Perception or Illusion

In this lecture we specifically looked at Perception or illusion , we started off the lecture by looking at  an image of a lamp post in the dark , we then discussed what triggers in our memory it could fire and what we could relate it to , for example , a walk home after a night out. Images like this help develop a deep sense of self awareness and allows us to perceive things differently , this of which will come in handy when designing in the future as it involves looking at a theme from a different perspective.

Perception - We looked at how the human eye is a form of perception , this is because we see every reflection of light upside down , however our brain knows to flip it the right way up. Below is a basic diagram of how the eye sees reflections of light and processes them:

We then moved onto looking at colourblind tests as they showed us that everybody minds perceive colours in different ways depending on the cells that are present in their brain. Personally i am rather colourblind especially to Reds and Greens , however other students struggled with these tests even though they do not class themselves as colourblind.

Further into the lecture we started to look at optical illusions and how our eyes can be tricked into thinking things are happening when they are not , the illusion below looks as if it is moving even though it is stationary. This happens because of the contrast in colours and our eyes are attempting to sort the colours out.

We then looked at the dinosaur illusion. This illusion involves a dinosaurs head that looks as if it is looking at you from whatever angle you look at it from. This looks like this as we have learnt as human that facial features sick out and that there is no other option for the face to go. As you can see in the video the illusion is created from inward folds with card.

Drawing 3 - Object

Moving away from structure drawing we focused on smaller objects. For this task we were each assigned a table to sit around , these of which contained different objects played out in various ways. Our aim was to draw with as much precision as possible , keeping the objects to a certain scale if possible. One of the first drawings i produced was a 'measured drawing' this is where you draw the objects in relation to another object for sizing references. In my case i chose to draw the stack of objects in relation to the size of my pencil when held up next to the object from my position. this allowed me to have certain reference points as to where each object should begin and end.

I felt that my drawing ended up being rather messy however it was a correct measured drawing and was drawn in perspective with the pencil using reference points. I think one thing i struggled with is that the top object had quite a complicated shape which made me ore reluctant to getting stuck in drawing it.

The next table i was allocated to had lots of large typography pieces scatted around the table in different variations. with these pieces i wanted to start adding colour variation to show some tone in the objects. I felt that i struggles with the typography table as the shapes seemed to be all rather complex , i felt that the angles were very hard to make exact. for example the G that is positioned onto of the G doesn't look as if it sits as smoothly as it should. this was the table that i spent the most time on proving it to be rather difficult. if i was tottery this again next time i think would pick less complex type , also picking different colours for the tone as they don't suit very well. shadow and tone would be one of the skills i would like to work on further in the future.

Other experiments included drawing with crayon , i attempted to draw the glass sphere in crayon as i felt it would create a glass effect with the shading being darker towards the edges and the light being focused around the centre. i liked this experiment as it was pleasant to use something to draw with that was different from marker and pencil. i feel that crayons bring out a nice range of colours that people neglect.

Into the Darkness

In this mornings lecture we watched Fear[s] of the Dark, the film is a 2 tone animated film that was released in 2008 and premiered at the Roma Film Festival. The structure of the film is that it is cut into 5 short stories that make up the whole film. The part that we specifically looked at involved a character that gets stranded in a blizzard and retreats to an abandon cabin , where we see the struggles of paranoia set in and mentally challenge him. i particularly like the film as each section focuses on different drawing styles or ways of animating , similar to the film 'Waking life'. The section we looked at was made up of harsh black and white shading with various textures.

Abstracts and Infos

At the start of this Seminar we began with a recap of key words from the last session , as a group we came up with :

Objective - (of a person or their judgement) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Contingency - a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.

History - the study of past events, particularly in human affairs.

Subjective - based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Fabrication - the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something.

Perspective - the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

Preconceived - (of an idea or opinion) formed before having the evidence for its truth or usefulness.

As a task we were split into 6 groups the were each given 20 seconds of the film Withnail & I to analyse and produce a sentence about , these sentences would then all be collected together and turned into well structured paragraph. The sentence we produced was "a scuffle between two characters which is solved by panicked compromise."

Problem Solving / Design & Communication

In this seminar we looked at how information can be presented via infographics. I was excited to be part of this seminar as i haven't learnt about infographics before and i would like to explore them more as my studio project involves them massively. I was inspired to look into inforgraphics by David McCandles who published the books : Information is beautiful and Knowledge is beautiful. These books display information about the world in a graphic manner that are very athletically pleasing and  also very detailed in i the information that they provide us with.

We then started by looking at student work that mapped different pieces of information. For example One student mapped relationships within her life and and created a coloured grid (similar to the tube map by harry beck) that showed positive and negative points about relationships with different family members. 

Our task was to create our own infographic that mapped information that we were interested in or personal to us. We had multiple subjects that we could chose from. I chose to plot music on a graph depending on the year it was created and how much i enjoyed the album. 

I chose to create my infographic similar to a scattergraph , where the points on the X and Y axis depended on weather i enjoyed the music and what year it was created . When i finished plotting the points i will use a straight line to determine weather the graph has A positive correlation , proving there is a link between the year the music was created and how much i enjoyed it.

Message & Meaning

"The difference between poetry and practical messages is that the latter are successful only when we correctly infer the intention." - Michael Rock 

In this lecture we learnt looked into Message and meaning , how it can be portrayed to and audience and the different ways it can come across to different people around the world and also that all pieces of design aren't made just for the sake of it , that there is always a meaning behind work and there is always a message it has to portray. We looked at specific designers such as Anthony Burrill who uses large type to portray powerful messages and studios such as Kurzgesagt studios that use infographics to communicate themes that people don't normally know about such as : what is light?

Message - a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly.

Meaning- Meaning is what the source or sender expresses , communicates or conveys in their message to the observer or receiver , and what the receiver infers from the current context.

Send (Encode)- This means translating information into a message in the form of symbols that represent ideas or concepts.

 We then looked into the work of Antony Burrill. His work was produced to display large messages that will either spark questions or produce motivation within the audiences mind. Burrill uses bold type and block colours that stand out clearly to anyone who can see the images. Burrill specialises in type and layout design using traditional ways such as printing blocks to add a more hand produced aesthetic to his work.

Kurzgesagt studio's produce informational videos that educate an audience through playful and colourful animations. Kurzgesagt focus on informing an audience on subjects that most wouldn't know much information about , most of these subjects are science related or questions that are not normally looked into without certain interest. The video we specifically looked at was "What is light?" , this video is included below. 

 

Project Proposals

For our studio project we were asked to produce 3 proposals for a final piece that our sketchbook research will lead up to , these final productions could be anything that linked into the sense of place brief , Below are my 3 ideas;

Proposal 1 - To produce an Info-graphical Map of my chosen city and document key places that relate to the music scene and industry related with that area. I will look into specific bands and base my themes around the chosen subjects i researched. I plan to present the finished piece as a large A2 poster that will work as both an informational piece of work and aesthetic piece of work. The style i plan on using for my production will be a simplistic vector style that i will use to illustrate the buildings within the city that doesn’t make the map too complex or detailed to an audience.

Proposal 2 - An animation that gives you a virtual tour of the music scene of my chosen city. The animation will take the audience through key places that are iconic to the Bands i choose to research. The animation will contain promotional samples of songs so i can provide an audio track of the the bands without having to obtain a license to play the songs on the animation. i plan for the design aspect of the animation to be simplistic illustrations of everything i chose to include within the time-line. this could be from album covers , to portraits of band members or key locations and objects used.

Proposal 3 - Design a campaign to re-introduce and re-brand old music back to the city where it originated from. This will involve creating posters and other propaganda related to the bands that i have chose to research. 

I feel that proposal 1 is the strongest as my research focuses specifically on similar material to the final idea , i also feel that it will be able to show my full potential as themes such as animation are not my strong point.

After Effects 2 - Book promotion

The second after effects workshop showed us how to link our frames together that we created in adobe photoshop. It took me a while to get the hang of this as i had 83 individual frames which all had to fit together in 10 seconds. 

I struggled to use After effects slightly as it was a very different interface as to what I'm used to using when designing print based media. I feel that in this session we were focusing mainly on creating a basic animation but using After Effects to stitch it together. We didn't focus on many skills that came specifically from the software , only basics such as: audio control , Opacity levels and creating solids for frames. 

Personally i felt that my animation was successful and gives a basic brief of what the book is about via the visuals. I feel that it worked as i used a lot more slides to create my animation as oppose to the 10 slides we were given to work from as a basic. However i do feel that there could be a quicker route around animating certain parts in After Effects therefore i am eager to see how this could be done. this is what we will be working on in the next workshop session using simple vector characters. 

Below is my Animation that is currently uploaded to Vimeo.

A Clockwork Orange from Ben Moulson on Vimeo.

Genealogy Continued

In this Seminar we continued looking at Genealogy. Instead of looking into future Genealogy we looked at what a Genealogist is and what type of work they do. This seminar we didn't have any specific activities to complete however we had a range of videos that will be referenced below.

"The Genealogist examines the Preconceived and questions the phenomenon that we tend to feel is without history." 

We learnt that genealogists question the rules of items what already exist. We looked into objects or items that would have been classed as no history , we highlighted: Goodness , Badness , Punishment , Madness and sexuality. we looked into these to see if the mind could create a sense of history for these objects and see if you can go back to the beginning and re-create them. 

The Guardians point of view advert shows that a story or an object can be re-created or misinterpreted depending on how you look at it. Similar to how Genealogies work. 

Influence and Behaviour

Behaviour - the way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially towards others.

Influence - the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself.

In this lecture we discussed how Behaviour and Influences can effect peoples work in different ways , ways we identified that could effect you in every day life were:

-Political
-Psychological 
-Personal 
-Cultural
-Social 
-Informational

We started by looking at Edward Bernays who was a pioneer in public relations (propaganda). Sigmund Freud (Phycologist) was Bernays uncle therefore allowing Bernays to have a psychological insight into his propaganda techniques , allowing him to adapt them to suit mass audience. he later published the propaganda book (1928)

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." - Edward Bernays (Propaganda 1928)


Wolff Olins - http://www.wolffolins.com 

"We didn't want the logo to be the Houses of Parliament with a hurdler going over them and a brush stroke"

Wieden and Kennedy - Were assigned to create a campaign for Nike during the time of the 2012 Olympics. They focused on more of a cultural aspect for the campaign titled:  "find your greatness". The campaign didn't focus on the athletes but focused on key people in different environments to as they couldn't use any branding to do with the 2012 olympics. Focusing on the people associated and involved with the olympics was a way to unite the audience that couldn't make it to the olympics or were watching abroad and to show that they can be involved in the sports just as much as the athletes can.

FCB inferno - The company used the stats of  The London 2012 Olympics to create the "This Girl Can" campaign. This campaign focuses specifically on motivating the women of Britain to partake in sporting activities as there is 2 million less women than men that partake in regular exercise. But there is a huge opportunity that between the age of 14-40 75% of girls/ Women want to exercise more.

Red Bull energy drinks are a good example of Deception within industry. 'gives you wings' is Red Bulls famous slogan , claiming that the 'Wings' improve your performance. A $15 lawsuit was filed against Red Bull to say that there statement isn't true and they eventually lost , resulting in you been able to reclaim $15 back on Red Bull products if you still have the receipt. 

Further Skills- InDesign

Within workshop week i caught up on the InDesign session that i missed a week ago due to a lecturer being absent. I really enjoyed this session as it showed me how to used some more advanced skills within InDesign. We mainly focused upon two page spreads and the techniques used to create a unique looking spread.

 Above is an example of the double page spread that i created in this session. One of the main techniques i used when creating this piece was how to type along a certain path or shape , that technique is how i created the left hand page. On the left hand page we also learnt more advanced options to edit text with , and how instead of creating separate boxes you can alter the layout using one single text box. The Left hand page then leads onto the right page creating leading lines for the eyes. I then used the type in text tool to create the circle which looks like the ball of yarn that the cat is playing with. 

We were shown that you can also import images and items from other adobe software (although i already knew this it was a handy thing for the group know). This is how we got the cat onto the document. We imaged traced pictures of animals and expanded them to create an editable vector image then exported them to the InDesign package where we could use the shape to our advantage. Other tools we were shown was the path finder tool and how it could be used to split objects or in this posters case wrap text around the image.

If i was to improve this poster i would edit the layout of the text more as i feel it looks very basic , however i didn't have enough tine therefore i left it fairly basic.

Afterwards we were shown how different settings on Adobe Photoshop can effect an image (Above). Starting from top left and through to bottom right;

RGB Colour - Used for screen display , colours will be vibrant but will differ when printed as RGB is used for display.

CMYK Colour - Used when printing CMYK colours are usually slightly darker than RGB and are used specifically for printing. CMYK stands for Cyan , Magenta , Yellow and Key (black).

Duotone Colour - This effect has been created using InDesign where you set the colour to only let specific colour of an image through. In this case the colours are black and red therefore it has made the image look completely red with some shading of the house still visible.

Greyscale Colour - Greyscale colour is just a more technical way of saying Black and white , Only black and white shades of colour will be visible in this mode.

Halftone Screen - Halftone screens are commonly used in screen printing however they can also have good effects visually on print media. The screen is made up of different shapes which you can choose on photoshop which the thickness of the lines creates the quality of the print.

Pantone colours on Halftone - I added two Pantone colours to the Halftone screen to create this Pop Art styled vibrant image , one of the colours substituted the white background and the other replaced the white giving me the vibrant effect.

Pantone is a standardized color matching system, utilizing the Pantone numbering system for identifying colours. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all reference a Pantone numbered color, making sure colors match without direct contact with one another. Pantone Colours cannot be printed unless the code is entered manually to the printer.

Below are Examples of posters I made using the Pantone colours and there codes for printing:

Joan Cornella

This week i visited the Joan Cornella - Contains Adult Themes at the Munro House in Leeds. Joan Cornella is an artist i have followed for quite some time and who's work i enjoy very much.  He is mostly known for his 6 panel comic strips that he paints using bright acrylic paints. He creates characters that are drawn similar to 1930's styled cartoons. The twist on Cornella's work is that although his pieces may be colourful he paints very crude scenes that involve very controversial themes such as : Nudity , Racism , Murder and Social issues. Hence the exhibition name - Contains Adult Themes. Cornella has released two books his first titled , Mox Nox and the second Zonzo.

Information on Cornella's exhibition and his own personal site can be found below:

https://leedsgallery.com/whats-on/exhibitions/contains-adult-themes-joan-cornella/

http://elblogdejoancornella.blogspot.co.uk

Workshop Week - Live Brief

As part of Workshop week i signed up to the Live Brief project. As a part of this project i had sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) therefore i will not be able to document on the work i have produced for this session until a later date.

However i can personally say i enjoyed the opportunity we had been given to take part in this task and i feel that it has given me a small taste into what working for an actual company would be like. Even if my designs aren't picked to be used i feel that they will establish foundations for what i can work towards in the future , providing i receive feedback on my work.

Drawing 2 - Interior

Opposite to the previous session , we now began with interior drawing , our task was to pick a location within the creative arts building and draw what we saw from our perspective using a range of techniques and drawing instruments. For my location i chose to situate myself on a high point , looking through the glass barrier out into the rest of the creative arts building , i thought this was a perfect able as it captures the linear structure of the building , i also felt that it had the most potential for shapes to be created in the building. In this task we were pushed to add tonal shade values and colour to our piece to distinguish them form a generic pencil drawing.

Below is my interior drawing from the creative arts building. I began by using pencil to sketch the rough outline of the structure. Once finished i went over these line using a thick finaliser to add weight to certain lines allowing them to stand out and define the build more than other less important lines. After i added a tech of shadow to give the building depth and finally an element of colour to define different parts of the building such as blue for glass.

Personally i feel that i struggle with these drawing tasks as it is something i haven't really pursued when designing , i prefer to make quick simplistic sketches than go into detail. Although i feel that my skills are slowly improving there is still a lot i need to learn. hopefully the future sessions will open me up to different drawing styles and ways of thinking when using drawing instruments. i feel that having more time will allow me to express my creativity more.

Sense of Place - Animated GIF

Love Spreads - The Stone Roses

Love Spreads

The GIF above shows the flow of images I took when visualising audio in my Sense of Place project. To create the image I used the vibrations of the speakers to move the paint. On the gif you can see how the vibrations make the paint get to its peak as the they change throughout the song.

Above is the video 'The Sound of Taste - Schwartz Flavour Shots' , This video inspired me when creating my visualising sound photoshoot as Schwartz have used the vibrations of sound to add life to their Herbs and Spices. I feel that one of the main messages that this campaign is trying to get across to the audience is that the Flavour Shots are bursting with flavour. 

Included in my project are other examples of songs i played through the speakers to map the sounds however they are just still images and not presented within a GIF format.