'MAN' Animation

This animation called 'MAN' by Steve Cutts really represents the issue of how humans have used the earth for their own selfish gain, it also expresses the issue of how we destroy everything else with no real purpose. At the end of the animation you see the man sit in his throne, with a crown on his head, thinking he is the king of the world, this is a true representation of humans as a whole, as we believe we are the rulers of earth and can destroy it as we please. I find this animation particularly inspiring as I am strongly against pollution and try not to do damage to the earth, we live in a society where taking the earth's resources and destroying it for our own gain is a big part of everyday life, it is almost impossible to live in the west and not take part in any of these earth killing practices.

MAN from Steve Cutts on Vimeo.

Loop and Boiling

In this process and production workshop we had to draw 3-5 images of the same thing, once scanned in we put the images into layers on illustrator and cropped them to the same size so they overlapped perfectly. We drew over the image using the pen tool to create a boiling technique so that the image draws onto the page itself and give's the hand drawn effect. We then added some lines onto the image to move and dance around the page to add to the scribble effect, I decided to maximise the power of my lines and I feel it created a really cool effect. I found an instrumental soundrack qhich I feel fits perfectly with the animation and gives it a strange feel. During my rending of the video from After Effects, the file must have had an error as you can see various glitch marks on the video, I ecided to keep these in as it adds a completely random and new effect which works well with the music.

I drew a dolphin to use as my drawing first but I felt it was too boring and drew out 3 frames of a tree.

This is the tree which I drew out 3 times to use in my final piece.

This is my final animation.

Lip Sync animation

In this Process and production workshop we created facial animation to fit an audio clip, we were given a few clips to choose from and had to create our own facial features for each sound. 

We first created phoneme sheet where we drew out the different shapes of the eyes and mouth.

This is the final animation I created, I feel it fits well to the audio clip and is a good piece for my first attempt at lip sync animation.

Looping moving image

In this Process and Production group we created looped moving images from videos we collected of a moving object/thing. I found this video of an elephant chasing it's mother and decided to use it in my piece. We trimmed the video to 5 seconds long and drew around the object for each frame, this was a very lenghty process which required patience. We cut out the rest of the video so that all you could see is the object that is moving, I then found this background and changed te hue/saturation to make it fit in with the colour of the elephant better. I feel the overall video has a strange quirky look to it and I enjoyed playing around with the final outcome by adding more copies of the moving elephant onto the video.

Typeface and Phrase

In this second Production Workshop with Nick, we were working on a large scale with our typeface; 1 letter per A4 page. I found this quite interesting and I enjoyed working at this scale with the type, it allowed me to find a final typeface which I feel looks good and fits well with the phrase "I am a person." 

I placed the letters on the floor and worked on the arrangements, however I found that I did not like some of my letters and decided to change them to fit with the rest of the type

I changed the 'I', 'm', 'e', 'r', 's', 'n' and '.' to follow the typeface more accurately. I feel like the outcome is good and works well with the phrase.

 

My finished Typeface and Phrase.

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Business Lecture- Population crisis

Lecture notes:

In 1880 there were around 1.5 billion people in the world, population growth has since been dramatic and in 2015 there was approximately 7 billion people, this number is rapidly growing and could result in a worldwide crisis. 

Thomas Malthus was influential in the fields of political economy and demography. He came up with a basic model of a population catastrophe, which he described as showing how if the population rises above the limit of resources, there will be a crisis resulting in war, famine and disease. 

Macabre

Macabre style is a big influence on me, most of my favourite artworks have a macabre style, I find it unusual and eye-catching.

Macabre is the grim or ghastly atmosphere of an artwork, works often emphasise the details and symbols of death.

Some of my favourite examples of macabre art are shown below

Anton Semenov

Wendy M. Effendy

Roby Dwi Antono

Rudolf Kurz

Lowbrow Art Movement

Lowbrow art describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the LA, California area in the late 1970's. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also known by the name pop surrealism, and has a sense of humour- sometimes the humour is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment. Lowbrow artworks tend to be paintings, however they can also be toys, digital art, and sculpture.

These are some Lowbrow pieces which I find most interesting.

Malojo Art

Mark Ryden

Jaime Best

Luke Chueh

Pete Mckee

I find illustration very interesting, this kind of unusual and creepy style is my favourite form of illustration.

James Elkins & Types of knowing: Can art be taught?

Lecture notes:

Elkins has written some provocative, skeptical texts, such as ‘Why painting cannot be taught’ and ‘Artists with PhD’s' and ‘On Pictures and the Word that Fail Them’. Whilst celebrating the trans-formative or ‘alchemic’ practice of art production, Elkins has been critical of the close alliance of practice and research (which founds the idea of practice based research). Elkins sees his art practice and art criticism as operating in very different registers. He separates his own work in terms of theory and practice, but also suggests that critics and historians should ‘learn to paint’ (and stop assuming that there is a ‘total meaning’ to any given work, or attempting to see semiotic significance in every random mark)

Elkins is an historian and art critic at the Art Institute of Chicago. Having been a painter but having become an art historian, he occupies an interesting place on discussion of painting/writing and rationality in particular. He believes that art/painting are irrational practices and that art cannot be taught.

Theories suggest that in the context of art, enthusiasm, commitment, passion, responsiveness and sympathy are important parts of teaching. A certain amount of art can be taught, however it is mostly argued that the main practice of creating artwork cannot be taught. Some believe that no subject can be taught, and that we are born with the ability to do certain subjects and cannot learn something to the full extent if we are not born with that knowledge.

Business lecture- Advertising

Lecture notes:

Advertising- Thinking outside of the box

Advertising is a huge competition and to get your product seen and known is a big task, thinking outside of the box is compulsory for a designer. We have to evaluate where and when the advert is going to be shown and work with that.

Ambient advertising is one of the most eye-catching forms of advertising, it is when you place an advert somewhere where you wouldn't expect to see it. 

Examples of Advertising outside the box.

Luke Chueh

Luke Chueh is and artist who is considered to be part of the 'Pop-Surrealism' art movement. He is also a painter and Graphic Designer, I find his work more interesting than other's graphic designer's work however.

Although he uses simple cartoon animals in his posters, the viewer can easily see the meanings behind it and relate to the posters. I feel that he has a very unique and great way of creating political art, and the message behind it would be lost if he had used human characters. We tend to feel more sympathy to 'cute' animal figures.

Gary Baseman

Gary Baseman is a Los-Angeles based illustrator, he explores the "beauty of the bittersweetness of life" through his work. His artwork inspires me greatly and it follows the Gothic and 'creepy but sweet' theme which I enjoy, he uses colours such as pink, red, blue and black in his work, and his illustrations remind me of something you would find in an old fairground. 

These are some of his artwork, the characters he creates are cute but also look quite sickly. They remind me of characters from the Pink elephant scene in Dumbo.

The music from the original scene is remixed.

David Lupton and "Bedshaped"

The song 'Bedshaped' by 'Keane' (2004) was one of my favourite songs growing up, I feel this may have been where my love for animation and all things eerie began. 

After doing research into who created the animation of the clay model character, I found that it came from a short animated film "Butterfly"- by Corin Hardy

This is a story of how a man's past made him into who he is, and how only he can change his future from being a 'failure'. I find the message is quite strong, but the video is overall creepy. Thinking about how I liked the short video in Bedshaped's music video, I realise that I was an unusual child. 

The animated band in the music video was created by David Lupton, who drew over 500 illustrations for the video in a week. This form of drawn animation is also very interesting as it creates a contrast from the 3D modelling. 

David Lupton's other illustrations are also quite dark and Gothic. They have a creepy and surreal look to them and would scare the viewer.

These are some of Lupton's other illustrations which I find inspiring and interesting.

Loop and Living Holds

For this After Affects Workshop we watched a ten minute long award winning animation called "The Thomas Beale Cipher" which showed an animated person on a train, It had great textures and the setting worked well, the movement if the people showed that they were on a train. The loops of movements he used were also effective as they fit in well together and didn't look too repetitive.


The Thomas Beale Cipher from Andrew S Allen on Vimeo.

We then created a simple character on Illustrator, we then put it into after affects to animate the movement. I found this process quite difficult as I have used after effects but not in this way.

This is the character I came up with, I am pleased with the simplistic look to him, however I feel his shoulders do not work well.

We created loops of movement using key frames in after effects, and added a consistent shaking motion into the animation.

  

I am quite pleased with the movement of my character, however I feel it does not fit well in the context. I could use this movement to show a person in a moving vehicle such as a train.

Context and history of Art & Design Education

Lecture Notes:

Bauhaus & Black Mountain college

This lecture focuses on contrasting the teaching at Black Mountain College in the USA (which had an important influence upon 20C art) and the Bauhaus in Germany which likewise influenced artistic practice, but which arguably had a stronger impact upon design practitioners especially in relation to modernist design. Interestingly, Black Mountain College was founded by Josef and Anni Albers – Josef Albers had been a prominent professor at the Bauhaus.

The overall aim of Bauhaus was to train students in the principles of design and art simultaneously - (this included fine art and applied arts)

Whereas black mountain college was a progressive environment - liberal arts college (not exactly an art college) and the aim for students was to emphasise the process of art, rather than the final piece.

 

Notable BMC graduates include:

(Robert Rauschenberg)

(Cy Twombly)

(Stan Vanderbeek)

Each graduate operates with a less formal fashion, with an emphasis upon material process/assemblage.

Bauhaus stressed the importance of experimentation, professor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy stressed the importance of technology, his teachings were directed toward simplicity and 'elemental expression' he reduced variety in nature to a set of basic properties used to create products that had agency.

Experimental artwork by Bauhaus teachers:

(Kandinsky)

(Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)

(Oskar Schlemmer)

Business lecture- 4 P's & analysis acronyms

Lecture notes:

Industry wants independence, self thinking and the ability to analyse. 

As a designer, I have to work along side my client and take their initial idea and make it great.

In basic Marketing there are 4 P's I have to consider;

Price=Overall Costs + Profits made from product.

Product=What it must do + Why customer buys it. 

Promotion=Persuading market, through advertising.

Place=Where is it available + place of consumption.

I have to constantly understand what is happening in the world, economy, client, market, etc. And predict what the situation will be like in 5 or 10 years down the line. 

PEST Analysis

Political

Economic

Social

Technological

I must also understand SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Weaknessnes

Opportunities

Threats

When looking at a business and/or product, we can see the Opportunities and Threats externally, however to know the strengths and weaknesses we have to be in the business.

Buyer Behaviour- Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

To create a product and to advertise it we have to get a feel of who the buyer is, Maslow's triangle can help us to understand where a person is in their life.