The Final Curtain

My Initial Proposal for the project was very open, I did this as I wanted to be able to narrow my direction through research and experimentation. Although this meant at times I became a bit lost and struggled with a clear vision of what I was doing I’m glad I chose to keep it open as it allowed me some freedom at the beginning of the project to discover a narrower path to take.

My research was a great starting point because watching films and reading books about the future helped me grasp others thoughts and inspired ideas of my own. It also led me into looking at Science Fiction artwork, like movie posters in books and on websites as well as comics such as “2000AD” and Johnny Ryan comics. Therefore my research helped me to start coming up with ideas for the final piece visually and conceptually.

My final piece was a low cost production as I just used black and white photocopies, black fine liner pens and my computer with programs I already had. I decided to use iMovie and Photoshop as these were programs that I was comfortable with and did what I needed, however in the future I’d like to try and use Flash, as I was unable to learn what I needed to in the time I left myself. All though I preferred Photoshop to taking stop frame photos, it was quite time consuming although had a professional finish at the end.

For looking at Film posters www.wrongsideoftheart.com had lots of weird B Movie posters, which I looked at a lot, specifically when thinking graphically about layout and colour schemes. I also moved from looking at people’s blogs on Blogspot to Flickr and looking at illustrators work on there and finding new illustrators that I liked through their favourites. It also allowed me to show my work and get feedback.

Another important way of getting feedback and generating ideas was by talking to talk to my peers and one to one tutorials because this helped me work out what I wanted to do with the project. Talking to my tutors was how I consolidated my initial ideas and research and decided to make it about the Gaia theory of how nature will defend itself in the future after the destruction of the Earth by humans.

I feel my time management was average as I stuck loosely to my time plan. However with the length of the project my enthusiasm and ability to generate ideas were not always constant meaning sometimes I would be able to create a lot more effective work then other times. Also with the amount of work and research I did, I didn’t leave myself enough time to learn Flash or to experiment with Screen Printing. Flash was less important as iMovie did everything I needed it to for the animation however if I’d done some screen printing it could of added depth to my drawings.

I have learnt that even when things seem to be quite difficult when generating ideas or consolidating them sometimes it works better just to do it anyway and try to ignore frustrations. This is something at times I could have done more and this would have improved my body of work for the final outcome. However I feel I have achieved my initial target to become more confident with my drawing with some successful experiments on a large as well as with colour. I also continued my joy of using photo montage and started to merge this with drawing even more in the project and taken it to a new media by using it in an animation. I will now look to continue these techniques experimenting further with them.