Art Collective
Today, after writing a creative brief, Tom asked the class to brainstorm and make thumbnails for our chosen corporate identities. After two hours, we had a critique. He looked at all of us and said that this is the stuff that we burn and forget about. He’s seen so many logos and he knows our future employers have seen so many logos. It’s going to be a few rounds of making logos and “burning them” before finding something strong and unique that will be able to stand the test of time.
Current state of wordpress blog
Today, I dove into wordpress. I thought it would be easy, but I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing fairly early on. Towards the end of my workday–why did I put this off until they day before it’s due?!– I found this beautiful window (see below) which is a portal into my stylesheet. I think it’s incredibly difficult and annoying to edit the files in dreamweaver and put them back with all of that php floating around in the code, so much prefer to do some hand-coding and get things done in the browser.
I’m going to consider redesigning my mood board and getting the brand right because I don’t really know where I’m running this site. I still feel like I am finding out where the strings are connected like WordPress is a tangled marionette and someone has asked me to make it dance in a week. I’ll probably make massive progress tomorrow after I figure out the branding for my company.
Today’s attendance was less than usual. To boost numbers, we made drawing club posters. The assignment: draw something drawing itself.
Friday, we brought in samples of posters. All kinds. A typographic poster, an event poster, a poster which educates/informs, a silk screened poster, a show poster, a interactive poster, a letterpressed poster, I brought one of each as did every other classmate and we looked at them in their respective groups. The posters seemed to fit within their genres because the media informs the poster. Letterpress is constricted by color, often characterized by using the grid and typography. Full-flood and knocked out type are difficult because of how the ink is spread. The informational posters needed the right content and context to seem valuable. They were sanserif mostly and the good ones had intriguing headlines. A good poster surprises you, goes above expectations a little. Expectations change from genre to genre. Expectations and Context: It could be fantastic in the right environment (read: Dentist’s office). Good: utilizing the medium, content and cohesion. Let the image and type interact or inform one another. It helps cement your idea into a full impact.
Interactive Posters
Interactive is an interesting genre. It doesn’t mean websites, necessarily. The formula for a good interactive poster: good use of material (medium) + idea + expression + interaction. Some interactive posters invite the viewer to take something away (The Most Brilliantly Pointless Street Flyers | Happy Place.) With the evolution of technology, interactive posters are becoming more commonplace (read: QR codes). Sometimes, it’s about having a captive audience. Maybe the poster is on-site, like when you’re waiting at a bus station. An inexpensive dispenser of some kind might be just the hook that makes the brand memorable.
Tell a Story
A poster needs to be engaging. To do that it must be simplified so it gets to the heart of the message quick. Get rid of the stuff that doesn’t tell the story. You are taking your viewer on a little ride, they need to know where to start (1) emotional hook. Get them engaged visually with something striking. A poster that changes a space draws attention to it like a magnet. Try to research where your poster might ultimately be and try to engage the space. (2) Emerging text. Use scale, position, negative space, information hierarchy and consistency to guide them through the piece, telling the story with the punchline at the end. (3) The reward. Bad posters conceptually show too much. When telling your story, a little bit of a missing puzzle piece, something subtle will allow the reader to connect with it as if he or she is laughing along with you in a shared secret. Or something evoking like an ambiguous ending or provoking like a discordant juxtaposition that raises questions.
“When I get an idea I ask myself three questions: ‘Is it beautiful? Is it smart? and does it meet the goal of the end use and the person who pays my bills?’” -Seymour Chwast
Sprint 1: Research
Link
Director:
Concept:
Era:
Notes:
credits:
9 Best Music Videos of 2012 | 9. Grimes, “Oblivion” | TIME.com.
Director: Emily Kai Block
Concept: Football Game/ Motorcross
Era: 80’s, sparkly wardrobe, boombox, bulky headphones
Notes: Recorded at a live event with unsuspecting extras?
credits: beginning credits
HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right) (Explicit) – YouTube.
Director: Director X
Concept: Bar-Mitzfah
Era: Contemporary
Notes: dancing, slo-mo
credits: some intro text, credit to the director in the beginning and at the end
Hot Cheetos & Takis [HD] – YouTube.
Director: 13twentythree Photography
Concept: Playground Rap
Era: 80s rap culture
Notes: frequent cuts back and forth on the beat, children extras
credits: title of song at the beginning, graffiti typeface for title and end credit to group Y.N. Rich Kids
Jack White – Sixteen Saltines – YouTube.
Director: AG Rojas
Concept: Montage of Surreal Mischief
Era: 90s
Notes: special effects, body paint, children extras
credits: none
Director:Romain Gavras
Concept: (see below)
Era: 80s ?
Notes: drag racing
credits: a copyright line, white on black at the end
“Director Romain Gavras takes all the live-fast-die-young absurdities of rap videos—speeding cars, dazzling stunts and provocative women—and transports them to a bombed-out desert, where they are quickly rendered into nothing but gimmicks in a stunning satire. The result is a chaotic cavalcade of insane feats, wacky dance moves and, as is typical of M.I.A., a deeply political streak running through it. The most arresting image is of M.I.A. nonchalantly filing her nails on top of a car as it careens on two wheels, which is simultaneously invigorating, frightening— and completely bad ass.”
via 9 Best Music Videos of 2012 | 4. M.I.A., “Bad Girls” | TIME.com.
Explosions In The Sky – “Postcard From 1952” music video (HD) – YouTube.
Director: Peter Simonite and Annie Gunn
Concept: Nostalgia
Era: 50s
Notes: slo-mo, people and children playing
credits: none
Aimee Mann – Labrador – YouTube.
Director: Tom Scharpling
Concept: (See below)
Era:
Notes:
credits: interview-news style credits
The video stars John Hamm as an overbearing version of director Tom Scharpling—portraying him as a greasy huckster video director who wants to do a shot-for-shot remake of ‘Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry.” (Students of the ’80s will recall that Til Tuesday was the group Mann fronted before her solo career.) In the video Mann balks at the concept, but claims she was tricked into signing a contract and is now obligated to go forward with it. The result is exactly what you’d expect: A mind-blowingly hilarious shot-for-shot remake of “Voices Carry” with Superchunk/The Mountain Goats’ drummer Jon Wurster standing in for the vaguely abusive boyfriend and a cameo by Ted Leo in an atrocious wig. The laugh-out-loud video is the perfect antidote to “Labrador,” the somewhat depressing song off of Mann’s Charmer LP about a hopelessly one-sided relationship.
via 9 Best Music Videos of 2012 | 2. Aimee Mann, “Labrador” | TIME.com.
Director: Claire Boucher
Concept: Surreal Post-Apocalypse?
Era: 2010s
Notes: live snakes, elaborate wardrobes, riding in a car, band of characters, dancing
credits: dancing with fireworks
Wilco – “Sunloathe” – YouTube.
Director: Directed by Peter Glantz. Art by Nathaniel Murphy.
Concept: Fantasy monsters
Era: 70s
Notes: made up critters, mixed media, clay-mation with traditional animation, patterns
credits: animated name of song and band at beginning
Kanye West [MERCY] ft. Big Sean, Pusha T, and 2 Chainz on Vimeo
Director: NABIL
Concept: Geometric space (parking lot?)
Era: 2000s
Notes: hide and reveal characters, black and white, surreal space
credits: end copyright line
Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game on Vimeo
Director: Phillip Andelman
Concept: Librarian stuck at a bad day at work
Era: 60s?
Notes: Starring Helena Bonham Catter
credits:
Something I noticed about some of them: they give a reason for the video to end, snuffing out a flame, panning away,
WINTER AFTER EFFECTS PROJECT
This quarter, I am planning on working with Matt Nyce and his band, WIMPS, to create a music video to their song “Nap.” From, mood boards, to story boards, to shooting, editing and producing the youtube video with links at the end of the video. I anticipate this (with some focus) will take 5 weeks, then in the following 4 weeks, I will make a video (with a similar process) for my portfolio website introducing myself like this one: : ) by Steven Harrington – YouTube. Building off of my project last quarter, I will be using After Effects integrated with video to create a unique and engaging experience. Additionally, I’m working on concepting skills, working with others, art-direction, planning, video, technical challenges like uploading to YouTube, adding links and self-promotion.
Drawing club. We drew this together. We did the collaborative drawing exercise, drawings that we took turns drawing one line at a time until a vague picture formed then each of us reinterpreted the drawing. This is a great exercise when you don’t know what to draw. The bottom drawings are when we worked on a picture for fifteen minutes then switched and added to the other person’s drawing.
As part of the first exercise for logo class, Tom had a list of random words and verbs, assigning to each student a new brand. The goal is a pictorial logo, my brand: Prancing Pirate. I generated word maps with some dictionary definitions and inspiration from Google Images search. I started off pretty cartoony and then slimmed them down to the essence.
Kismet Arts Tangent 