#nm2208

Hello world,

I’m choosing to nominate Christie’s post on her advert sequence (Project 1B)!

http://viscoms.tumblr.com/post/152067454082/project-1b-image-2-so-project-1b-image-2-is-my

In my unimportant opinion, a good discussion post covers new ground with some references to our existing knowledge, so that it’s easy to understand.

I like how she explored a lot deeper with the nature of line thickness, and how the lines of a figure or the lines of the ground have differing requirements if we want to imply movement. In that sense, she has successfully discussed and added new ideas to our existing knowledge about line drawings that we may not have had time to explore!

NM2208 Project 2 - Independent Narrative

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“The Oppressiveness of the Mobile“

Digital mobile technology has penetrated every part of our lives – from our conversations, to our working places, and as multiple forms of entertainment. In truth, it is harder to determine what technology has NOT transformed...

Social media has erased the boundaries between private and public space – with individuals uploading and vetting their entire lives online to express an idyllic, perfect existence. We judge our worth now through likes and shares – each one giving us shots of dopamine as we feel more reassured that people care about us for our unique selves.

Internet speak is now bizarrely inane – with viral memes and strange colloquialisms substituting clear and concise conversations. One-to-one messages have been truncated to little more than utterances of "LOL" and similarly dense abbreviations.

Consumer culture, now mutated into a driver of global conglomerate industries, invades our minds – purchases from across the world now being accessed with a tap of our screens. Augmented reality creatures become the object of our affection, and our dying passions.

Such is what humanity has reduced itself to.

A singularity of ones and zeros. On the move. Everywhere.

That is the oppressiveness of the mobile.

And nobody can rebel against it.

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Project 2 Progress Post

The main message for my narrative project would be a cautionary tale about how we have been using mobile media - everyday commuters become anonymous by burying their faces into their phones, and I wanted to bring across a sense of dread with regards to that phenomena. In a sense, have we lost a chunk of our humanity in the process of worldwide mobile device adoption?

My comic follows a very basic structure (top-down, left-right) - but I wanted to play around with the Gestalt Principles of both movement and proximity.

Proximity was enacted with the panels in page 1 being very close to one another - according to our lectures, this has the effect of making them feel like a group. At the same time, each panel is varied in the composition of its background elements to create a sense of harmony.

Week 11 – Storyboard for Independent Narrative Project

Concept

12-part image series depicting a warrior killing a dragon to save a princess, and it is revealed at the end that the warrior is a woman. (Also, maybe princess turns out to be male.)

Feminist/gender-fluid retelling of typified archetypes.

Story

Pt 1: Princess trapped in castle with flying dragon. Close-up on dragon. Close-up on princess. Close-up on warrior.

Pt 2: Warrior charges forward. Warrior fights with dragon. Zoom out to sky and birds (show long process of fighting)

Pt 3: Dragon defeated. Warrior runs towards castle and retrieves princess. Princess is shown thankful. Warrior takes off helmet and reveals a woman. Princess takes off head and reveals man.

Execution

Square format, small, and bounded, imitating a child’s storybook

Thinking about Gestalt Principles got me into a mood to critique video game cover artwork! The cover art for a video game often speaks volumes about its content to potential consumers - if it is unappealing, people might get turned off without even considering a purchase.

With that in mind, let’s look at some video game cover art I dug up.

1. Contact

This was a fairly aged title called “Contact” - it’s known for being quirky and weird, but as we can see here, the cover art went for something quire basic.

As mentioned in the lecture, the differences in contrast between the figure and the ground can make or break an image. Here we can see that the use of white for the ground gives the artwork primary emphasis on the figures (the boy and the title logo) as they are easily distinguished from the ground, which is more or less uncluttered.

Something interesting is occurring in the background, however - a crack and an afterimage of the boy (albeit without color) are present. Despite the similar silhouette of the boy, a lack of color is enough to distinguish him from the figure. The crack marks, which are distorting this colorless image, implies that the ground is actually a mirror!

In this sense, the crack itself presents an unorthodox type of closure - the white space, as well as the boy’s afterimage, experience a gap from these black lines - to complete the image, or minds are forced to perceive the ground plane as some sort of reflective surface!

2. Azure Striker Gunvolt [English]

Here we can see might observe Gestalt Principles applied to limited success.

The line bisecting the image diagonally splits the image into two halves (it is two games in one)

At first this feels a little obtuse - but, notice the main protagonist (with blonde hair) is also arranged in such a manner that his heads (and hair, which contrasts strongly with the predominant blues of the image) are juxtaposed diagonally with one another as well, in the opposite direction of the big black line. This almost gives the image a sense of continuity in the mental shape of two diagonals forming an "X" through the image!

Notice also that due to the image's use of strong contrasts in the ground, the title logo (which we will consider the figure) is a little harder to perceive clearly - they had to give it white boundaries to make the title logo stand out better among the VERY busy background!

It seems the Japanese version of this game fared better....

3. Azure Striker Gunvolt [Japanese]

Here, the emphasis is a lot clearer, with the title logo being the element bisecting the image into two! It still has the same white borders, but less so - perhaps to make it meld into the ground and emphasis this vertical function!

Notice that the logo is blue and red in a manner that roughly corresponds with the ground images as well! The image is thus bisected by colors (blue versus red) to emphasis the narrative of a two-sided conflict!

Overall this one seems more appealing to me than the former English example - it has clearly similarity on each side of the image, and a much more interesting use of the logo to imply a continuity down the middle of the image, splitting it into two!

4. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

The rectangles are situated so close to each other that they seem to represent a unified whole - yet the characters within face different angles, breaking the repetitiveness of the similar shapes and simple use of proximity that unites them.

The logo has a distinct diagonal orientation due to the arm pointing outwards - this has the effects of continuity along it, which also has the effects of breaking up the monotony of the vertical rectangles behind. It also has the dual function of distinguishing this logo (the figure) from the background images and shapes.

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Breaking down these images common to me was very enlightening! It taught me that very clear techniques are present for making a particular element of an image stand out. For video game cover art - it seems to be very important to emphasize the title logo, and Gestalt Principles have indeed been applied to great effect in many cases!

PROJECT 1a:

GRAPHIC ILLUSTRATION : Attack of the Chihuahua (A3 Collage)

Using the following source images, I’ve created a kitschy collage of a city under siege by a bone-laser-shooting bug-eyed chihuahua.

1. Chihuahua (Jersey, 2016):

Scaling up the chihuahua’s eyes, I created large bug eyes to give it its alien-like look, borrowing from my experimentation from Scale.

2. San Francisco Skyline (Wikimedia Commons, n.d.)

The skyline was probably the most “in-scale” item of this collage, so the only adjustment was to scale it up to A3-size.

3. Bone (Petco, n.d.)

Bones were scaled to various sizes to depict motion and size. Bones of increasing sizes “emerging” from the dog’s eyes grant an illusion of movement, as if the bones were approaching the viewer, or the direction of the viewer.

Bones were also “crossed” against each other and paired with a face (deconstructed toilet seat) to create floating skulls – meant to depict death or floating souls of the departed.

4. Toilet Seat (Walmart.com, n.d.)

As was witnessed in Week 5′s experimentation with Deconstruction, a toilet seat can indeed make a face (giving new meaning to the term shitface). By also pairing the toilet with an apocalyptic scene of a city under attack by a monster chihuahua, it could be read, metaphorically, that the dog is giving humans a shitty death.

Toilet seats were also deconstructed to form “laser beams” for flying plates to shoot.

5. Plates (keyword-suggestions.com, n.d.)

Plates, when placed above a skyline appear to be flying saucers, a fitting accompaniment to a domestic animal destroying the city.

6. Kanye, Daniel Craig, and Kim Kardashian (Pinterest.com, n.d.; Abcnews.com, n.d.; Kelly, 2015)

Undeniably, these source images were used to create a sense of crowdedness and human victimisation. Repetition was used to create a crowd of people, and some characters were deconstructed to depict damage and death, borrowing from my experimentation from Deconstruction.

Considerations

A3 instead of A4

I decided to do this on an A3 block of paper as I had expected the scale of the “human victims” to be much smaller than that of the dog; if the dog occupied the height of the canvas, the “human victims” would be scaled down to an inconvenient extent should it have been done on an A4 paper.

Altering Scales and Using Repetition

Scale was very important in this collage as it communicated not only size, but depth. In this collage, I used varying sizes of objects to make stationery figures “move”. Coupling this movement with the repetition of characters creates a disturbing yet comical cacophony.

Idea

Week 7 Homework: Disturb (v. 2)

Using the source images from the previous weeks, I constructed an image that, well, may truly be considered disturbing.

What I like about this experimentation was realising that size/scale of an image actually creates a sense of depth when placed in contrast with another image. Because Kanye is slightly smaller than Kim, it appears as if he is jumping/breaking apart a few metres behind Kim.

On the other hand, the dogs, being of a comparable size to Kim, look as though they are not that far away, if not, at the same plane as her.