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.

Animation

I've now got a 23 second animation using collage and photoshop with a stop frame technique. I haven't been blogging too much recently due to my new enthusiasm for Flickr, there's so much good stuff on there I keep spending ages flicking through peoples favourites that I like. Anyway back to the animation here's a few collages that I've made and I've either already used or am going to for it. suckkkkkkerrrrrrrrr.

My Mothers Crying Blood Dust Now

I've started using Flickr more, it definitely has a lot of plus's being able to favourite other peoples work you like as well as putting your own work up. The favouriting is quite handy as it acts as a collection of research material for my FMP. Anyway here's the link for mine http://www.flickr.com/photos/31113392@N07/ and a few cool things I found on there...

I've also started looking at experimental techniques to generate ideas for the outcomes of this project. I've begun using template shapes to draw characters on A1 sheets experimenting with different ideas and colours. I now need to start trying out different medias as all I have used is pen, pencil and photo montage.

After saying the song 3rd planet was related to my project I realised another song from the same Modest Mouse album, The Moon & The Antarctic, called "Wild Pack Of Family Dogs" sums up the new direction I have taken. In the song the Dad shoots one of the pack of dogs and their family dog ends up running away with the pack. The dogs then come back and as revenge they steal the dads daughter but her brother(the person who is telling this story in the song) accepts it as he see's the justice whilst his family are distraught.

anyway have a listen and ignore the idiots in the video.

The Universe Is Shaped Exactly Like The Earth When You Go Straight Along Enough You End Up Exactly Where You Were

After talking with my tutors today my vague ideas of what to do are slowly becoming more defined and focused I think. The whole idea I've come to is to do with humans destroying the Earth and nature and how in the future nature will fight back as the two become further and further apart and the only way nature can survive is by fighting back. This fits the broad Gaia concepts that living organisms on a planet will affect the nature of their environment in order to make the environment more suitable for life.

I've been listening to this song basically so much since starting this project. The lyrics and whole mood of the song link to what I'm doing I think in a way.

I'm going to start putting up more work hopefully, I just don't enjoy the whole scanning process.

THE STORY SO FAR...

Now Easter has definitely finished and college has started again I thought I should evaluate my progress in my research so far.

After choosing a monstrous subject: The Future to base my project on I was hoping through research I could narrow it down to a fine point and carry on with that direction. That has been a harder task than I thought but so far I feel I'm going somewhere with my research and ideas.

First thing I think the quote 'Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future' by Wilde is a quote that summarises where I sort of knew I wanted to go with my work with the whole idea of the world getting worse, humans ruining it and themselves (because no one wants to draw happy people.) This is a quote I feel I can work with even if I don't directly relate to it and has led to me to start thinking about the enviroment and how we're destroying it but also the recent economy crises and how we're even managing to destroy this made-up, all powerful, fictitious thing called the economy. Not only are we destroying it but we're letting it destroy us.

This whole idea of me thinking about the economy and the environment was in progress when I managed to end up on a book review about the baby boomers and how they've ruined our futures. Not only are we going to have to pay ridiculous taxes for their pensions but also have been the wealthiest generation. Money aside they've also probably been one of the most influential generations on the downfall of the environment and increase of pollution, leaving us with this poisonous toxic society that we live in. So although this doesn't strictly fit into Wilde's quote in a weird way it sort of does proving the point that modern society is full of pollution and stress leading to sin.

Along with the ideas above I've been thinking about the rapid increase in population and how there's only so many houses you can make with a functional world still existing. This is something which like the baby boomers is relevant to my life now as it will be in the future with England being the most densely populated country in Europe (possibly the world?) Anyway this thought process made me think J.G. Ballads book High Rise could be an interesting read as it is about a society of people in a tower block who have everyone and everything they need(according to them) surrounding them so they eventually spend all their time inside this human built world in the sky and it all goes horribly wrong(I think I haven't actually read all of it yet).

After Geoff's presentation in college I have also begun to revaluate how I do my research; instead of just looking at directly related research I've started to broaden it by looking at different things that could influence my drawings and colour schemes I like. I have also started to put together an A1 sheet of landscape influences, with photocopies, illustrations and making collages from landscape images. I'm going to do this for my character design for the people in the future and also the machines and technology so I have a few A1 pages of research that I can easily reffer to when drawing my initial ideas and final projects.

After this week I'm going to start slowing down my research by spending next week experimenting and figuring out a concrete final idea with plans and sketches of alternate ways I can make it so in two-two and a half weeks I should be able to just get on with my final piece.

GORE AND NAZI PORN POSTERS

I found this website called www.thewrongsideofart.com which seems to have every weird amazing film poster ever made. All the genres from aliens to nazixploitation to sex education films. I don't know why blockbusters these days fail to have posters that don't seem like they've had the same fancy photoshop template as every other film. Surely if they can make such amazing posters for some b movie that never really made any money let alone be remembered, they can't for any of the new ones. These posters just seem to tell you so much about the film which I think these days they don't.

First of all I started looking at the Naziploitation one's, naturally. Nazi art and the whole design of their campaigns has always been admirable and probably quite groundbreaking even if some wouldn't want to admit it. But one way of making something better is by adding seductive women. i like the way the first two of these try to stick to the original look of nazi posters making it almost subtle that they're not propaganda from the 1930's, which you later realise by the nudity and cleavages. This sort of poster art and the layouts are something I want to explore for my final major project as the layout is very important and something I fail at, at times.

I then moved onto looking at the more obvious gore and Sci-fi posters which never fail to amaze me. As much as I'd like to say I will do some illustrations like these it would be kidding myself but in any case they're nice to look at as inspiration seeings as my drawings will be of the future so Sci-fi art and illustration is something I feel will be important in my research.

RICHARD CHASEMORE

I bumped into the illustration of Richard Chasemore by accident online but after having a look at his work I love how technical it is and the way he draws machines. He does the drawings for Dorling Kindersly books as well as Star Wars. I'd like to be able to produce such detail in my work, I'm going to start studying images to enhance my drawing as this is something I have not done enough this year so better late than never.