Sunday 31 January 2016

Freedom & Liberty: "Updates"

Well this sucks.

My plan for Freedom & Liberty is to make a film on location in various parts of London. So far it has proven to be a nightmare.

Firstly, I cannot believe that we only get given two weeks to pull it off. I've used the first week to generate ideas and yesterday I went out to photograph suitable locations to help, but now I only have one week to create a storyboard, assemble a cast and go off to film it, and I know this is going to be tricky because everyone around me that I know will be very busy with what they're doing. If I am going to make a fresh, clean and convincing storyboard, I'll need way much more time than this. Here is part of that storyboard and it looks absolutely terrible, because it is being rushed just for the sake of meeting an unreasonable deadline.

The only project that I have really found any joy in so far this term is the advertising campaign from the first week. It was fun because I felt like our ideas were more fresh and more thought out as a team. With more people on hand we could work faster and reflect ideas off one another in order to create a genuine final product. The title sequence project was fun to a certain extent. The two week deadline put me alone under too much pressure, and thus my final outcome was rushed and sloppy and everybody hated it.

Don't say that these storyboards "Have a unique style" or "They have a charm to them". They're rubbish and you know it, and it's because this pressure is too unnecessary. I do, however, look forward to the Final Major Project. We have been encouraged to think about it for a while now and I feel like my idea is coming along nicely. All I'll need before actually filming it is to work out how I'm going to obtain the props and cast necessary.



Tuesday 26 January 2016

Freedom & Liberty: Gallery Visits and Inspiration

The two exhibitions from today which I think I really got a lot of strong influence from were Matteo Palmieri's Visions Of Paradise at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square and Champagne Life at the Saatchi Gallery.

Palmieri studied the ancient writings of Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, which influenced his writing on the virtues of an ideal citizen. Palmieri commissioned Francesco Botticini to paint Assumption Of The Virgin, which reflects his own vision of Heaven that he described in his writings. It portrays a woman that is praying up at the sky where a congregation of people have gathered to look down on the land. It looks like she really wants to join these people and is ignoring the land that she's on. What I got out of this was that freedom and liberty is equal to death. Depressing, but it feels true in a way and could have some influence on my work.

I much preferred Champagne Life. A small exhibition, each piece is a black and white photo that has a cartoon character imposed over it. The characters contrast greatly to the scenery around them. Much of the photos portray middle class working people that are often lonely, and each caricature is very diverse in nature. It's as if they are all expressions of what the people in the photo are thinking, which tells me that freedom only exists in the imagination. While it made less of an impact on me like Visions Of Paradise did, it still feels like a legitimate concept and one that I can relate to.

Wednesday 20 January 2016

Title Sequence Project: Progress

I chose to take on the title sequence project because, at first, it sounded very interesting and wanted to see how well I could handle it. My Western one is an animation and I am having terrible difficulties trying to finish it; I have all the components for it, but it's compressing it and running it through several different softwares that it complicated and slow. Complicated and slow isn't bad; what is really bugging me is that we've only had two weeks to plan and execute everything. If we had loads more time then, to me, everything would feel more fresh and have even more potential. I also don't have a great deal of experience in sound design or music, so trying to create a remix of the main theme feels very out-of-reach.

I have three rough ideas for my final major project, although they aren't really very big or deep ones. Hopefully we can all influence one-another at the crits.

Friday 15 January 2016

Title Sequence Project: Changes

Tom announced this morning that the amount of title sequences that we have to make has been reduced to two...just as I finish drawing all four typefaces I was making for each of them. While this has relieved a lot of the stress so far, it does mean I'll have to compromise.

Typography





These are my typography designs for the title sequence project. I tried to think very carefully about what the key themes and moods were for each movie genre and what was needed to be evoked.

Wednesday 13 January 2016

Title Sequence Research





Yesterday I watched four films in four of the specific genres we had to focus on. I have analysed each one and how they work, which should be helpful when making my title sequence and how each character/name is presented. I aim to start work on the storyboards tomorrow.

Monday 11 January 2016

Typography Workshop


This was a warm-up exercise to get us to get the hang of typography and layout. I chose to take on the description of a thriller called "Finger Of Guilt". To make this, I tried to draw what I thought the feelings of guilt and pursuit looked like, and converge it into a typeface. This is what I got and I felt like it was very fun, even if most of the emphasis is on the drawing rather than the typeface. Then again, when you feel guilty, you feel small and it's like everything is imploding inside you.

Tomorrow I aim to get started on researching the way that title sequences work in a variety of movie genres, such as Spaghetti Westerns and TV Drama.

Monday 4 January 2016

Advertising Campaign: Grey




The first week back and we've been given a task to make an advertising campaign for a specific word. We have to work in groups to make a 1-minute film, 30-second film and a series of photographs. The word that my group and I got was "Grey". It has been very tricky and it started off with us making all sorts of funny puns; we're going to give ourselves until tomorrow to generate and settle with final ideas, and then the next two days we'll start making things.

I will be mainly carrying out the photography bit (but I do aim to show up to help the others with filming), and I feel that I have quite a strong idea. Grey is a colour often associated with bleakness. We've been really struggling with ideas, which I realise is something that I've been through a few times in the past, but I've always found a way in the end. For my idea, I propose to show that going through grey moments are inevitable, but if we stay strong and don't quit, the colour and fulfilment of it will soon find its way and things will be better.

Now all I have to do is think of suitable locations for it.