well as referring to previous learning experiences. I haven't ever written one of these before so i'm not sure whether i'm doing it right or not. Here is what I have come up with so far :

Aisling Crosland

Learning Agreement - Convergence/Divergence Unit

Through this unit I wish to be able to provide an awareness of how screen-based technologies are transforming the way that audiences are consuming information and how Illustration can enhance a specific concept and effect a target audience.

This unit will enable me to inform my creative ambitions with career planning within the digital/technological and inter-active industries. Moving my work along from what I have demonstrated previously in other units throughout my course. I will develop my creative solutions and skills in relation to the technology available to illustrators towards a screen based presentation. I want to develop my organisational skills which enable independent learning, critical evaluation and self-management. I will achieve this by creating a time plan for the duration of this unit, which will be reviewed and updated as my project develops.

I want this unit to enable me to demonstrate my knowledge of new and evolving technologies as illustrator and the possible effectiveness for clients and other audience contexts. Progressing my work from techniques I have previously tackled in other units and creating images for a modern audience. I want to be able to demonstrate the application of organisational skills and evidence of independent learning , critical evaluation and self-management within my ongoing work.

For the convergence/divergence unit the content work will be structured as a narrative, created not to portray a particular message but to provide entertainment and light relief. I’ve chosen to do this after completing the last unit. My work really progressed using this structure and I enjoyed creating my own narrative and characters. When considering audience for this unit I will create my outcome aimed at a child audience, however age range will be decided after experimentation in method when I discover the level of complexity or sophistication screen based work can give me.

I intend to use stop frame animation to create a final outcome for this unit. However ‘stop frame’ covers a variety of techniques I would like to try my hand at throughout the project before reaching a conclusion of what I feel works best for my narrative. The body of my work will be represented as a blog, however I really enjoy working with hand drawn elements rather that working entirely computer based so I intend to do a large amount of my work by hand before bringing it all together digitally at the end as a screen based outcome. I would like to work with a variety of mixed media within this unit, being able to look back over previous techniques I have used and evaluating what I think would work best when translated as a screen based outcome.

The last unit has taught me when creating a successfully narrative planning and storyboarding are key. I intend to utilize this for the convergence/divergence unit. In order to show my story boarding digitally I am considering two ways of displaying my thought process. Through hand drawn storyboards, planned out in a sketchbook and later uploaded to my blog (as this is how I feel I work out issues and composition best) but also since this unit will involve moving image I am going to use some of the techniques I learnt previously in the paper cinema workshop from the last unit. By putting my characters onto sticks so they can easily be moved around either in the background or foreground to work out how I need to this about things compositionally when considering the moving image.

For this unit my work will be represented as an on screen visual outcome, this is something I have never tried before and I am going to use this unit as a chance to push my work to a new level. I’m hoping that through experimentation I will be able to represent my work successfully on a new platform. Developing my work for on screen purposes will help me aim my work towards a more modern audience, but I know I don’t want to loose that hand rendered aspect I love so much about illustration. This is something I will have in mind and keep referring to across this unit, trying to combine old techniques with new screen based techniques to tailor to a modern audience.

Date	Activity	To Do List
1st - 5th April	Learning Agreement	Research different types of screen based media in order to complete an informed Learning Agreement. Create narrative for base of this unit.
6th - 10th April	Character design	Research audience and work on character design.
11th April	After Effects Workshop	Take notes, pictures, screen shots etc. This knowledge will be important later on in the unit.
12th - 17th April	Character design / Story-board	Complete all character design and work out setting.  Start story-boards and be at a strong position to begin animating my images. Research into screen based media and audience to inform my work.
18th April	Stop-frame workshop.	Record and document everything learnt in workshop. Screen shots / Pictures are a must for uploading my learning process to my blog for a screen based response.
19th April	Critical evaluation	Review how the project is going so far:  What have I learnt ? Does anything need to be changed in my plan? What problems have I come across? How to move things forward from here?
20th - 22nd April	Story-boards	Have all story boards and planning completed by this point. It’s time to start animating !
23rd April	Paper Cinema Workshop	Record and document process to upload online.  Use techniques from workshops to see how story-boards work as moving images (screen-based) How does doing this help inform my practice when creating a screen based outcome for a modern audience.
24th April - 14th May	Work of final outcome	Using all techniques learnt up until now to begin creating a final response to this unit.
15th - 16th May	IT Support/ Trouble shooting	Final outcome should almost be completed by now. Use these last few days for any support or issues I have encountered.
16th May	Final critical evaluation	Fully evaluate my progress through this unit. What problems I encountered and how I tackled them? What I have learnt through this unit ? How this unit has made me aware of evolving technologies and what this means for my work as an illustrator?
17th May	Deadline	All work completed and handed in.

The deadline for this is in two days time, giving me a chance to edit it, and next week I will have the opportunity to meet with my tutors to discuss what I have written here and make any changes needed.