D&AD Awards

D&AD has been created to inspire, inform, and educate those who work in and around the creative industry, offering competitions and access to professionals and events within the industry.

Accessed the briefs and looking forward to entering my first competition. Thinking of the character design brief as probably something I will go for... Im totally excited to be entering this!

12 Wires - Hand drawn 8mm film

Attended the first gathering of Twelve Wires today!

We created some interesting film by hand drawing directly onto some 8mm film using pen, ink, marker pens and so on, which were then projected onto the studio wall. Messy fun!

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - Recorders Exhibition Manchester

Got up bright and early this morning to take a trip into Manchester to see the latest exhibition of Lozeno-Hemmer. The Recorders exhibition uses modern day technology such as surveillance cameras and 'mis-uses' them by creating playful interactive pieces of work.

The pulse room was my favourite, something about all the lights flickering to many heartbeats in the darkened room. It was fascinating to watch and then become a part of.

The idea was to hold onto a metal handle bar which somehow translated your own pulse into a glow from the lightbulb overhead. As each individual took their turn, your own heart beat moved along to the next light bulb hanging from the ceiling and so on until the room was full of lights, all eventually being replaced and moved along in time with more visitors! A great inspiring experience.

Archetypes for fairytale characters...

Ive decided to look at creating a kind of bible of the archetypes of characters. Evil characters, Hero's and so on... There will be examples of how they look, features that make them recognisable, how colors are used and so on. (a bit like the book in the childrens movie spiderwick)

There will also be some necessary research to be done. What is it that makes a character instantly recognisable? Look up Carl Gustav Jung (Analytical psychology) Quabalah - and the concordances. The Otz Chim design and think about the movie with Jim Carey in '23!' for ref and inspiration. Think deeper - meanings, tree of life!

The final piece hopefully will be presented as an animated book of hand drawn sketches and snippets of text. The pages will turn when you select the corner of the page.

Could be a very useful reference guide for me personally being interested in character design and perhaps something I could get produced as an actual hardback - online field guide one day?

Taxonomy - folksonomy - Fairytales

For my second project Ive decided to continue with taxonomy and folksonomy through a media of more interest to me personally... here are a couple of ideas;

Because I was brought up on Disney I decided I might want to look into the characters he created - to create some kind of taxonomy of the kinds of characters... the good, the evil, the innocent, the good and bad conscious etc.. and then to create a taxonomy of what defines that character and why we recognize and connect with that character.

Another option - I enjoy creating fantasy artwork and so was looking at myths and legends for inspiration. I found an interesting website called SurLaLune fairy tales which basically looks at the hidden meanings in fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood... who the characters represent and how they reflect our culture and the subliminal messages they contain for children.

Fairy tales are an important part of culture and storytellers have existed since cro-magnon man, beginning with telling them through cave paintings, to Hans Christian Anderson and Bros Grimm - to Disney and his American style of presenting the fairy tales, to modern day movies such as Pretty Woman. As a child stories are there to help provide an understanding of our culture, life events and surroundings. Even as an adult, we are still looking for the fairytale life and happy endings resulting in the popularity of movies like the Never ending story and so on... An interesting subject! As a mother I find this extremely interesting and also relates to my District 9 project in first year and how the movie was an allegory of the apartheid in Africa.

Cool Animation Video

Cool Animation Video

check this out... must have taken ages! great idea for 2d animation though.

'Your shoes weren't meant only for walking they should also do the talking about you'. Megan Cleary - author of The Perfect Fit.

Her website has interesting ideas on how a woman's shoes are not just a fashion accessory but actually a window into her soul. Readers are categorized into the type of shoe that best fits their personality.

www.missmeghan.com

Perhaps something I could use in my shoe animation... the shoe's would have personalities not only because of the kind of shoe and its purpose, but also based on where the shoe has been and what it has experienced being worn by the owner. That way seeing all the shoe personalities would build up a picture of the owner without actually knowing them. You would learn about them through the shoes.

Shoe Puppets

I managed to create a short animation using shoe puppets over the weekend...

Lesson number one! remember next time I use puppets to consider where I let the strings lie when the puppet is in the frame but not in use..

Lesson number two! Don't ever assume again that it will only take a few minuets to take out the strings in photoshop... Start again and plan!!!

Took me ages to get rid of the strings on the first blue shoe as I had just let them fall across the front of the shoe instead of ensuring they fell behind it... consequently I had to remove from every frame and some of the re-touching is visible as it plays.

Honey pot label

I've been asked to design a honey pot label and have been checking out some images online. Quite a cute project and they're in no immediate hurry so plenty of time to research. They want something with quite a modern look rather than very traditional and not too fussy... Fun!

folksonomy animation

Plan A... the animation has to be something done fairly quickly so I've decided to take photographs of my shoe's using the camera settings to take lots of stills as I move the shoes around like puppets. I'll place the shoe against a white background to make editing as simple as possible with some thread attached to the shoe's to move them around with.

Once I have the images taken I can then transfer them into photoshop, delete the thread and hey presto - an animated shoe!

Then it will just be a case of adding character eyes etc to the images and features / sound... etc.