Research - Mental Health

Time to Change - Get the Picture

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/getthepicture

This was a great article on about mental health, and how campaigns that show miserable pleople cluthing their heads are out dates, and not really helpful. In fact surveys suggest that these types of images can be damaging and have negative effects on people suffereing. "People with mental health problems don't look depressed all of the time".

It is quite a challenge to try and produce work that embodies this, but I wan't to at least give it a go and try and keep this in mind whilst I work. 

Here are a few drawings that I produced in response to this. With the horse I throught about the frustration and many other struggles that a person can have within themselves when they have depression. I think glimmers of these different emotions do show through, but it's not clear enough to others, this idea will need a lot more practice.

I think this artical has affirmed a bit more for me though that in genereal terms of a campaign I would prefere to steer clear of usning human faces, and use animals instead. Animals take things back to a much more basic and emotional level. There is much more simplicity with using them to represent and describe mental health.

I will continue to explore trying to use non human characters, in a bid to step away from cliche's and steryotypes, and the stigma that surrounds mental heatlh.

Yard Sit

Visual Journal Development:

I just had a lot of fun putting this sketchbook drawing of my back yard in leeds, and really experimentally puttting it through photoshop.

I still haven't managed to develop it to a leevl where it works yet. It's just a bit too mad and busy. Some interesting things going on though, perhaps all I need to do it find the right way to mute the crazy photograph textures. The image has the potential to have some quite interesting depth.

Interflora

Contextual Research

One of the things that I would like to create as a part of my proposed campaign for Interflora is a web banner, so I have been looking at some other examples of them to get an idea for the format.

These are a pretty bad selection, but it gives me a good idea of the balance of image and text and their sizes that are needed.

Here are some of Interflora's own web banners:

Vice, Imagery for animations

Format decisions and character development for Vice Brief

Here is the text that Jake has been designing:

Although he created this, we still kept checking things with each other, the decision on the final font was an included one. A serif font was chosen in the end, as the aesthetic of this was more in keeping with that slightly traditional/classic British imagery that Rule Britannia goes for. At the end of this issue publication are Jake's finished versions of the type that we will include in the animation. The Rule Britannia is hand drawn in three variations, so that the three layers can be put in a little sequence and looped out, to give the text a sense of moving, this adds a bit more interest and life to our animation and enhances the aesthetic we are going for.

Sketchbook Extracts:

Some character development for the animations. A lot of these are based on the gangster that features in the fraud documentary.

Above are some considerations into how we want the layout of our animation to be. The two main formats that I proposed was firstly to have all of the characters blossom around the 'Rule Britannia' text, or secondly we thought we could have the initial text of 'A vice Original series' then use several frames to have some of the iconic characters from the series travel across the frame, until it can finish on the end text which is 'Rule Britannia'.

Here are some more of my sketches towards character development, and gearing towards getting them all into a good animation frame:

Interflora Flowers

These initial drawings are a bit rubbish, here are some of my early developments before I put them through photoshop. There are a few glimmers of success in the drawings that contain several flowers. Overall I would say that these drawings need to become more multi dimensional and be much more delicate and expressive. 

I tried to research what type of flowers would be used for grandparents day bouquets on their website but it didn't come up with any sure results. So I decided to visit a local florist that endorsed Interflora. Since Grandparents days is in Autumn, I think I will just draw very seasnally appropriate flowers.

Feedback from Design Proposals

Here is our feedback from todays crit, it was quite helpful and now we have a good set of aims and things that we can work on (see two sheets below):

Here are some of the already entered ones, this is some of what we are competing against:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vice+d%26ad+ident

So far the standard is quite mixed, there is a lot of mixed media and graphic work in there, not as much Illustrative work.

Things that will Set our work out from the rest/ "5 Reason's why we should win":

• Our work is aiming to be quite reflective of the humours and undercover nature of 'Rule Britannia', it should be more reflective of the brand than the current ident.
• Better font
• Interesting things going on, something that each time you look at you might see something new, since it is something that will be replayed a lot, this might keep it that bit more interesting than others.

Organisation and keeping on track

To help keep on track with what we both need to do for this brief and when I drew up and we have been keeping as close as possible to this little organisational timetable, to help us keep in check with the timescales of this.

Geroge Stubbs

George Stubbs has been referred to as one of the greatest painter of horses of all time. Looking at his works, that certainly doesn't seem to be such a fair fetched leap at all. I couldn't resist taking his book out and reading it when I spotted it in the library. He has many incredible anatomical studies of horses muscular structures/anatomy, which has clearly influenced the magnificent way that he can capture their form movement and likeness.

I enjoyed studing his book, and it got me thinking about pusing a questioning the physical structure, such as the horses skelleton in my drawings. And considering movement into drawings.

Anyway I've been drawing a lot of horses for this new module as a part of my characters and narrative focus.

The ink and overall feel of this horse is quite Ralph Steadman. I was actually thinking of him as a drew this one, I put down the expressive ink marks first, and then worked into it with the skelleton. It's quite an emotional piece, it is supposed to communicate the saddness of loss, and the strength of  memory/affection that would endure. The text helps a bit to communicate this, but overall these things only come through quite abstractly perhaps.

I wanted to have a practice and see if I could inject any level of feelings and emotions into my work.

Information for proposal boards

Vice and Rule Britannia

Vice is an online    that reports on some of Britain's youth culture. It s take on it is aimed to be a one that looks more undercover or reveals surprising things. There is a sense of humour loosely behind it 

Key words:

Youth

Youth Culture

Nefarious

Online Den

British

Undercover

Behind the scenes

Different/Surprising and New.

We need to create an ident that is perhaps somewhat iconic, and that celebrates all of that.

Contextual Research:

Hand drawn type:

Rule Britannia's Current Ident

At the moment their ident is very simple, a faded and tattered British flag waving in a stylised breeze that fades into 'Rule Britannia', the font isn't very exciting and doesn't really communicate anything extra about itself.