#l4intro

Finished magazine Group Collaboration - BCU

This lecture was about Protest and covered the themes of Empowerment, Subversion, Participation, Revolution, Activism and Rebellion. It started with the 1950's and the creation of the Teenager identity which was portrayed films such as 'Rebel without a cause'. 

The Lecture also spoke of the Black rights movement in America in the 1960′s where we saw the last speech of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. and the beautiful Poem "I know why the cage birds sing',1969 and "And still I rise", 1976 by Maya Angelou who also stood up for female rights and empowerment. The lecture then went on to tell us briefly about Ai WeiWei and his controversial artwork that aimed to fed light on corruption and cover ups in his countries government as well as being critical on their democracy, Human rights and policies. we also heard of Grayson Perry’s “The Walthamstow Tapestry” 2009 which is quite an interesting piece but personally not appealing to me because it looks too active and jumbled.

I liked the Anti-Fur poster done by David Bailey for Lynx UK, it was very graphically and sent the message clearly.I like the colour scheme of black and white then the red for impact which was highly effective.

This lecture was on Production, it spoke about printing production such as moveable types and wooden letter press used in the printing industry as well as Photographic art, even the production lines of the Ford Model T Ford of the 1920s in the machine industry.

The main things that appealed to me were Pop art and Bauhaus, I had expected to hear about Art deco during the lecture since it was about Production and Art deco was an art movement that focused around the new age of machines and mass production but it was not mentioned.

Pop Art is one of my favourite art movements mainly because of the rich colours and the comic style it has and its appeal of being 'young, fun and optimistic'. I liked how Pop art has various different styles but all were easy to mass produce which I think is important for design. The Bauhaus was also mentioned, their style of making futurist architecture and furniture is the most interesting of their time.

‘Error’ and ‘Obesity’ were the two words my group had to produce a full final outcome on, including a place we chose which is the Jewellery Quarter. Our project was based around Vyse Street in the Jewellery Quarter. As a group we found many things which linked to the two words perfectly together. At first when we got given our two words, we done a quick brainstorm on what the two words link to. By doing this we then linked the two words together on how they both represent the Jewellery Quarter. It was important to find a link between the words because without the link, the project wouldn’t have been successful.

By having discussed about the two words with each other we came up with a conclusion. But before we came up with a conclusion, we had other ideas on what we could link the words to. At first by visiting the area we had an insight on what we could base the project theme on. By visiting the Jewellery Quarter I knew it was a very wealthy area as Vyse street is full of Jewellery stores which specialises silver, gold and diamonds. Breaking each words down, error means mistake and obesity means overweight in simple terms. Whenever we hear the word ‘obesity’, the first thing that comes to our head is an over weight person and the word ‘Error’ means a mistake but there’s a deeper meaning to those words. Obesity and depression links together and by being depressed you want to search for something that gives you pleasure. This could be eating, drinking high level of fatty and sugary foods and drinks that make you pleased linking to the pleasure centre of your brain. This pleasure which people search for can damage your body but it’s an addiction which people suffer from. Then there comes the word ‘Error’ which links to people wanting to search for pleasure which slowly ruins their lifestyle and could lead to death. At first this is the theme what we wanted our group project on. Later on during the week we spoke to our tutor who gave us some idea and helped us break the words down even more. After that we came up with the conclusion which was to base it on marriage as both words link to marriage. The reason for this is people rarely get married out of love but for the status from which started off as the groom giving his bride an expensive ring which she can then show to others that she’s married and possesses an expensive ring. This represents the word obesity as it links to greed. After a divorce then that money has been wasted and if there was love then the love is gone, this then links to the word error. Error symbolises mistake, which by making that mistake leads to depression and death.

The group module was to explore the place together and understand different visual communications we could produce as a group. As a group we chose to make a film as it was something different and would gain some experience by producing it.

Our animated film is aimed towards existing couples, not just the people who live in the area but everyone else who’s going to be watching this film to inform them that marriage is something special and valuable and shouldn't be thrown away easily over something petty. Also to make people aware that status does not make a marriage last but love does. By having a happy marriage leads to having a happy life. This is the reason why we are targeting existing couples.

The task itself was pretty easy to understand, the only problem was gathering all the ideas together. In order to keep up to date with each other we set up a skype group where we shared each others ideas and any changes we want to the project. A lot of group meetings took place inside and outside of university. Also one of our group member who is going to be studying Film and Animation took some inspiration off other artists and directors and put it into our project.

The best ideas we came up were taking inspirations from other directors and artists, mixing them up and making something of our own. Artist which inspired us were Ben Heine and BLU. The reason why Ben inspired is by the way he draws images and hold it up against a scenery or building, changing it. We used this by drawing on acetates to create an animation. BLU inspired is by the way we used stop motion animation for the introduction of the film.

One thing we as a group found difficult in my opinion was before we were given the idea of story board we all created our own thing and tried putting it all together which didn’t work out. After we were advised to have a storyboard our project ran smoothly and more ideas came in. After gathering all the ideas together, Emily put the video together. After watching the video, we as a group gave her feedback on what to add and what to take out.

All illustrations were drawn on paper before they got transferred over to acetate. After having done the illustrations we used Adobe Photoshop to get rid of the backgrounds on the illustrations so that we can use it in the video. The tools which were used in Photoshop were the rectangular marquee tool, lasso tool and the magic want tool. After editing all the illustrations, we used Final Cut Pro to edit the film clips and merge them together.

In the whole process of thinking up the idea and putting things together, we came across some successful and some unsuccessful things. In some cases, we added some extra illustrations to the film which didn’t work out as it didn’t flow with the story line. I think the illustrations were done perfectly as before when the scenes used to switch, it used to be jumpy. In order to fix this, we had black title scene to split it up the clips, this would helpful towards the viewer as they will be able to follow it and know what’s going to happen. This was inspired through films in the Charlie Chaplin era.