Visual Language - Editorial illustration

In the optional module session a few weeks ago we read a piece of text and then had to illustrate it to communicate the main points as well as we could. My piece of text was about how its better for an office worker to be lazy becasue then they never get blamed for doing anything wrong and how lazy workers can get to high positions by acting this way. This is what I came up with. I enjoyed doing this so I searched for editorial/newspaper illustrators on the internet and looked at images in newspapers.


This is a picture from Pugh, a well known cartoonist for the Times. The images accompany a newspaper article at the side with a caption underneath. This one was for a story about John Darwin the 'missing' man and how his wife went to claim his life insurance. The illustrator has put a humourous tone of voice on the article by having this image next to it.





This images are from J.T.Yost who has done lots of illustrations for the New York Times. Unlike Pugh, there are no captions but the images are detailed and you can tell what they are trying to communicate.




















These are by Noel Ford who also does illustrations for greeting cards and childrens books. He has done work for readers digest and other magazines and all his work is in this humourous cartoon style.




I think doing this kind of work would be interesting because you will be trying to put words into images and using signs and images to convey meaning. You have to use semiotics and know what images signify and how different meanings can be pulled from them. I think it's fascinating to see when an image can say just as much as written language can.

Pictoplasma

I went to the Pictoplasma festival in Berlin (23th-25th November) where I saw a whole feast of new and exciting animation in the form of short films, adverts, stings and music videos. I have always been interested in animation and think that it is something I would like to do professionally and this trip enforced my passion for it. The festival coincided with a new college module of digital design so I managed to gain lots of research for the new brief. I went to two of the lectures that were there, one by Studio Soi whose Lloyds TSB advert is currently on television and who have also done MTV idents. In their lecture they showed us the process they go through to reach the final outcome. They showed character designs, background designs, character expression tests, sketches and storyboards. This was helpful for my own work because it became clear that it is important to refine the idea as much as possible before producing the animation on computer. Tokyoplastic were the other lecture hosts I saw. They have worked for big clients like Toyota and also do a lot of their own projects. Their interactive website - www.tokyoplastic.com- is fun just to navigate through as everything is animated - they are particularly famous for their 'drum machine' which can seen on the website. Their work is influenced by anything Japanese from their characters
to the calligraphy on the website. This is helpful to me as one of my phobias for my work is Japanophobia and I can see how they have managed to signify Japan through images. The red circle of the flag, buildings, clothes, people and a red and black colour palette on the website all help to do this.

At Pictoplasma there was a small theatre that screened the smaller independent animations and a large theatre that screened the commercial, big budget/big client animations. It was interesting to see the differences in the two theatres and they were both brilliant but for different reasons. The animations in the small theatre were wierd and sometimes very abstract and very experimental in how they had been produced. The commercial ones were for the large part digitally produced, although some used other methods, and they seemed to be aimed at an audience you might refer to as the 'MTV generation'. They were funnier and more rude and offensive which made them slightly better in my opinion.
Amongst one of the programmes that showed the more commercial end of animation there were lots of E4 idents. I was particularly looking out for these because the new brief is to communicate a phobia through a given number (mine is 3) and E4 idents always involve the 4 in some way, whether its a character in itself, or characters interact with it. One of my favourites was a winner of Channel 4's esting competition (below). Its by Ginny Robertson, a free lance animator based in London who has also worked for companies like Aardman and Nexus Productions. The simplicity of the character and narrative is what makes it work and it was created in Flash, which is the programme we are using for our brief.



Other E4 stings that I thought stood out against the rest were done by the production company Hot Head Films. They have done loads of recognisable work including adverts for Quavers and Branston, as well as a music video for Robbie Williams. Theie E4 stings and other work can be seen at www.hotheadfilms.co.uk