My Film So Far

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luH75XZGKQk

Surrealist Typographic Project

I have been working on my Surrealist Typographic 1 minute film. I begun by researching and playing around with various animation/ film software I found online, however I've settled with using Microsoft Movie Maker.
As I want to create a dream-like disorientating atmosphere I begun by having several story boards which I mixed together to create parts that I thought worked well together.

I've taken my camera to a local church and graveyard to take photos and film clips at night. I also experimented with writing words into steamed up mirrors and onto surfaces outside.

So far I've completed 30sec of my film. To finish I need to edit the last 30sec and play with the audio and lighting effects to give a finished feel to the 1min film.

Surrealist Typography

In class I watched Eraserhead and Helvetica for the first time. Eraserhead was an amazing film full of surrealist and abstract ideas. Despite feeling a little lost by the storyline I enjoyed watching it. I have a real interest in typography and it was inspiring to see the passion people had for the typeface in the Helvetica documentary.

After watching Eraserhead for a second time I concentrated on certain parts I found intriguing. I love the way in which David Lynch put lots of detail into every scene, as a viewer I almost felt part of another person's thoughts.

I have decided to follow the second of the two briefs - to make a 1 minute surrealist typographic film - as I haven't used film in a project before and I thought this would be a good opportunity to have a go.

I'm going to begin the 3 week project by re-watching both of the films, doing further research on typography and movie making software.

HSM Exhibition

Before the end of the last semester Graphic Design level 1 had an exhibition of the HSM project. When everything had been set up the work all looked great and it was a really nice evening!

High School Musical 2 - The Remake

In the end I decided to work with a friend from Graphics to complete the project. We used Sony Vegas Studio to remove the original audio of a section of the film. We then wrote our own script, which we thought was more relevent to teenage life and issues, and put our own voices into the our section of film. We also added background noise soundtrack and text to give the effect of a complete short film.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Igqlikf9zOw

High School Musical 2!!!

I watched High School Musical 2.............................. not my favourite thing, too cheesy and too Americanified. I've decided to work alone for the project.

I personally don't think the film promotes a positive message to its target audience- young girls, but because it Disney its acceptable. So I decided to take its sickly sweet ideas and mix it with another film that is explicitly about sex - American Pie 2

Here are my preliminary ideas....

Excuses Project

After practising and practicing the coke typography I draw it onto graph paper which helped me with keeping the letter heights and weights consistent. Once I was happy with the type I went over it with a black liner, scanned it and played with the contrast to make the graph lines invisible. I then printed it (very lightly) onto red card and went over it with a white liner pen. As coke cans are shine I decided to put my work onto photographic gloss paper, I photographed my work played with the contrast on the computer and had it blown up to A3.

Excuses Project

I've decided to carry on with the coca-cola related excuse. The lettering used by coke it among the most famous across the world. This means I don't actually have to use the words coca-cola in my excuse for it to be eye-catching and make sense.
I wanted to play around with my chose of excuse to find a more interesting sentence.

I've chosen the excuse - Couldn't Do It ... Was Having A Sugar Rush
I am now working on recreating the typography used in order to do my own sentence. The letters appear in - Coca-Cola, Light and Diet. So I've been using these to piece together an alphabet. For the letters that don't appear I want to take signature parts of the coke lettering such as the loops in the 'O', the terminals and the gradient of the stem. Reading through books on type I've picked up some key parts of a letter to study when creating a font.

Oh yeah ....Right! Excuses Project

On Friday we had the day to begin the Excuses Project.
Because the project is purely typography I begun by looking through books in the library related to the history of type and the use of it in graphic design.

I brainstormed ideas for excuses - dividing them into two categories 'honest and dishonest'. Sketching and playing around with the excuses I had come up with I decided on three designs that I felt worked visually.

The excuse 'My Little Brother Lost It' I put into a word search playing with the idea of finding the letters. I also thought of doing a crossword style format with the words 'I'd prefer to be doing crosswords'. My final idea was 'I spilt drink on it', in the coca-cola style of lettering.

Photography Project - Ideas

For the two week photography project I have also explored the brief about finding the alphabet in the environment, whilst taking photos when out and about I was really interested in the shapes and forms fond in pylons. I tried to find various letters within their structure.

2 Week Photography Project

The story sequence (using a disposable camera) was my chosen idea for the photography project. I based my story on Little Red Riding Hood, using a mixture of sets and dolls I created and the real world for close ups and some backgrounds. I put my story together in a book form which resembles a photo album. In hindsight I think i should have either put more of a twist on the story (from the original) or created my own story sequence. Using a disposable camera meant that I was using the first shot I took -no editing! Because of this some images are blurred or cropped in a way that I had little control over.

One Day Photography Project

For the One Day photography project I chose the second brief 'Alone with Everybody'. I begun by finding a copy of the poem, I fond reading through the poem brought more meaning to the title and helped me to feel more creative. I went to Canary Wharf at lunchtime, it was very busy with groups of people generally swarming in one direction (towards specific restaurants, toilets etc)..... these represented the 'everybody' people being viewed as a collective or one unit. Unaware of these people's thoughts and emotions my alone aspect of the photo featured one individual singled out, standing next to a clock fixed in time whilst everybody moves at a different pace.

Photography Project

For the Photography Project I going to do some research and initial ideas for two of the outlined projects to get started.

I'm interested in the Restrictive Photographic Narrative, I've been looking through children's books as they are often able to tell a story with visual images

The project involves using a disposable camera, they normally have 27 exposures so I've been working on story boards with 27 frames. At present I've only worked on well known fairy tales so over the next few day I want to possibly create some of my own!

Alphabet in the Environment is the other project I'm going to look at, so far I've just taken a few shots of interesting shapes I've seen whilst out and about that resemble letters

Drawing Machine -The Final Show!

Yesterday our drawing machine gave its performance in front of the class! Overall we were very pleased with the result. We had spent the day perfecting its mark making abilities, we wanted to keep it interesting so we used a combination of pastels, ink and paint. It was very messy but the Team Ink Tank machine made marks and all the motors worked really well. An improvement would have been for the machine to be radio controlled as our remote ontrol was linked by wires and did become slightly entangled!

Drawing Day - My Books

Finished my A5 books. All laminated, ring bound and with front and back covers!!

Drawing Machine - Part 4

We’ve worked more on the atheistic appearance of our drawing machine and also used more robust and reliable motors.

Our last task will be to decide on how the machine will make marks. We currently have various ideas but want test them out first and see which works best and that we agree on as a team.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=siTC_hAJBtI&feature=related

Drawing Day

On the 21st Oct we had Drawing Day

I completed a series of 30 A3 drawings using a variety of media. All the drawings had a title (eg draw a self portrait eating a catus!) given at the start and were done under varying time limits.

I have begun to turn my 30 A3 drawings into 4 identical A5 books. I had the A3 pictures colour photocopied and resized to A5, costing a pricey £54! I have now laminated all the A5 copies along with A5 descriptions of each drawing, which will appear opposite the drawings inside the books.

To finish my 4 books I still need to decide how I'm gong to bind them and also make front and back covers.

Drawing Machine - First Marks Made!

Drawing Machine - Part 3

Yesterday we managed to have something that actually made marks on paper! Unfortunatley we didn't have all of our group together so there are various aspects we still want to perfect and fine tune! By taking apart the casing of hand held fans we had to motors which we then attached to the wheels we had made.

We attached sponges to the wheels that were then dipped in paint as the machine moved accross the page marks were made. We are hoping to have a variety of colours and marks as we work towards finishing the machine.

Drawing Machine - Part Two

Team Ink Tank is born!!
Working in a group we have combined our initial ideas and new ones to develop a more sophisticated machine. At the moment we’ve concentrated heavily on the mechanisms of our design to ensure it moves in an interesting way, incorporating sound activation will be a big challenge but would add an exciting element to the way in which marks are made. We hope to work on the appearance of the machine and the quality of the marks it produces later in the week.