FAKE I.D

The lecture was conducted by Yvan martinez and Joshua Tree of FAKE ID. the lecture was like the strangest thing ever. it reminds me of how we do our critical studies presentation where every one seem to read from a piece of paper.

as the lecture went on, i was thinking the mood was going to change or the line of conversation but it was really shorking to see that the lecture ended the way it started.

I tried my best to grasp what they were saying. An interesting thing about the concept of narration and limiting visuals.

I was really looking forward to having them talk about their work which they didn't but rather was talking about their influences and how it impact on their work and talked more about the self initiated and educational project.

the only thing i got out of the lecture was the fact that narration is a very powerful tool. even in the absence of images. a narrative should be strong enough to sand and capture attention on it own.

Evaluation

Working on this professional practise module was a very exciting thing. Though I did not get up and running with my blog at the start but as soon I got the hangs of it, it was really fun. The module afforded me the chance to look into design form a very broad perspective. Not only limited to work in motion graphics but also looking at graphic design, photography, and illustration. It also made me appreciate a lot of the big design blogs around. How much effort and time is put together to get such rich contents that grace their sites.

The general operations and logistic of the blog reminds me of creating a web page. Though i don’t do the codes but it was fun to link still images and link to a website from my blog to other sites but would have preferred it if they had a setting that will not allow the new site load over my blog. Like a load in another window option that happened by default without right clicking to choose that option.

The contact report, though challenging for me, I was happy to have been able to get to physical portfolio crit (Michael Tabner and Richard Malcolm) and some verbal and online feed back and advice from my vimeo page. I think I will really like to revisit this blog and those of my class mate as the bulk of work I had to do during the session did not afford me the time to really look into all their blog but they all had very interesting stuff I’ll want to catch up on on my own personal time to expound my personal research base.

For the blog, I think what limited my research was that I was taking a lot of time and putting a lot of details to each post. Talking about a particular piece of work, the company responsible, looking at other works and in some cases comparing them. which took a lot of time. As what I found out later in this module and from researching into other blogs, they mostly keep it short and simple. Just talk about a particular piece of work and then give a link to the web address. Though I still feel that quick brief description of a piece of work without further investigation into the company may not have met the criteria for this module.

I did make some interesting finding and connections with designers, their work and processes during this module and I hope to further investigate and look into other design blog as I find that it is a quick, effective and relevant way to keep tabs with present goings in the design industry.

FILM TITLES - collection

Title sequence has gradually and successfully taken the front role position in the presentation of a film. It has become the means through which movie producers make the first impression. Both Hollywood and independent studios today spend a lot of resources and valuable time conceptualising the title that precede their film.

I have always loved the concept and role that the title of a film plays within a film. The possibilities that it bring to the film that was why I was compelled once again to do my dissertation for my final year on title sequence. ‘TITLE SEQUENCE AN EXTENTION OF A FILM’

This submarine site is a site that is dedicated to showcasing the very best and memorable title sequences. As far as they are concerned, viewers should have had enough after seeing the title / opening credit of a film that is why their slogan is @ Forget the film watch the title’

Titles on this sites are categorised into Animation, Motion Graphics, mixed media and 3D. it has a huge achieve of titles that will be enough for content for a research project as well as a source of inspiration and generation of ideas.

'TAO' by Kervin Brisseaux

This image by Kervin titles ‘Tao’ caught my attention immediately I saw it. I have personally liked to work with silhouette images and have always thought about giving some sense of life and mood to a rather flat one coloured subject of a silhouette. This image does it for me. The light coming from the background, as well as the light cast on the face of the subject gives it this angelic look as though the subject is alive.

From this piece I can see the importance and impact that lighting can have on an image. It suddenly changes the visual attitude, interpretation and mood of the image.

DEPTH CORE

I often find myself coming back to this site depthcore.com. It has become one of the sites i come to as a source to banish all things called 'designers block'. The ranges of images always bring and serve as fresh inspiration for me. It has become almost like my ‘church’ of design. I do have a couple of site I always bounce back too when i don’t feel very inspired in my work.

Depth Core’s collections focuses on modern and abstract art. Incorporating design, photography, animation and audio.



The site is a very good look and will inspire most viewers.

Gustav Espenes

http://www.klippoglim.no/

A showreel showcasing a few experiments with motion graphics by Gustav Espenes with a dark distorted and disjointed soundtrack. The work contained in this show reel is from a variety of random animation test. The sound within the piece pretty makes it work as a whole. One cannot over emphasis the importance of sound within a piece of animation

NICK VEASEY

I decided to do some further research into the designers who were credited for the stunning image that grace the lucozade billboard ad posted on my last blog. I particularly find the style of the graphics very interesting as it takes the X-ray technology into a more dynamic and artistic way.



The artist responsible for the shot Nick Veasey is a British photographer and filmmaker primarily working within the medium of X-ray. Nick uses industrial X-ray machines typically employed in art restoration used to examine oil paintings. he works with a high dose of radiation.




I really wonder how he works his art out as even in a typical medical situation, a patient is exposed to radiation in an X-ray machine for only a fraction of a second while Nick exposes his subjects as well as himself to ionizing radiation for as long as 12 minutes to get a crisp shop. Its amazing what designers will do for art. the process and risk taken to constantly push the front line of design further away from mediocres. Constantly pushing the boundaries to produce something very original, giving birth to fresh concepts, ideas and direction in design.




for me, Nick work speaks more of courage , fearlessness and the need to always push up the limits within my work.

TED 2003

Opening title for the annual TED conference in Monterey. Created at Trollbäck + Company, an award-winning creative agency specializing in branding and motion graphics. The opening designed for the 2003 edition of the TED conference focuses on memes. The idea was to try and explore how thoughts radiate.

The TED conference is an annual conference that defines it's mission as "Ideas Worth Spreading". The conference covers topics in Science, Art and Design, politics, eduation, and Culture. It is a gathering of thinkers and doers coming together to find inspiration.

The title i thought had a smiler idea to the recent Lucozade ad campaign visual. The tiny bubble like objects that come together to form the human frame.

In exploring the thoughts of the human structure, the wire frame / skeletal look used as the camera zooms into the subject really works well. It allowed for abstract juxtaposition of elements to represent the randomness of the human thoughts.

LUCOZADE - Billboard


I like the way the text within the animation are placed and how it moves within the space. The random movement is symbolic of the constant motion of the human mind. The title is an idea well done and representative of the brief.

Nick Veasey the designer that worked on the Lucozade piece used X-ray elements combined with Candy Lab’s 3D orange Lucozade bubbles. They were integrated to complete this stunning image.

LUCOZADE - Agency: M&C Saatchi, AB: Mick Smith AD: Tistan Cornelius & Jo Miller.

FWA

The FWA - Favour it Website Awards is an industry recognised website award programme showcasing stunning flash websites that uses dynamic cutting edge technology together with inspirational ideas to set new paces to lead the way for future generation.

I've always come to browse this website when am working or researching into websites and interactive applications. Its always been a good source of inspiration for my motion graphic work as most of the sites contained in the websites have dynamic intros that am sure must have been created with other applications than flash or anything interactively driven.

THE FORTUM WEBSITE


I like the overall interactivity of the site. it stores a huge catalogue of sites that have won various awards as well as their own awards. The achieve is categorised by year which allows the viewer easy access to data by dates and years.

Preloader for Comcast Town


Welcome Page


Home Page


Not until looking into the site for my professional practise did i realise it was established in England in the year 2000. I've always thought it was an American initiative.

the website is really worth a look for every designer looking for inspiration for both still, moving and interactive platform.

FREE PITCHING

Free pitching or free tendering of design work as is sometimes referred to is the practise where design companies produce unpaid speculative design work for clients in the hope of winning the job. A practise that I believe form observation may have developed partly because of the reasons of having too many design companies and little design jobs to go round. Same as having too many design graduate with little design jobs hence making the market more competitive then it should be.

This practise of free pitching I find as very inappropriate and is another level of financial waste. In a recent article, published in issue 148 of Computer Arts Magazine Maxine Horn for the British design Innovation stated that “an average free pitching cost agencies £38,000 a year that totals around £1.7bn in waste resources.” Waste resources that designers have found is later paid back either by design staff working unpaid overtime hours or either the cost for the pitch is absorbed by other clients through increased fees. The cost of a free pitch cannot be taken on by smaller designer companies which mean they don’t get to pitch for a job therefore missing out on some design opportunities. From statistics, it has been found that companies with more than five employees win 66% of their pitches while those with fewer than five staff win only 33%. This fact again suggests that the chances of smaller companies winning design jobs is slimmer than larger companies.

Free pitching is bad for smaller companies as lager companies have in their disposal the ability to pour more resources into each pitch therefore producing more success and result.

The practise of free pitching does not only lead to financial waste but I also intellectual waste, creative waster, time waster etc. I feel it is a clever way to exploit one’s creativity because at this stage the design ideas of the companies are very fragile and could be taken away. I believe design is an intellectual property and at pitching stage one runs the risk of devaluation and also at this stage, ideas maybe stolen.

I recently came across a design company online. Really it’s more like a portfolio site for the designer but what I found was very interesting and gripping really. And I thought it could be a good example for this subjects matter though I have not further investigated the issues.

The site contained the work of Brian Michael Gossett a designer, illustrator and art director creating work for advertisements, commercials, editorials, print, film and broadcast media. I came across his work whilst researching into the Red Teatly Tea ad I had seen online a while ago and was interested in investigating the company that did the ad as it explored themes from the African continent which I thought was well executed and representative of the African people to an extent.


It was then I came across a storyboards that was designed my Michael for STAR DUST. The story board had a detailed sequence of the ad idea/ story line, the visual style and idea approach. The board was used while pitching for the job which they did not win but was won by Christopher Hewitt with German power house Sehucht.



The final ad was 97% similar in style and idea to the designs drawn up by Michael for STAR DUST. I could not even tell the difference as his storyboard may pass for the storyboard of the one taken to production. It just crossed my mind in an instance if the idea was not rubbed. And sometimes with design we never know what idea came up first.

Recently I was showing Rick (tutor) screen grabs of a campaign by the NHS I was looking into whilst I was researching for my final project. It was a website to help people get information about alcohol and it had an interactive interface where you can instantly know the amounts of unit in every bottle of alcohol. The site had the same style and concept of Dave Croucher website design he did way back in 2nd year for his alcohol museum and we had a little laugh about what came first. The way in which the objects go out of focus as the cursor moves away from them was also used here.

NHS KNOW YOUR LIMIT CAMPAIGN WEB PAGE



These though are very thin lines in design that some times raises questions we may never find logical answers for. Well I would have thought about the idea for sliced bread if given more time. It raises the question if two separate people can have the same idea and come up with the same visual concept.

For the Red Teatly ad I honestly could not work it out. Maybe there is a possibility that two different agencies on two different geographical location can think in the same direction / line and come up with the same idea or maybe this could just be a cause of clients taking advantage of ideas / concept they come across with during a pitching session. There’s also been suggestions that clients sometimes may use the pitching session as means to brain storm for ideas to help them direct they way their final brief will be written out as most times design companies who come to pitch for ideas are not really given a proper brief. They are just left with a few words on paper and expected to come up with a whole body of work that can lead to a potential marketable concept.

The idea of coming up with concept with little information on the brief in itself is not representative of the creative capability of a design company as the brief are too short and not clear which will limit the potential out put of the design company pitching for a job.

Like other profession, I don’t see any reason why designers should produce this detail free work where as in other sector it’s different. For instance , an individual hoping to have his house built will not as that the builder build a smaller section of the house for free before he’s actually commissioned to take on the job of building the main house. I believe that free pitching should be scraped and all designers should log onto the various anti pitching website and sign the forms.



The British innovation website features a detailed article by the professional pitch organisation where a detail procedure for an ideal pitch is written. It can be found on this link. It makes an interesting read.

STUNT HERO

Stunt Hero -

Stunt hero is the opener for a stuntman casting show series on Swiss national TV SF. designed and animated by LE MOB.

i came across this piece while researching into projects that have used the time freeze technique on way or another for my final major project.

I like the style of the over all animation. The camera movement and jump cut between the scenes are very typical of action films though is was presented in a more graphical way.

The scenes where the subject freezes in time and immediately changes in visual style to become grungier worked well with the sound, pace and the follow on scene as soon as the freeze continues in real time.

the style of the animation is reminds me of Ronin’s Black day to Freedom piece.

BLACK DAY TO FREEDOM

Since having done stuff on the green screen recently, I have become more interested in animations that involve a lot of compositing. It makes me appreciate the amount of effort, skill and attention to details given to a project at a storyboard level.

The details given to the project at the storyboard level cannot be compromised as shooting on green screen before compositing the final elements will require the shots of every character been worked out carefully. The position of the subject and the camera angle and more as how the scene will lead to the next characters angle. These were some of the subject that was discussed on our visit to Double Negative. As mentioned there some mistakes made at the shooting stage cannot be corrected e.g. issues like camera angle on the subject etc.

A lot of the footage from the animation was shott on green screen then later compositied in after effect. A lot of mask revel technique has been applied and used a lot within this animation and it works out well as transitions between scenes.

TAL ROSNOR and TRACY KANDLE

The beautiful and powerful thing about design is the space / freedom it gives individual for expression. Expression in style, methods and processes. It’s not like maths that has a rule to it. It is the expression of one's self and the creation of something that represents idea and creates meaning.

As different as designers are in the medium they use they all are aiming for the one big thing and that is either telling a story with a sill image, a piece of moving image, sculpture, or literature.

For my comparison, I am going to be looking at Tal Rosner a motion graphic designer and Tracy Kandle a still graphic designer working with the medium of wall paper. As distinct as their medium is they share a common processes.


Tal Rosner from talking about his work, have been inspired by the space around him. he tends to record random found images which he uses for his self initiated or commissioned work. Tracy in the other hand who work with wall paper also record random found materials that are processed to create something new.

Tracy work that i found really representing this commonality between her and Tal as working with found object is her feather series. This particular work of her is very dear to me as she explained how that she finds this piece of feather on the floor picks it up, photocopies it, and enlarges it to a very huge size. This found feather has becoming a new special work of art. Her idea of fining a simple idea and pushing it to its auto most limits. That which was found has become something new and different which is the goal of every designer.

For Tal, he collects these found footage's which he takes into an editing programme, retouching, rescaling, applying techniques such as repetition (kaleidoscope ), on this found object pushing it's boundaries to make it become something new and use able.

I have always liked working with found objects. Finding that object and pushing it to become something new.

Though at Tracy’s presentation I found that i drifted away a bit because the lecture was a bit boring compared to Tal's lecture which though not in his most eloquent self , his work spoke more volume. Same with Tracy. There work spoke for them selves. Clean and original.

Another comparison is what this two different designers have to face in their day to day running of their business is the issue of clients. Clients as typical as they are will only give you so much freedom that they can give. All designers weather in still or moving images most times put this restriction on designers. Both Tracy and Tal noted that they work better when they are given the creative freedom to create a piece of work.

This is another rare gifting of being in college. Where you have the creative freedom to generate, explore and reproduce an idea that I like. I wonder how that will go in real time when we have to deal with real clients and all their restrictions.

TILE CREATIVE

Tile creative is the portfolio website of web designer Matthew Tyas and graphic designer Lee Isherwood. The site contains a collection of their work from early days through to current projects. the collection of work are from both paid and unpaid, self initiated projects and commissioned projects,.

They have worked on some very interesting websites with stunning layouts and graphic content. on the websites, i found the way they presented the website projects that they have worked on very interesting.Screen grabs of the home pages is pasted on a picture of a MAC desktop.


It presents the website as hos it will appear on a computer screen. i thought it was a very cleaver use of the computer and is very appropriate for the subject.



Though this style appeared to take up a lot of space within their web page, it works with the overall layout of it.


I found a couple of logo design which i thought were very creative use of fonts.Though very simple they are yet they were complex in the details.

Sports Asset Management - SAM
A financial company looking after the interests of professional athletes and sports personalitie

i really like the way they brake the font apart and put them back to still represent the word it is intend to present where by creating something new from old.

Hair by Michelle
Independent mobile hair stylist based around the North-West

Toyism
A company specialising in the sale and distribution of Vinyl figures imported from Japan

This image of Toyism reminds me of Jacks Feel the goodness project from last year.

Signal Post
A small independent internet based company reviewing music and events



Voodoo
A themed bar based in the North-West serving mainly cocktail

It redefines the personality and characteristics of the font which in it own right has become a new font.

ANAMORPHICS STUDIO

ORPHEUS - demo trailer


Anamorphic Studio is Manchester based production house specializing in weddings, corporate and creative video.

I came across the name of the company whilst doing a random Google research for multimedia companies in the Northwest. The concept of their website home page immediately caught my eyes. The visual element used quickly reminded me of Tile's Creative a design company. They used a similar old TV box to hold their logo on their old website which has just recently been updated.

i like the use of the set of 3 TV box as a metaphor for an onward moving multimedia company . The three TV boxes starting with an old ancient box to a new modern box depicting progression, advancement and growth.

Though i did not like a bulk of their work, i found the Orpheus project interesting. The shots, visual effect and edit worked and looked good. Orpheus was a demo trailer to a feature film used as a pitching aid. 90% of the footage is original. Shot on location and green screen and then edited by the Anamorphic team.

I did send them a mail to see if i can have them look at my work but i did not get any replies even after following on with a call.

Below is a screen shot of the mail i sent.

DAYLIGHT MOVING IMAGE

While still doing my random research on google into multimedia comoanies in Manchester and the Northwest in general i came across Day light Moving Image.

daylight is a multimedia company based in Manchester and located in Manchester city center. creating work for motion graphics, animation, corporate identity and film.

They had an interesting range of work. their clients include oasis, Levis, Scottish Hydro, Somerfield, together trust , sound and Vision amongst other.

I contacted them about the possibility of a face to face visit and portfolio crit to their studio and didn't get a reply. Though i followed on with a phone call and was promised to be called back to see if they can arrange a visit. They didn't call back.

it was interesting though to make that direct contact with the company.

I also found that mails sent to companies through their Info @.com / contact@.com email add most times don't get read. The 95% of the time get sent to the trash of the email account.