At its simplest I went for a stop motion animation about two planets, Thera and Cavolon, whose lack of communication and connection has led to an argument over the colour of their shared moon. The name Thera and Cavolon were chosen because of the simple anagramatic link to their relevant words Earth and Volcano.

I made the two planets by using 8 cm Polysterene and 12 cm Dry Foam balls, respectively, as a base then building on them using Cladium clay, Bass Wood, Modelling Foliage and Acrylic paint. There were 4 Moons each just a 4 cm Polysterene ball with a coat of paint.

A poster I created as part of the brief

In the animation they’re supported on a makeshift base comprising of a bit of Doweling held in place by a Paper Maché Flower Pot and a Dowel cap glued to a plank of Bass wood all of which was then painted black. The various props are cardboard cut outs held aloft by Blu-Tac and Kebab skewering sticks. Lighting was provided through artificial means, the windows were blacked out, there was my room light as well as two Halogen desk lamps either side of the set.

Work in progress

I chose to keep the supports visible in the final video because I felt it was part of the aesthetic and not just because I didn’t want to extensively edit 372 photos, I did edit a few to hide the Blu-Tac and supporting boxes when they crept into the frame.

Taking these photos I imported them into Final Cut Pro with a default speed of 2 frames per photos at 25 fps, although this caused the Earth-like planet to revolve rapidly I felt 3 frames per photo was too jerky and slow. I then recorded a voiceover, using my voice as a placeholder until I find someone better, and imported various free to use and royalty free sound effects.

If the end result was to be given a title it would simply be ‘O2 Has A Solution’. It was captured using a Sony Alpha 100 and at full res it’s suitable for a 1080p HDTV.

Well here’s the final video.

I have the crit for this project tomorrow so I’ll see how it all goes but as far as project go it’s probably been the most amount of work I’ve put into a project and I certainly like the end result.

Well I had the crit and it went very well, the two tutors sitting in on this crit liked it very much, they had a few recommendations that I’ll work to implement over the Christmas break but all is going well this Semester.

You can now find the final piece here.

The above is the title page I quickly threw together for my rough cut presentation on Tuesday (25/11/08), now below is the video I presented. Now in the end I didn’t use the above design as it no longer fitted in with my film.

I mean, shooting this in HD, all the footage required for it took up 20 gigs on the University’s RAID drive, I’m sure glad I chose to use their facilities rather than doing all the work at home like I usually do. I don’t have that sort of space floating around anymore. Sadly I only get 20 gigs of space so I really need to invent in a few external terabyte drives. Well it’s Christmas soon.

From the presentation I now know what I want to focus on as before I was just filming any old stuff. Now based on the comments I received I’m going to explore this idea of screens, and perhaps being trapped in them.

Something along the lines of this Free Poster Films production.

Just to quickly explain the numbering system, Level 2, Semester 1, Graphics Brief 1 becomes L2S1G1, this is the system they use so I thought I’d keep it going.

So getting into my first project since starting level two at the Winchester School of Art, I got partnered with a fellow student Jennifer Babey. Like most other people on my course she doesn’t have a website or much of a presence really other than Facebook and I’m not putting that up on here. She’d done an interesting collection of work, whereas I’m more digital she went for a tactile collage style, more than some had done.

Set: 6/10/08          Due: 16/10/08

Week One

The brief asked us to combine our working styles and produce a new and challenging identity in the form of either a set of posters, press ads, leaflets or web banners. These are to be produced for either Giles Deacon, Marks and Spencers Classic Collection, Absolute Vintage, Clarks or Rohan. So all clothing and footwear, a fashion based project, wouldn’t be my first choice of project and I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.

We went for Giles Deacon and the 4 press ads feeling that Deacon had a very fractured personal image, he doesn’t have his own website and appears here and there so we thought we’d converge it and give him a bit of exposure, increase awareness and branding.

Going with that I threw together some vector A4 designs using strong colours and textures to add a sort of grunge to the images. Jenny’s work would comprise of fabricating some form of background, a collage of sorts.

The vector resources are from the book Neubau Welt and the included CD.

As it is, those three posters could perhaps be a bit of a cliché but I feel that when I outline Deacon’s actual work and combine it with Jenny’s background it should turn out pretty interesting, they certainly need more relevant textures than defacto textures can provide.

During the first tutorial (9/10/08) we were told to look into teaser advertising such as Orange’s introduction campaign where they used Orange placeholders with ‘Coming soon’ on them then a few months later they revealed their true identity.

This sounds an interesting idea and an excellent way to double the number of press ads. Following this tutorial we came up with the four themes we’d be using for each these are his Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2009 and New Look sets.

Continuing on from where I left of it’s not the night before the crit day. Bit of a rush but we managed to pull it all together on the last day, apparently that’s how she works, well I’m not much of a fan.

After another tutorial (13/10/08) we decided to go for a fold out spread idea giving us more room to work on, and an easy way of combining the reveal idea. I cut out the people in Illustrator and Jenny threw together some textures and materials that I then scanned in and positioned.

Got the double sided A3 designs printed at KallKwik for a tenner which isn’t bad. Not that I have a large experience in that field.

Well tomorrow (16/10/08) is the crit so there are still changes to be made but for now those are the finals design with the reveal preceding the spread.

Had the crit and things went well, they were really focusing on our presentation skills and we did really well. They still gave us a long list of things to improve but that’s to be expected. Just got to work on those at some point before Portfolio hand in which will be in January.

Other than that that’s another project down. Getting a new brief on Monday (20/10/08).

Well after a batch of crowdSPRING submissions in numerous projects I finally won one! Of the two prizes I won the second one of $300, not what I’d call a small amount, but I am a student living of loans. It will help towards a lovely new 24″ monitor I’ve been eyeing up. Congratulations to clashcreative for the first place $500 win. 

You can see my winning entry after the jump.

As you can see it was pretty simple but I feel that’s what he was going for, a simple almost iconic logo. Not sure what they’re going to do with two logos but I’m not complaining if it gave me an opportunity to win some money.

The grand conclusion to my second Semester was a book project. Winchester School of Art broke out the workshops and we were taught how to bind our own book. This was certainly another favourite in terms of experience and the final outcome. In the end I made two books, one about the adventures of a Stickman and the other about my location and surroundings.

In this post I will focus on the latter.  

At this point my tutors were really pushing me to do something different so I did, I drew a strange really wide stickmen adventure, they liked it. So I took it further and took to pieces an old book and had another adventure among its pages. They liked this too. But at another tutorial (where we show our work and progress) I showed the other work I’d been doing…the sort of work I’d been doing all along. 

And they told me to make this into the book. So after all the time I’d spent doing something different they still chose the more normal style of mine. Of course with this amount of work I’d put in I wasn’t going to scrap the stickmen idea and so made two books.

The book based on my normal work was itself divided into two different styles.

The first style was mostly Photoshop work using world map vectors and Google maps with Photoshop elements put on top. All alterations were made digitally on digtal parts.

The second style was a series of set pieces which were then photographed with no alteration besides colour balance etc. These set pieces were made up of physical elements, for instance the Google Map is printed out, written on and altered using physical non-digital means.

I was especially impressed with how the first photo in the second style, something so moody and atmospheric about it all, especially the menacing orange charging light. 

This book was printed on high quality double sided photo paper and wrapped in a black cover with a dust jacket depicting a white outline of the UK. There were also some see-through components that were printed on tracing paper. On the inside of the dust jacket I listed the tools I had used in making this book.

This was a particular irritation I have with certain artists book who don’t list what they were printed on when I really like the material and tactile feel.

Only the CD case beats the final outcome when it comes to how pleased I was with this project. There were quite a few good books coming out of my Graphic Arts year so it was very cool.

Throughout this project I went down 3 radically different approaches.

Spraypaint

The first was a Spraypaint idea. At University I continually encouraged to try different methods of working, to try and not just use the Computer to create my designs so I thought going physical with Spraypaints would be a great idea.

I decided to focus on the idea of inverted space and the medium the music would be on, a CD in this case. Although I liked the outcomes in real life, when scanned in and printed out again they lost their tactile nature which was their strongest aspect.

When shown to my tutors they similiarly liked their rough textures and the idea of a broken CD but I did not develop this further.

Watercolour

The next approach was a unique combination of Watercolours, Acrylic inks and a Camera dust blower. I used the Watercolours varied colours to write out the individual letters and then blew them with the dust blower to produce a splattered typography.

I felt this was a stronger idea than the Spraypaint although beyond what I had done for the outside of the CD case I couldn’t think of how to fully develop the idea into the required 8 panel booklet and CD. This was not helped by the fact that this next idea came pretty late into the project and was my favourite.

Digital

Typically my favourite idea was the least original in terms of what I do but still it looked the strongest in my opinion and had a great identity, which was the key objective in the project.

Using an out of focus camera and the street and car lights of night time Southampton, although it wasn’t that late, being in the middle of Winter it got dark pretty early. The idea came to me whilst I was waiting for a lift it was that simple, but because of this simplicity it could easily be expanded to cover the requirement. And then some.

As you can probably tell I like Bitmap fonts at that time. In this case I was using Visitor from dafont.com, that site is immensely for someone who doesn’t want to buy fonts. Of course you get what you pay for sometimes.

After coming up with the initial idea I got a little carried away with the booklet and included items. You see before having this idea the digital idea I was having was all map based and after reading this tutorial on making road maps I wanted to include this.

I’d take photos of the final outcome but my University used it in an exhibition I think and so I haven’t had it back yet as that was as I was leaving. I hope to get it back as it’s probably one of my favourite pieces.

I’m going back to Uni in a couple of weeks and I’m definitely looking forward to it, keeps my mind thinking like crowdSPRING. Thanks for reading.

Recently there was an article in the Sunday Telegraph’s magazine Seven about the clampdown on public Photography and how Terrorism ‘threats’ is only throwing fuel on an out of control blaze.

It certainly isn’t helped by the latest poster campaign that’s been posted out by the London Police and their poster campaigns.

Possibly the worst thing you can do to counter-terrorism is to make people paranoid about other people, especially an already oppressed group of people such as Photographers.

Let experienced officers decide what action to take.

I can’t help but feel these ‘experienced’ officers were the ones that decided to promote unrest and worry in the first place. If the aim of terrorists was to disrupt our day to day lives then they are certainly succeeding with every new law that is put into effect to clamp down on our freedoms.

Why does this remind me of some of the "report suspicious behaviour" posters seen in the background of the film "Children of Men"?

As is pointed out in a comment on this BoingBoing post they do seem worrying like said posters in Children of Men. Great movie in my opinion. Trying to find a screen of that poster but it’s a little difficult might just end up watching the movie again.

So with this in mind I decided to have a little fun with the first poster and just do a little parody. I hadn’t found a high resolution resource at the time of doing this so I had to recreate all the elements myself.

Not meaning to be racist with the ‘non-english hotline’ line, just highlighting how few UK base call centres there are and the fact I bet the number they originally put isn’t UK based. What do you reckon 6673 2727 spells out on a mobile phone?

Well it’s all part of my University Summer project.