Major Project Planning

Earlier this week my class and I commenced our Major Project, which we will be working on for the rest of the term, or year. I forgot. We had a multitude of media-based choices such as game art, fashion designs, short films, and scripts. I chose to do scripts because I work best when writing fiction with my imagination.

We were instructed to use Milanote to gather research and make notes on our upcoming projects. I mainly gathered character information at this stage. I found inspiration in Japanese superhero television shows such as Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, the Japanese version of the currently-running Power Rangers Beast Morphers, and Kamen Rider Drive. I gathered inspirations behind the appearances of some of the characters and listed some elements to the series at this point. We were then told to fill in an approval form for our Major Projects and wait for an email from our tutor.

At this point I added more information on the main characters themselves, more on their inspirations. I added more design basis in the form of a picture of Daft Punk for their element of having screen-faces that display different emoticon faces. I will continue to work on he planning before I write my script for my Major Project.

Advertisement Group Project

This week I was tasked to create an advertisement with two others in my class: Azeem and Alex. We were told to advertise anything, so we chose to create and ad about a fictional radio station. We called it MWC, short for "Music Writing Communication.".

Secondly, decided on the arrangement of the title. We went through "CMW", "MWC" and a few other combinations before settling for "MWC". We then experimented on the stylizing of the logo in Microsoft Word. Then we decided on a photo subject for the advertisement: two people standing in front of the Arts and Design building wearing earphones and the other reading a newspaper with colorful musical notes flying between them.

We used the typeface "Rockwell Extra Bold" for both the name and the meaning. We created a white outline around it to accentuate the colours. We then tried to replicate the text in Adobe Photoshop, with some success.

We were able to create a white outline for the larger words through an alternative method, but it was proved overwhelming for smaller fonts. We attempted to write the frequency number in a smaller font, but the method we used to outline the word engulfed the font in white. We then settled to colour the frequency number white with "FM" in black. We then tested several taglines for the advertisement, but we couldn't decide on one that day.

We then tested potential placement for the text on the advertisement which may change depending on how the main picture was taken.

Because of my absence in the photoshoot, we had help from another classmate, Weronika, with Alex photographing and Azeem as a subject. Alex decided to use this photograph to use on the advertisement.

I was then tasked with creating the advertisement by adding the photograph over the background of the transparent file. The text went through several changes to bland with the photograph, such as changing the black text into white, and adding a stock image of musical notes, which was later omitted by request of Alex, who didn't like it, to which I agreed. In place of the notes, I put the tagline between the subjects over the Arts and Design building.

This project was full of potholes, on my side at least. But I was relieved when we finally finished it.

Blog Buddy

Starting this week I will be having a Blog Buddy to give feedback on my posts. Being a Blog Buddy means we will take a looks at our posts, give feedback, and help with ideas. This is Anna, and she will be my Blog Buddy.

Anna is from Poland and is going to study in Media Production or something else after her foundation year. She loves fashion and loves watching movies, series and dancer recordings. She is inspired by dancers and photos of them and wishes to be a dance photographer or a fashion photographer. She wanted to be a model, but she later decided to be a photographer. In high school she wanted to study psychology or veterinary medicine, but she changed her mind to media.

I look forward to her help in the future!

Duane Michals

Duane Michals is an American photographer born February 18 1932. He is an artist known for creating sequential images, a collection of images that depict a scene. I will be discussing two of his works, one of which inspired a previous work of mine: "Consumption".

I will first discuss "Chance Meeting", made in the 1970s.

This piece shows two men walking past each other in an alley. The bespectacled older man watches the other cautiously as he passes by when, in the final picture, the other man looks back. According to Duane Michals, this piece is showing what it is like to be homosexual in a homophobic world in the 70s, displaying this with the cautious nature of the two men as either one, or both, could be homosexual and showing varying degrees of caution. Duane Michals is homosexual and some of his works have the theme of homosexuality, but in a more subtle way than most other works of media with the theme.

The second piece I will be discussing is "The Dream of Flowers", made in the 1980s.

This piece shows flowers growing over a man resting his head on a glass surface, most likely a table. Although not shown here in this compiled image, the individual images were lettered with different letters to spell "AIDS". With this context, the man may be dead or dying and his body is giving life to flowers as he dies. The flowers themselves give a funerary theme to the image. The AIDS theme was chosen because this piece was created in the AIDS crisis in the 80s when several gay men were discovered to have been infected with AIDS, increasing homophobia at the time.

References
- Artist image: http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/duane-michals/
- Chance Meeting research: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/arts/design/duane-michals-prepares-for-his-retrospective.html
- The Dream of Flowers research: https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/16563?returnUrl=%2Fart%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dchasanoff%26show%3D30

Individual Sequential Images Project

I have created a series of sequential images as part of an individual project which I have collectively dubbed "Consumption".

Below is a rough storyboard of the process.

I took several preliminary shots to find an appropriate angle to photograph the subject before settling down to this low-angle. For the props themselves, I filled the bottom of the tin with miscellaneous items to elevate the snacks and inserted thick-folded paper in various pockets in my wallet to enlarge it before taking them out for every shot. I used Paint.net to compile the photos in a 2x6 grid by copying and pasting them. I tried to create a grid with no borders, but it looked disorganized so I tried spacing them 50 pixels apart. This looked too small, so I spaced them 100 pixels apart. I contemplated only using the tin for the shots, but then I thought of adding a wallet that shrank to enforce the "consuming" theme.

The idea behind this is that as we "consume" food, we also "consume" money from our wallets. This is presented by a biscuit tin and a wallet on a table. As the tin is filled with snacks until it overflows, the wallet becomes smaller as money disappears inside. The idea is a simple idea, no "deeper meaning" to it, just that in order to consume (food), we must consume (money). I was inspired by Duane Michals' "The Dream of Flowers for its still-life-ness and close shot of the subject.

Sequential Images

This post is to recap on the process of a group project by me and Weronika Hennig on Sequential Images.

A sequential image is a set of pictures of scenes that show subjects performing a variety of actions that create a sort of story.

This is the result of the project. The image depicts someone cleaning a window when he got bored and decided to play around with his mop. Unfortunately he hits someone in the face as he was swinging it like a warhammer.

I originally envisioned myself swinging the broom like a staff, but we found that the motion doesn't translate well as still images, so we thought of a different action for the broom.

The images above are some of the shots that were taken for the initial shoot. I actually performed the twirling movements of the broom as it was captured on my phone's burst mode. As you can see the "twirling" action only look like I am just moving the broom around rather than actual action. Weronika was stepping back as I performed the final twirl that should stop in front of her face. We, and one of Weronika's friends who came to help shoot, suggested we take a different approach that won't harm anyone by accident.

In the end, instead of actually performing the stunt and twirling a broom, we decided to mime a more "amateur" style for the broom stunt. The fourth picture depicts me thrusting the broom while kicking before I "swung" the broom around. In the final shot I placed the broom closer to Weronika's face to make it seem the broom is just to her face and about to hit her. I didn't put any symbolism or message into this, I just thought it was funny.

Hello World!

Welcome to [REDACTED] Studios. I am a student in De Montfort University in Leicester, England. This blog will be used to record processes and ideas of my projects during my Digital Arts International Year Zero.

I am mainly a story writer and I sharpen my skills by writing fan fiction and I have interests in sci-fi television series such as Transformers and Power Rangers.

One of my main inspirations come from Kamen Rider, or Masked Rider in English. It is a Japanese live-action television series that is currently running under different titles from 1971 up until now. The series is produced by Toei Company, who is known mainly for creating many anime such as Dragon Ball, with some writers from those anime writing certain series of Kamen Rider.

Pictured above is the titular hero of Kamen Rider Zero One, a series running since September 2019. There have been many other series before this one with different characters and designs. Main elements of the series include young men being called to action to fight evil as Kamen Riders, belt-like devices used to access their armour and equipment, motorcycles, and monsters that they fight. This may sound familiar as you may think of Power Rangers, who themselves are adapted from another Toei Company production: Super Sentai. My interests were eventually pulled into Kamen Rider after researching about Power Rangers.

What interests me about the series is not just the design of the suits, but also the philosophy of the shows themselves. These philosophies include generosity, friendship, hope, morality, human nature, helping others, war and peace, etc. In short, the designs pulled me in, but the story is what really inspired me to create.

References

- Hero Club, July 17 2019