Responsive Student Awards - Brief Analysis/why are they set

Things That hope to be achieved by taking on Competition briefs/this responsive module:

1. Broaden your approaches.
2. Win Stuff.
3. Professional feedback.
4. Networking Opportunities.
5. Confidence.
6. Workload Management.
7. Working to deadlines.
8. Working with Clients.
9. Experience.
10. Locating your practice.

Proposal/Achieve:

Proposal

• Produce a product.
• Visual Concept.
• Persuade through a campaign.

Achieve

• Publicise their brand.
• Expand their audience.
• Return to customers.
• Attract kids.
• Have an edge over competition. 
• More Customers.

Problem:

• People don't know about us!
• Multiple audiences (We don't know who they are)
• Fun not serious.
• Pozetty but pragmatic.
• We don't know what we want.
• We are dull and out of date.
• Adding Value!

Here are the Answers that my group came up with:

Lino Printing Workshop 1

I had my first ever lino print attempt, and I really love it as a process so far.

Its quite baffling to get your head around how to go about creating your image. I am attempting it by putting tracing paper of my drawing that I would like to recreate in my lino print - in this case the wizards face - and attempting to change it to the negative shapes that I would carve, and that would therefore show as white when I get round to printing it. This way of transferring my drawing made me pick up on what the most key lines and features of the drawing make it successful at conveying a bearded, severe, aged wizard. Such as the big groves of his cheeks, and the length and elongated nature of his nose. Also I think that the long waves of hair and of course the frown lines are what really gives the face the expression I am trying to aim for.

Its such an enjoyable process to carefully carve out and reveal your work quite physically, it makes you consider each line and their usefulness, relevance and significance so much more.

It was quite confusing trying to change the scales of it, and to reposition it onto my actual lino board, so I drew out some sketches to map out the position and marked out a few key positions in charcoal on the board. 

I'm not sure how it will turn out, but this is what it is looking like so far.

Ideal Witches Nose

I've been drawing a lot of witches, and there are certain key areas that identify them as a cliche witch, such as the chin and the nose (and of course the hat.) 

I've come to use this particular way of drawing their noses as a bit of a device, which is really helping my attempt to develop a bit of a character/specific way of drawing them come along.

Peer Crit on first cut image animation!

What new learning have you gained through the study tasks and workshops?

Discuss effectiveness of the movement?

How effectively is a concept or an idea beginning to be communicated?

How can what you have done be further developed by media or materials?

The Difference Between Magical Hats

Wizard

Practising Wizard faces.

Cliche Motifs of Wizards and Witches:

A raven can be seen as a symbol of a wizard just as a cat and a broomstick are very cliche extensions of a witch. I think it could be fun to play on these.

The mix of textures and colours for this above image do not mix so successfully together, but perhaps something for the shape and form of its head and expression 

I am really please with the textures of this bird drawing, the contrast of the black brush pen outline and the grainy look of the pencil build up a interesting and fitting feeling raven. I think that this kind of texture can look really good in animation as it creates more of a sense of movement and tangibility.

Below is my beginning attempt at being playful with  switching up the motifs and their cliques, like trying to show a witches cat wearing a wizards hat. I like to keep this work leaning towards the humours side of things, as that is essentially one of the biggest themes in Terry Pratchetts work.   

First Dragon Frame Animation

We have had a few inductions and workshops about the Dragon frame software. Its quite different to things that I have worked with before, but after the key areas that we are to use were gone over with us and pointed out I feel like I have the hang of it a bit more now. 

We made some cut shape motifs that could be used to be moved about and make a little image sequence, for our practice with this way of working.

Here is my finished animation:

I have processed it a bit through after effects, where I stretched it out a bit and added some background textures to try and give it more of a stormy feel. Now that I have had an extra Dragon-frame lesson in how to edit the colours, levels, hues and saturations of a piece of animation I would want to play about with these to make the hills look more of a green/obvious hill colour. Its a shame that animations are quite complicated to convert to video format, because it is unlike a simple photoshop image where you can come back to it make minor adjustments, and tweak things very simply. 

Pros:

• Successful textures
• Fun and interesting imagery
• shows concept relatively well
• Relatively clean production, for a first time it doesn't have too many blips and really shoddy production (well that my untrained eye can see).

Drawing Refrence - A'Tuin

I spent some time using this as reference drawing turtles, as a turtle is quite a key motif to all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, as the Discworld rotates on the the back of a giant intergalactic turtle, called 'A'tuin.

Its tricky to draw from moving reference, and is clearly something I need more practice at. None of these drawings are any good, or even that complete, however I do now have a better general understanding of the way in which turtles move, and how I should draw/shape their legs to get a much better drawing of them. I feel that I could draw a pretty okay shaped turtle without any reference now.

After Effects

I mostly write notes for these sessions in my notebook as I find these easier to jot down as I go, I will be referring to this as I go along.

Some key things about after effects however:

Everything is measured in pixels.

A Keyframe is a point where a significant change occurs.

Some little tests and learning practices:

Motifs for Animation

Selecting simple enough motifs and themes.

Then to go about simple animation we had a practice at cutting out some collage, and making it move with blu tack joints.

I might try to animate some imagery from Terry Pratchett to practice with:

 "The storm stalked on legs of lightning over the hills grumbling and shouting"

Etching Uncertainty

I've always been on the fence for choosing between etching and screen print with this brief, and particularly today after seeing so many beautiful screen prints at Colours May Vary, I'm wondering if I could make some more exciting work with screen print.

For example look at these beautiful restored screen prints.

I thought I'd do some more research I to etching and what sort of results I might be able to achieve and then decide.

I had a look at this book in the library on Colour etching by Nigel Oxley:

These images really appeal to me, and to be able to make something along these lines would be incredible, I don't really know if some of these process might be a bit too complicated for what I need to achieve, but it's always worth asking, I hope this is possible for me.

Here's a second book on Etching by Colin Gale:

I love this mix of mono printing and etching, I remember learning about how to create some of those textures in mono printing with talcum power. 

Animation

New Brief!

Group task:

It's quite difficult to get your head round thinking in animation. A lot of groups made 12 scenes that needed a bit more than one second to describe them.

Set out to make our own collage shapes containing different elements:

• Fast moving line
• Slow travelling line
• Metamorphous
• Off Screen Space
• Change in Scale

Things learnt:

• Making things move across paper at a plausible speed with drawing id very tricky!
• It's hard to visualise how animations and images will work when you have never done it before.
• It takes a lot of patience. 

Focus Point?

At the moment I am finding my themes so broad, and difficult to work from them, and find way of making them successfully visual.

I was already honing more towards just looking at Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and my tutor suggested that I perhaps pick one specific book to focus on. This might be a lot more helpful to me, so I have selected out the book 'Equal Rites', which I plan to go and re read research into further, with a mind to continue my project just focusing on this.

Next Steps:

• Research and reread 'Equal Rites' in search of new motifs and themes. 
• Go back and research some more into Terry Pratchett himself, incase I fid some other more interesting directions that I had [previously overlooked, which also might lead to the discovery of some different theme's and motives.

With this project I am struggling a little as I'm not quite sure what we are overall trying to achieve.

12 Images and Interim SB1 crit and evaluation

12 images, showing off a sense of atmosphere alongside the motifs:

Above are a selection of what I felt to be some of the more successful of the 12 compositions (well, if you can call these that.)/ images. 

This one is contrasting a very large and pretentious wizard beard, with a little witches hat, which is supposed to speak of the misogyny humorously covered in Terry Pratchett's 'Equal Rites' novel. The yellow behind is an ink drawing of some sea life, and it is supposed to give off an impression of magic and power. 

A negative for this image is that its just floating on a white page, total disregard for the frame. I like the imagery being attempted here though, could be quite fun with a bit more care, colour and texture. 

In my general feedback someone wrote that they quite liked this, not the most constructive thing to have said, but it makes me want to try more of it, as I quite liked the playful repetition of it and think that the general colours and aesthetics link back to the more humorous theme that I am definitely trying to convey.

Some interesting textures, and maybe even the overall scene, but roughly ripped out tissue paper a good look here.

Deep sea photocopied imagery giving a nice sense of atmosphere of fantasy and magic in this piece.

An attempt at trying to contrast a witches and wizards hat. I was aiming to make the wizards hat look superior to the witches hat, this image is rather crude, but I think this idea might have some scope.

Interim Crit

Peer Review Feedback

Before I showed my work to anyone else my opinion of it was generally quite low, I didn't think that these 12 images were very good at all, I thought some of them were pretty awful. They just felt so messy and vague but not really achieving enough to me, in what they were trying to convey (my motifs and such forth). However this from of general feed back on them made me reevaluate and see them with a slightly fresher pair of eyes. The general sense I got from this comments sheet was that my work was showing:

• 'Lots of exploration'
• 'Loads of textures'
• 'Interesting textures'
• 'Good experimentation'

Being messy and experimental is something that comes naturally to me, so I shouldn't be surprised by this, but it was nice to know that some of this could almost be regarded as good, or at least heading in a positive direction. (Unless everyone was just being polite, which is kind but totally unhelpful).

Self Evaluation pointer sheet

Interesting and Useful things that have happened so far:

• These textures (That have not come out so well on this particular scan, but can be found in my visual journal) are some of the more successful ones that I have created, I like the look and feel of them. When I was making them I had in my mind the description, found in several of the Discworld books, of an 8th extra and brand new colour that is almost synonymous with magic. I imagine purple as being the closest thing to this. I was mostly wanting to try and inspire an atmosphere of magic, creation, strange new places. The use of the deep seal life imagery definitely plays on of the biggest parts in helping to achieve this. 
• Some interesting and nice line work. 
• Nice textural bases, I think I will keep creating textures like these to cut out for collage and such forth.
• I found the use of photography of deep sea life used as textures created really interesting sense of atmospheres and scenes which helped to show off my intangible theme of magic, and convey a very different and intense fantasy world.
• The wizard and witch hats are successful to conveying my themes (humour, magic, fantasy cliche...)

Things that were't so successful, (and how might I move on from these):

• My selection of motifs. I would like to have a lot more of them, and for those to be more powerful and describe a bit more of my author/his themes.
• My drawing/image making quality. I want to attempt more refinement, and generally produce images of a higher quality that are more detailed.
• I need to have more experimentation and play in my sketchbook.
• Practise some more collage/textural work (as this is a process that could look quite good in an animation), and create some better images this way.

General Notions:

• I was beginning to get successful at creating intangible elements of feelings to my work, such as atmospheres of 'strange' and 'magic', however I need to go and refine my motifs or my characters, or what every specific imagery that I might want to convey, as this side of my work was a lot weaker.
• I found it quite difficult to get my head around what I was trying to achieve with these. My motifs did not feel strong enough and this really showed here.
• I must fins an area of focus, and pick some much better motifs and themes.

Collage

Motifs from a directory of lines

My motifs drawn from my directory of lines. Some produced some quite nice results. I enlarged some of these pictures in the Issue publication. The collage work was also showing some success. Most images had a relatively nice expressive nature about them.

The motifs That I am focusing on here are:

• Strange and Large beards
• Octopus limbs (because eight is a very magical number in the Discworld, and their tentacles are like some of the strange and magical creatures there)
• Witches Hats
• Wizards Hats

Peer Review Session

Comments from my peer review session on my current motifs:

My motifs are not as strong as might be best perhaps, but in general feedback told me that my symbolism was pretty good. 

To summarise, the themes/motifs that I focused on for these line drawing tasks were:

 - Running away

- Wizard Hats

- Long Beards

- Lots of Limbs

These were to highlight the fantasy and magical nature of Terry Pratchett's Disc World books, and what goes on in a lot of the plot lines. These particular motifs to me also come across as being quite humorous, which is one of the biggest factors in these books. 

Need to work on:

• My use of space, most of my motifs I have just drawn floating in the centre. It might be early days but thats no excuse for poor composition! lol. 
• Start playing with scale to perhaps further my slight undercurrent theme of humour.
• Mix up and combine more of my images and drawing.
• I would like to find better motifs to represent my author, or find a way to portray some of the wittier observations and small mocking swipes at society, as Terry Pratchett's wit is one of my favourite things about his writings, I'd like to make a bigger deal of it.

Initial Brainstorming

I created some mind maps and some general expressive drawing sheets to get into the swing of idea generation and exploring Terry Pratchett and his work. I just worked loosely and freely (not letting myself look at any reference at all) and had fun imaging some of his characters and how they might look and behave. It was fun to try and draw Death's character. I drew Rincewind the wizard falling because I always imagine him getting into trouble or falling over and off things in his many sticky situations. 

Summer Research and Presentation.

Here is some of my summer research that I considered for the creation of my presentation.

George Orwell

Terry Pratchett

My Presentation on Terry Pratchett

http://issuu.com/jessiebroad/docs/terry_pratchett/0

Peer feedback:

Points to take forward:

• This seems like it will suit and appeal to my creativity.  Some of the things I have discovered I'm really interested in and agree with. (Important to remember if I begin to doubt my choice of author.)
• Need to do some further research, particularly with regards to looking onwards to visual development.