Danielle Birch

From the last blog and doing the research, the next thing to do was to start making the posters and the animation. I sketched and came up with a plan and storyboard for both. I really wanted them to resemble real Adidas adverts so wanted to make them slick and clean and professional looking. I also thought, as though it were a real campaign, there would be a few different posters that were similar but had differences to mix it up a bit. So I created three similar designs, two that were the same but one showed the boot in before it lights up and then the other one is when it is lighting up. The third is a different view of the boot and then a catch phrase. I kept the posters simple, keeping the boot in the centre of the posters and having the colours all either blue, black and white. Also the Adidas logo was important to have in the corner. 
To make the posters specific to Lindo, I wanted to personalise the boot to have his name on the side and on the bottom in the images. I also put Adidas x Lindo as though it was a designer collaboration and I'm sure he will love that.
For the animation, I kept the colours and images of the boot the same as to keep the connection and consistency with the posters. I wanted to have the same background as the posters, have a football hit the back of the net and then have the background  and the stripes on the shoe to start lighting up somehow. Potentially use fireworks for this. Then have the slogan, "Score, Hyperbeam, Repeat". I also wanted to keep it short as it would be good for instagram and social media adverts but also for tv.
After coming up with the designs I just started playing around with the design until I was happy with them. I made the posters on the Illustrator and the animation on After Effects which are software I am very comfortable with, so the creating part of the project wasn't something that I would struggle with.

My first thought when it came to what I could do to bring this invention to life was that I don’t know how to make a shoe that will light up when a goal is scored in specific colours. All the elements that would come into making this work, such as wiring, money, a sensor in the shoe and the football net etc, I have no idea how to do that. My first initial idea for this was to use my specific skillset in the area of animation and graphics, creating an animation to show how it would work in a cool quirky way, perhaps in a neon light design. However, as we have been told, maybe we should try something new and learn something new ourselves when it comes to creating the invention. 

Therefore, as I would like to get more into advertising, I am going to take this as an opportunity to do this. I am going to create a small advertising campaign for the football shoe. This will include, the shoe being designed for real life, a short gif/advert perhaps for instagram, static adverts that would be shown on the adidas website etc.

I have started by doing research into sports shoe advertising and more specifically adidas ones. I found that they are all branded in very specific ways, to make them look more intense and new, they keep the backgrounds dark and the graphics white. They always look very sleek, they keep up the same look for each campaign so it in keeps with their brand image. Therefore, I am going to try and replicate this with the hyperbeam, using the same font and ideas etc.

The problem with this is that I need to football boot to look as realistic as possible, however, I’m not able to do this that well. Therefore, I research adidas football boots that already exist and found a few that looked most similar to Lindo’s design (where I’m sure he got his inspiration from) and I’m going to use these images and edit them to look as similar to the invention on Illustrator.

The first week began with a low down of what we will be doing during this 8 week course. I am really glad that I ended up being chosen for this course as it was my first choice and working with children is one of my passions. 

We would be going into a primary school with a set question and theme that would kick start the children’s ideas and eventually their inventions. In small groups during our first workshop, we were given cards that had a range of themes, such as, homelessness, recycling, public transport, water, food etc. From these, we thought of 5 themes and questions that would go with them that we could then take into the school for the children to use. 

Our questions were; 
How could you make fruit and vegetables more fun?
How could you help homeless people?
How could you make public transport easier?
Invent a way to reduce packaging waste
Invent a way to make sport more colourful

We ended up choosing the last one, “Invent a way to make sport more colourful”. We decided on this one as it was more fun for the children, a lighter topic and something that can open up lots of different avenues.

I made some inspiration sheets for the children to look at when coming up with ideas. I just got images of different sports, how sport is already colourful and different words that could inspire them. These really helped!

We got paired off with one child each and I found this very beneficial as we could really work closely and focus on their ideas rather than going round a group. I was paired with Lindo, who is 8. He was slightly reluctant to get involved at first but once we were paired off, he really loves drawing, so got really into it. His interests in drawing and sport were beneficial, as he went straight to designing a new sport shoe. This is the invention called the ‘Hyperbeam’ and what it does below.

We then moved onto the prototyping part. This part he was slightly stuck on how to build a shoe but I helped with the logistics of it, so we built a net which he drew the shoe of and he then put the design on the outside. This was the end of the session and now I am going to start to think about how I can bring this invention to life.