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

want2bsquare

I read about this website want2bsquare.com which was a project by the design company Attik. They distributed a brief to talented emerging artists and creative production companies with the theme 'boxy' and the responses had to advertise the website. The website contains 16 of the responses as well as 6 different worlds (1 for every side of a cube) for you to play games and interact with objects. the worlds include one called 'The Beats' where you can play music related games, and one called 'Urban Zoo' where flash animated gorillas roam around.


Seeing these brilliant films I assumed Attik were mostly directed towards independent work, aimed towards people with an interest in design. But after researching them more I found they were a brand-building, global creative company with a very formidable client base, working for such companies as Coca-Cola and Virgin mobile. They were also responsible for the Adidas adverts in which the tagline 'Impossible is Nothing' is used. Their client base is evident on the website by the constant pop-ups of the new Scion model, from the car brand that has an on-going advertising campaign with Attik. Want2bsquare.com is part of this campaign. Nevertheless the films that are showcased on the site are amazing to watch and the interaction with these 6 different worlds kept me entertained for ages! One of my favourite films which was done by Attik is called 'rats with wings' which interviews a man complaining about pigeons but when you see the pigeons they're a special breed of boxhead pigeons its funny trust me. keeping the theme of having a box as a head this video uses still photographs and digital manipulation to animate this womans head into a square.



One of the companies involved in the 'boxy' brief was Buck who produced the animation 'Tower of Grantville'. It hosts a mix between 3D, 2D and illustrative animation. I like its creepy feel and the characters took real imagination. The tyrant 'Gumptin' oppresses gopher type animals.



Buck are a broadcast-design and motion graphic company who are similar to Attik in terms of their clients. They concentrate mainly on adverts and have done work for Nike, Burger King and Virgin Mobile. Tower of Grantville seems like an exception to their usual very commercial work. Tower of grantville was deemed by Attik, 'the best at meeting Attik's goal of getting people to go to the want2bsquare website. In the future buck would like to try doing film titles. They are showcasing at the Berlin Pictoplasma festival which i'm going to at the end of this month so i will hopefully see more recent work they have done. Here's a show reel of some of their work.

Collage

I've been thinking a lot recently about what kind of work I would like to produce in the big world of design. I love to draw and make images with pen and ink, but through looking at illustrated design all the time, Im constantly reminded that the standard of illustration out there is extremely high and I wonder whether there is room for me to compete. Last year I was inspired by the work of Daniel Eatock who produced this image by standing felt tips on end and balancing a piece of paper on the nibs. When talking about it he said:
'My best friend from high school is amazing at drawing. We went on holiday to the south of France and at the beach he started to draw the view. I could never compete with my friend at drawing so I had to invent new rules. My solution: I drew two straight lines across the page, I wrote 'sky' in the top part, 'sea' in the middle part and 'sand' in the bottom part. I realised in that instance the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea.'

This completely enlightened me and my confidence was boosted after discovering so many more who have succeeded through different means of image making. I was interested in a particular edition of the magazine IDN because it was called cut and paste and I thought it might offer more insights into illustration without drawing. It showed work from a number of collage/montage artists who are all very individual and different.


Among these are Julien Pacaud who uses existing digital images to create his collages on a computer. His images are surreal worlds, composing black and white photography and objects with bold colour. He often colourises the black and white images on photoshop to give them an unnatural look. His work and clients have included doing singles covers for the electro alternative band GoodBooks, a front cover for French magazine TGV (about excessive psychotropic drug use in France) as well as continuing to produce personal work. He is also creating a web experiment, Automatic Art, which is an application which randomly creates artworks constituted by various bits of photographs loaded in real time on the internet.








This collage edition of this magazine has informed me that there are countless ways to solve illustrative design problems and I shouldn't worry about pure drawing skill as it is (although considered by many the corner stone of design), not imperative for good work. If we all did things the same way life would be very boring.

Cult Fiction, Comic Art

'Cult fiction, comic art explores the relationship between popular media - specifically comics, cartoons, illustration and contemporary art.'
At this exhibition in Leeds Art Gallery, there were very different artists, illustraters and comic artists who displayed work. Some were fine artists whos images were probably meant to comment on the role of the comic in visual culture, some used only illustrations which showed a narrative without using words. Most were the traditional drawn images teamed with text in a comic book format. A large amount of images were black and white, silhouettes being a well known and powerful tool of the comic artist. I thought a lot of it was a bit rubbish but a few of my favourite ones are these by Travis Millard, Laylah Ali and Killoffer.

LETTERPRESS

In the Letterpress induction on 01 oct we were shown this process which used to be for newspaper press. It involves lose type setting and rolling paper over the inked blocks of text.
Its a shame this craft has declined in use because its so much more interesting to look at than any digitally printed type.

climate change - human activity or natural causes?

im trying to attract opinions about whether the recent freak weather and climate change as a whole is a result of humans or just a natural flux in temperature. I personally think its a bit of both but i need some strong opinioned people to help me with this for my summer project!

fun explosive

I bought these matchboxes in Prague. They have cute illustrations on them done by fun explosive, a design company specialising in Prague tourism souvenirs and objects. The artist is Jiri votruba whose work can be seen on http://www.votruba.cz/. He does paintings, graphics and illustration and a lot of his work can be seen in souvenir shops in Prague!