Inner Thoughts of a Designer

Link to full video

Although this was the most challenging piece of work I’ve done this entire semester, it was the one that I had the most fun creating. At the beginning of the thought process, I brainstormed many different ideas, such as Archie Comics, and witches in today’s society, but the topic that interested me the most was fashion throughout the past five decades since I run multiple fashion blogs and I felt the most passion towards this specific topic.

Once I decided on my topic of choice, I drafted a mind map to specify the ideas I was going to be putting into my PSA video. After narrowing my topic of choice down to a few specific thoughts, I was ready to begin researching the ideas I placed on my mind map through Pinterest.

I pinned anything related to fashion and clothing from the 1970s to today’s styles, which inspired me to draw the outfits I did on my artwork. I wanted to draw a person and outfit for every decade and include as many ethnicities as I could for diversity's sake.

I have been drawing on my iPad Mini on the application Procreate for a little over a year now with my stylus and it gives me such a professional look to my work, which I am so happy I got to include in my PSA video, since drawing, especially fashion, is a passion of mine and to incorporate it into my graphic design skills has been a dream come true.

It took me many hours on each drawing to figure out which trend of each era I wanted to use and complete it in a drawn format. When I was done, I masked the drawings and turned them into pngs so they could be overlaid easily over text, etc. I also placed the pngs on the backgrounds and storyboarded the entire video in my vision as I saw it in my mind, so it would be easier to transfer onto Adobe After Effects.

Once my storyboards were uploaded, I created multiple shape designs in Illustrator, such as a location drop tool, New York City skyline, and lines with the pen tool and added strokes and fills. I created a new composition of regular Youtube video length and width on AE and imported all my pieces to start creating my PSA.

I trimmed the instrumental audio I had chosen from a copyright-free website and looped it so the parts that I truly enjoyed would play repeatedly seamlessly. Once I had the images in their specific layer, I added the text I wrote out in a script based on my research. I only used two fonts, one being Helvetica bold italic and another being a custom one I created a few years ago.

For the transitions, I added the presets provided on the software, which was mainly slide and shift movements, along with a slight bounce on a few textual elements. Finally, I looked over all the elements and decided that after all the work I had put in, I had finished.

Lastly, I incorporated moving credit text and the end of the video and a quick thank you to the viewers of the PSA. I am incredibly proud of how this project turned out and look forward to how I can improve my skills in these programs for my future.