NEW WORK

So yesterday we given a talk by three second year students about an opportunity we have as Graphic Design students at Chelsea to compete for the chance to win a place on a semester long exchange with F.I.T. (fashion institute of technology) in New York.

The brief in short is that we have to create a piece of work that expresses why we want to go to NY and the lengths we would be willing to go to to get there. Responses can be any media and size so literally anything goes. However they suggested that we use famous New York icons like the statue of liberty, the street layout, pretzels, yellow taxis etc as our inspiration. Really excited about this project, despite the potential amount of money it could cost nothing could compare the experiences we could have there. Pretty much the same project as last year, one girl got a tattoo of a dollar sign on the sole of her foot and said she'd 'put her heart and soul' into the trip and won a place. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?!

Milton Glaser designed the logo above, quite possibly one of the greatest logos of all time.

I will be making a video in response to this brief. That is all.

MALE ART

Moving swiftly on, last Thursday we were given a new project based around the concept of 'Mail Art'.

I stupidly missed the briefing for this project which was a massive error as we got to choose our own groups for once but luckily Mr Harry Holt and Johnny Holmes claimed me and Ben for our group. Here's some stolen blurb from Miriam's blog as like I said I missed the briefing...

To give an overview- 'Mail Art' is a movement which began in the early 1960's in which networks were formed and would use the postal system as means of communication to exchange art as well as to collaborate with others on projects.

This has been given to us as a starting point and in our groups, we may create a project of our choice that in roughly three weeks time we can present to the class in analogue form. RAD THANKS MIRIAM.

This project has come at an interesting time as my laptop has just decided to break itself. Currently in a state of flux where using analog is the only option at the moment for me and so doing a 'Mail Art' project seems incredibly apt at the moment and I am throwing myself into this project head on. Really excited about our idea but it needs an awful lot of work to make it happen. Myself and Holmes spent this morning in a Bethnal Green model shop with some nice little Chinese ladies and a laser cutter. 

More to follow shortly. 

You Utter Dingbat!

A quick overview of the first project we have been given since our return from Christmas break. We were put into groups of 3 and told to produce a 20 second long stop motion animation based around the typeface Zapf Dingbats (shown above). By based around, I mean we were only allowed to use the Dingbat characters only changed in colour and scale. The animation was to be produced on a flat 2D surface out of paper/card and shot using istopmotion, a pretty nifty little stop-motion programme we were provided with in a slot of 2 hours. All editing was to be done in shot so for zooms etc we had to produce a number of the same element in different sizes which was quite time consuming but the week before we had an awesome storyboarding workshop to help us out with pre-planning and spent a good amount of time storyboarding our own animation and creating the character and elements in illustrator. Nothing was left to chance. 

I was with Sunnie and Chloe which was lucky as they are as sick and twisted as I am apparently and loved my initial idea of animating a Dingbats Peepshow based around the early animation machines we were shown as part of the introduction to the project. Once you start looking it becomes very apparent that Dingbats is full of absolute filth and our animation can be summed up by one word, TASSLES! We had a good week to prepare our animation which was lucky as Chloe was stuck in the USA until last Tuesday but managed to get it all done for yesterday which was our alloted time. The final animation has yet to be exported in its full glory but hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on it and I'll post it up here. There might even be some kind of Dingbats showreel using clips from the other groups in our class. I am super happy with the way it came out, it is almost exactly the way I imagined it, if not better. Props to Sunnie and Chloe as well for putting up with me being so immature and working so well together, very good start to the year. We definitely bonded over burlesque, tassle technique and "Lacie" as she will be forever known.

Below, a few pictures of yesterday. Animating and being silly. 

Bad Type's Bad Day Out

On the 14th of January 2011 myself and my class mates took our Bad Type white letters for a Bad Day out around Chelsea and Pimlico. Above is a video I made of that day using my new Cannon 550D camera. Having never used it for video I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to test it out and have a go at editing in Final Cut Pro for the first time as well. I am pretty happy with the results although I'd like the shots to be less shakey although I guess that comes from practice (maybe even investing in a tripod?). Editing wise I could have done a lot more but again with practice and patience. Below are some photos of preparation and the day itself...enjoy

Shrinally...

Above is the final image for mine and Rachel's shrine project where we had to combine our passions of playing live music (Me) and ice cream (Rachel). Shot in Thamesmead on a very cold evening at the base of Honours Ice Cream who me and Rach. got in contact with and visited twice over the course of this project. This was probably the longest project we were given over term one though only reflected in one photograph, many hard hours of work went into this running round trying to hire/buy smoke machines and industrial lights as well as going to and forth to Thamesmead twice. Huge thanks to Onur for being so welcoming and enthusiastic with us, massive props to Rachel as well for being an awesome partner to work with. Both linked above. Below a few images from our working process with involved making home made ice cream, teaching Rachel how to play 'Seven Nation Army' on guitar, visiting Onur the first time and combining a microphone with an ice cream scoop (more photos to follow of that).

New Year

A few resolutions,

1. Draw more.

2. Go watch more live music.

3. Play hard, work harder.

Wes Andersonism

Manifesto 2 of 2.

For our second manifesto we were allowed to choose any subject whatsoever, write and then typographically represent a manifesto on that subject. I chose to write a manifesto based around my favourite film director Wes Anderson.  

A slap in the face of public taste

Manifesto 1 of 2.

Above is the first of two manifestos I have designed. The brief was for the first manifesto to be based around an arts/design movement from 1890 to 1930. I chose the largely unknown Russian Literary Futurist manifesto 'A Slap in the Face of Public Taste' purely for the title and the fact it is so unknown.