Greetings from.....: Concept Ideas

Today I made a few concept ideas containing key landmarks from the cities I have chosen. I found that Dubai is proving to be quite difficult with people not recognising the key buildings from the developing city. I may have to change my forth city to one more recognisable.

I also feel that I've concentrated perhaps too much on city buildings, there are more ways to represent a city other than a landmark. For example - I could use the Underground sign to represent London or a baguette to represent Paris… well you get the idea.

Line of Sight

Coming off a two week break from Visual Language we jumped straight into Line of Sight. Using images that we had found, the group as a whole analysed where each images line of sight was directed.

After this Matt set us the challenge of creating an illustration concerning transport asking us to first create a series of scamps.

I'm not feeling these images at the moment and may return back to my horror/dracula theme which has driven most of my work recently.

Greetings from…..: Initial Ideas

'What world cities have distinct or interesting skyline or features?' This is what I asked myself when we first received this new brief. I also wondered whether I could use fictional world cities like places seen in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones etc. I decided against this as it would limit my audience to a certain degree.

After a bit of thought I chose to centre my work around;
Paris,
London,
New York,
Dubai

Each of these have interesting buildings/skylines that are quite famous, with the exception of Dubai which I think people may possible struggle to recognise.

Here is an example of Dubai and its skyline;

Dubai's buildings aren't as explicitly identifiable as those from the other cities I have chosen.

I will most likely discard Dubai as my work goes on.

That's Pants: Final Outcomes

Here are the final outcomes for Studio Brief 1:

Our Gif Image:


Our Poster:

That's Pants!!!: Self Evaluation

My evaluation of Studio Brief 1:

That's Pants!!!: Queue Gif Final

After a bit of thought I decided that the gif image we've already made will be suitable to use for this brief with just a small bit of editing.

The biggest issue I had with our gif was that the message displayed in the clip was blurred, so I simply opened the file and made a new speech bubble for each frame.

This didn't take too long, however I then encountered a problem - I'd somehow messed by gif up. It now played erratically and jumped frames without any indication as to why. Furthermore when the speech bubbles appeared they all did so at once instead of moving frame by frame as I intended.

After about half an hour of messing around I eventually discovered that it was due to the visibility icon in the layers box. Each frame consists of its own set of layers and each of these can be visible or not. So it was simply a case of making sure each speech bubble position was visible for each corresponding frame.

Once this was done there was just the case of timing to resolve. I previously had the gif timing at 0.05 and 0.5. Instead I chose to speed the gif up by having that frames at 0.02 for the queue and 0.05 for the speech bubble frames. This makes for a quick gif but allows people to view the message in the speech bubble too.

Viewpoint and Depth: Etching

Today we created an etching using the image I created in last weeks lesson. VERY happy with the outcome. Definitely a process I'd like to try again.

Here is the link to the process blog entry: http://t-roberts1316ppp.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/etching-tutorial.html

That's Pants!!!: Gif Research

Today I thought about editing the Gif that we shot to make it look different, possibly give it a vintage feel as seen below...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQMJQih-sq0

I also looked into different software for Gif creation as an alternative to Photoshop. They are all decent and do an adequate job of creating Gifs but none are as advanced as Photoshop.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-free-alternatives-photoshop/

That's Pants!!!: Poster Gif

Today I made a Gif from the photos Katie and Sophie took on Friday. 

It's a bit fast so I found out how to slow the frame rate down. I selected each frame to last 0.5 seconds instead of 0.05.

This works much better and doesn't seem as frantic.

That's Pants!!!: Queue Gif

Today, whilst Sophie and Katie went out to take photos of their poster around Leeds, Hannah and I filmed our queue for the Gif image. Here we encountered a few problems, firstly; the amount of frames that were present in the short clip was astounding! Considering it was only about a 10-15 second clip the were about 500+ frames when opened in Photoshop!

Neither Hannah or I have much experience with creating Gif images so we looked online to find a tutorial. Here is the process we learnt:

- Flatten frames into clips

- Convert to frame animation
- Delete unwanted layers
- Make frames from layers
- Loop - forever
- Delay time

We also found that due to the low frame rate which we filmed at - nearly every frame is blurred. We have several options here - either re-film and make a stop motion image or use a high frame rate camera. Or ignore the blurring and consider it part of the design and work on our existing footage further.

If we do re-film, here are a few things we would need to consider;

- SHORTER FILM - MORE FRAMES 

- Less distance between each person
- Crowd moving faster/slower
- Person with the sign strolling slowly at the end so words are legible
- Bigger sign

This is our first gif.

That's Pants!!!: Poster and Gif Development

With Sophie and Katie spending time on the poster for tomorrow, Hannah and I decided to begin work on the 'continuous queue line' Gif idea. This is in case it is too wet for Kate and Sophie to leave the college tomorrow.

We designed a simple speech bubble with the text "Too busy to say thank you..." written on it. We then gave it a handle so someone in the queue could walk past holding it.

Katie and Sophie later showed us their revised posters that they had come up with. I much prefer the designs of these using both yellow and red to grab peoples attention, much like a warning sign. However I feel the text on the poster to be somewhat rude, considering that we are trying to raise awareness to the importance of being polite this kind of contradicts our message. However Katie and Sophie are happy with this message, feeling it to be appropriate, so I will trust their opinions.

That's Pants!!! Poster 1

Today Sophie began making the poster which we'll hang around Leeds, Katie and I were on hand to offer our critical feedback during the process. Although I liked the wording of the poster, I felt that visually it came across as being to similar to the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters that having been quite popular over the last few years.

I expected the poster to use a variety of different typefaces or be visually more broad than Gill Sans, something like some of these. However both Katie and Sophie are happy with the design so I won't fight against it and respect their choice.

Viewpoint and Depth

We learnt about depth within imagery today. Its an interesting area that I again haven't really paid too much attention to in the past despite using some of the things we learnt about today.

Keeping with my Dracula theme I created a series of scamps that experimented with the compositor of an image to best display depth.

After deciding which of these worked best I chose to create a final copy ready for an etching workshop that we will have soon at Rossington Street. I chose to be liberal with character size and take advantage of certain people to evoke a sense of power from the taller of my subjects whilst the smaller is displayed to be the weakest. Whilst doing this I continued to be aware of depth within the imagery.

That's Pants!!! Poster Design

Although Sophie said she would take care of the poster design I decided to make a few outline versions myself should Sophie not be able to do it for whatever reason.

That's Pants!!!: Group Meeting 3

Today we met again to discuss our project and receive critical feedback from other groups about our work thus far. Whilst the three options that we had decided to push forward were all received well, the dominoes and the door holding themes were the better received.

However one thing that we hadn't thought about was Friday, in which we are to go out and photograph our theme in a different locations. It was also suggested that our piece concerning the dominoes was somewhat over complicated and could be simplified down to a simple message such as 'remember to be polite' or 'please say thank you'. So we decided that we would simply create a poster with something along the lines of 'Remember to say thank you' which we will then photograph in different locations around Leeds. These photos would then be made into a gif image.

Half of our group also liked the idea creating a gif image of a continuous line of people passing through a door with our message on it. This is a continuation of an earlier idea and one that we will now use a contingency should the weather be bad on Friday.

That's Pants!!!: Group Meeting 2

Our group meeting began by discussing what we had done over the last few days. I presented my concept images to which Katie and Hannah were in agreement with me over which concepts worked best. They suggested that maybe we could incorporate queue jumping into the domino effect which sounded good to me.

We then detailed how we would investigate these three possibilities further over the weekend. 

I was given the 'Dominoes' theme as I own a set of dominoes. Hannah went for the 'door holding' theme and Katie decided to go for the 'bubble' theme. As we felt the dominoes theme is our strongest route we informed Sophie (who was unfortunately unable to make today's meeting) that she should develop further ideas for it too. Over the weekend we will all hopefully produce a series of images (via photography) of our theme to present to the studio on Monday.

That's Pants!!!: Concept Images

This evening I began thinking about concepts for possible GIF images. The investigation included a play on the "domino effect in which rudeness knocks a domino over which then leads to a line of dominos falling. This of course would be a play on the idea that a rude action can have on ongoing effect putting someone in a bad mood leading them to be rude to someone else and so on.

The idea of someone in their own little bubble came next. I tried to communicate this visually without using an actual bubble in the concept. Following this I then created a series of concepts in which someone holds a door open for a line of people, only being thanked once.

After this I made concepts for people being interrupted, asking for a seat on a train, someones rudeness down pouring on others and finally queue jumping.

I feel out of all the ideas I have produced the first three are the strongest however, I'll wait to see what the others in my group think of this tomorrow morning.

That's Pants!!!: Group Meeting 1

Today we met in our group to discuss what we had found out, however none of us felt as though we had done enough research so we spent an hour doing a bit more online and in the library. Afterwards we felt we had a larger knowledge base to discuss our topic. I broached the problem of awareness vs. encouragement and we decided that a good piece of work will be able to both make people aware of rude behaviour and encourage people to be politer.

We began our meeting by discussing what we'd each found and then moved onto thinking about what we feel makes someone impolite, examples from research of impoliteness and terms that could be associated with the topic.

Following this we made another list of reoccurring themes that we could push forward with.

Finally we made a few scamps of possible ideas using sayings that could be associate with the effect impoliteness has on someone.

Before parting ways we agreed that come Friday's meeting we will each have generated a few possible ideas for our GIF image or A2 photo from which we'll be able to push forward with.

That's Pants!!!: Initial Research

Last night and tonight I began my research into all things impolite within the British public. What I found was actually quite interesting and contradictory to what I was originally looking for - Britain is considered to be one of the worlds most politest of people. So it made me think; should our group produce a piece of work that highlights the impoliteness seen day to day or rather a piece that helps remind people of our standing within the world and encourage more politeness?

I then went on to think of first hand experience I've had with impolite people. Such instances included;

- An old man looking for a seat on a train and no one would get up for him.

- Waiting to make a booking in the digital print room and about 3 people walked in front of me.

- When I worked at a cinema chain and the customers would treat you like garbage unless you were a manager.

- When I've held a door open for someone and that can't utter a simple thank you.

- Hearing people talk obscenely around old people and children.

Tomorrow I will show my findings to the rest of the group where we will hopefully be able to find a solution to the problem of encouraging politeness vs. making people aware of impoliteness.

Frame

Framing was the focus of today. We had to create a series of thumbnails that include a butterfly, elephant and myself.

Using reference images that were provided and those that I found from the internet I created many potential ideas, some of which became more refined. However I went forward with an image of my hand holding keys, with the elephant and butterfly being keyring items. I felt the way the hand comes into the frame draws the eyes down the fingers to the keys/ key rings becoming the focus of the piece. I'm really happy with this piece, even though it looks very basic.

That's Pants!!!: Grouping

We began Module OUIL406 with news that we would be collaborating with others from the studio. I was selected to be part of a group also consisting of Katie Hickey, Hannah Graney and Sophie Wright.

The context of this module will be to build a body of work around something that we think is 'Pants' or crap in the world today. Here is a list of five things that I feel is pants;

- Michael Gove - a man who has  minimal understanding of education and is in my opinion destroying it.

- The Tory government - see above but refer to the how the country is run rather than just education.

- The cost of travel - travelling in England is extortionate compared to Europe.

- The state of the movie industry - run by people who care entirely about money over substance.

- Celebrity lifestyles - a type of person who lives in a fantasy land.

After creating this list we pooled our ideas together within our groups and decided upon the three best options;

- Celebrity lifestyles conveyed within magazines such as 'Heat' and 'Star' and how people copy them.

- The stereotypical belief that 'art is not a subject'.

- The general lack of politeness within society.

Of these three areas another group chose for us to go further with 'The general lack of politeness within society'.

Within our group we wrote down a list exampling rudeness within society to help us pursue an appropriate course of research. This list included;

- Littering

- Shouting on your phone in public

- Spitting

- Queue jumping

- Swearing loudly in public

Following this we planned out our time for the next week - specifically when we would be meeting in groups to discuss our findings/project development. Due to scheduling conflict and other Level 4 sessions we agreed upon;

- Wednesday@10:30: Before Wednesday we will gather together some research to present to the group.

- Friday@9:30: Second meeting to discuss project further in preparation for the presentation on Monday.