Final major project (week 1)

So its the big one the final major project and the brief is to write your own brief and I have 12 weeks to research, develop and come up with a final idea, which is a great opportunity to really develop a nice strong final outcome.

week 1
this week is research week i have to come up with two general ideas for the beginnings of a brief i then have to present the ideas to the tutor group which will help me narrow it down to one idea, I then then have to write the proposal for the chosen idea.

 Idea 1
my first idea is kind of a continue of my previous project "forever I've known nothings forever" i still think this text has a lot more to offer and as its so open it would be ideal for my fmp, so i started to really think about what the text meant. So I started to think, nothings really forever everything's always changing, so i then started to think about the word change and how that word is so open for ideas and again an excellent starting point for a brief so i started to already think of ideas.

 one being i want to get some old photographs of myself and then project them onto myself to show how I've changed throughout the years.

another being projecting pictures of the human anatomy on to myself or maybe other people and show how the human body is always changing.


another being getting hold of some evolution pictures and show how the human race has changed over hundreds and thousands of years.


I just think this as an idea is really open, and has countless amounts of ideas and outcomes to explore the idea behind the projection ideas was inspired by two artists

Shimon Attie
http://www.shimonattie.net/test/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16 

Shimon Attie used old photographs of old families and old buildings lost in history, and then finds the location of were the photgraphs were taken. He then projects the photographs over there locations were the old photographs were taken and takes these photographs.
 
 
its really interesting to see the contrast between the photograph and the surroundings and how things have change over the years. They look visually stunning the projections are so crisp and clear against these old ruins of buildings.


another artist who uses projections throughout there work is Christian Boltanski 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Boltanski 
Boltanski uses projections similar to Attie but in a very different way Boltanski uses old photographs off Jewish families and Jewish children and overlays, projects and lights up the photograph to forcefully remember those who were killed by the Nazis in the war.


the photographs are very powerful to look at, by using lights and shadows the photograph really stand out and contrasts against there surroundings.
 
 
this one is one of his instillation pieces were hes used little light projection to create these interesting shadows and characters on to the wall. So although he uses a similar technique to Attie he creates  very different outcomes.

Forever I've known nothings forever

For the last 2 weeks we have been asked to chose a peice of text that we found interesting, and to create a peice of imagery to go with the text and I decided to use a Maccabees lyric "forever I've known nothings forever" from the song "forever I've known" which I thought was a nice little play on words. It also was a very open peice of text so I wouldn't really be constricting myself. So the basic idea for the imagery was there was a band of skulls album cover i really liked which was created by their bass player the album was "Baby doll face honey"  its this beautiful paint and ink piece that had been mirrored and when you looked closer you could depict these interesting shapes and imagery much like the Rorschach test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test . I wanted to create somthing on these lines so I started to experiment with paints by creating interesting shapes on a piece of paper and then literally folding the paper in half so that it creates these crazy quite intricate shapes and patterns. very similar to something you would in early primary school when you had to create butterflies, but obviously i wanted it to be a lot more sophisticated than that.

so after scanning them in to the computer I really went to work on them in Photoshop. Firstly I mirrored them and then I started to play around with layering them, and for the type I wanted to keep it really quite basic as the imagery was really quite busy and psychedelic looking so I didn't want to over complicate things. some of the type has been inspired by my previous project for the album covers and here are my results

the results have come out better than expected there are some really intricate and interesting textures that are not apparent at first glance but once you  really look up close you really notice them im really pleased with the results.

Cul-de-sac

This week we have been asked to create a movie poster for the Roman Polanski film Cul-de-sac http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060268/  and no imagery from the film is to be be used on the poster.

Cul-de-sac although a film i wouldn't necessarily pick was an interesting film and although as a story line i dint really like it i could appreciate it for its artistic quality's and certain camera angles were really nice and a thing i really liked was how there was always little subtle hints throughout the film.

In some country's still to this day when a movie is released in the country the movie artwork isn't always necessarily at hand so its up to designers and illustrators to create the artwork so they have to try and get the the general gist of the film in the poster, a good example for doing this is Poland  http://www.polishposter.com/

so we had to basically do the same thing the original poster for Cul-de-sac was created by a very famous designer Jan Lenica who was often the designer commissioned for most of Roman Polanski films

this is the original Cul-de-sac poster that was actually used which has really nice well thought out shapes and really nice painterly quality's and in contrast really crisp, sharp text which was usual for Jan Lenikas work http://www.poster.com.pl/lenica.htm

so for my poster i started to think about the word Cul-de-sac and what it meant i started to think about words like dead end and confined,  i then found this really nice image of two cliffs with the sea in between them which was perfect because not only did it look very similar to the set in the movie. i also had this idea to try and confine the the text in between the two cliffs to to give the feel of  a cul-de-sac. I feel that the sepia effect one is my more stronger poster as it has a better feel of the film as the film was in black and white. if i had used the colour one it wouldn't really give the feel of the movie, im really happy with the layout of the poster for the text i tried to blend the words together to made them appear trapped together which i think has worked really well and i think my poster does give a general feel and atmosphere of the film.