Crit feedback

We had the crit for the drift brief last week; my book of photo's got a fairly positive reaction. Everyone agreed I should have concentrated on a couple of images and developed them rather than doing a whole book of images which is what I thought already. Aside from that Neil said I had a good eye and a few of the images in the book were good and could be developed more :) He also said it was good to be ambitious, as I said I'd gone a bit too ambitious with it. I definately think I went about it in the wrong way though, trying to fill a whole book. Most people did either a photo montage, an illustration or a short series of images, which would definately have been a better idea.

20th October - Post London/Pre crit

After a lengthy debate me and three others decided to go to Camden and see the markets. It was mainly me that pushed for this one as i've already seen the London eye/Oxford St and all the other touristy  places and the brief meant going somewhere new. 

   I really enjoyed going to Camden, it's such an unusual place, full of stalls for Punks/Goths/Ravers and basically every extreme going. I spent most of the journey with my eyes glued to my camera and took about 300 photo's, so I had plenty of material to work with for the brief. 

As for the Kyle Cooper lecture, I found it really interesting and he came across as a really nice, self effacing, funny guy. Although i'm definitely not a fan of lectures and tend to zone out he kept my attention all the way through (this may have had something to do with all the movie clips). I had no idea how many films Cooper had done the titles for, we briefly talked about him in the base room and watched the title sequence for Se7en, which happens to be one of my all-time favourite films, but I had no idea he had done the titles for films like Tropic Thunder. I found the whole thing pretty inspiring, and he gave out lots of advice for designers, like starting ideas on paper first;

"Keep your hand in it brother"

After spending hours sorting through my photo's I decided to buy a small A5 sketchbook and use it to record my journey through Camden in the form of illustrations, photo's and notes. I've now got half an hour before the crit and although my sketchbook isn't quite finished i'm pretty happy with it. We had to have the brief done for 10 o'clock this morning so I didn't bring any materials in, which means I couldn't get it finished throughout today. I might have aimed a bit high with this one, only having four days to do the whole thing. I spent about 10 hours on it yesterday and woke up at half 6 today to try and finish it, although it's pretty much complete there isn't much in the way of notes, which I was going to add in afterwards. I think that lets it down a bit as it's for the Text and Image unit and is basically just image. I'll have to see what the rest of the group think in the crit.... which i'm not looking forward to, being the worst public speaker in the world! :S

Secong blog attempt

Today we had our first PAL session with the second years, which I found pretty cool and interesting. I think it's good that we get the opportunity to talk to people who have already experienced what we're doing now; I think it will be really valuable to have someone to look to for help and info on the projects we're doing as so far i've been struggling to get used to this style of teaching, it's so different to college and school. Aside from playing pass the parcel as a 'getting to know each other' game we talked about some of the briefs and they mentioned doing their blogs. They told us that we only need to write two or three inches a week on what we've been doing, which is good because I had been thinking that I needed to keep a diary of everything we'd done each day, whereas we really only need to have a fairly brief overview. So this is my second attempt at recording what we've done so far:

The main brief we've been set is the text and image project where we went on a day trip to Poole to record the environment, in the form of sketches, notes and photographs. We've now found out that this is so we can design three editorial illustrations i.e. illustrations for a magazine, newspaper or book. I had a good day on the trip although it wasn't as productive as I would have hoped due to the fact I was freeezing cold, so it was a bit difficult to draw. I'm looking forward to doing the illustrations as this is the first brief i've ever had which in effect could have come from an actual client. Nothing I did at college was like that, it was all blatantly college work. I think I need to go back to Poole though to collect some more primary research.

We've also done some typography work, researching and watching a film on Helvetica, and researching some typographical terms, which i've done in the past but had forgotten what some of them were. On Wednesday last week we were split into groups and set a task for the day, to design a typeface using sticky tape. Although I wasn't immediately inspired by the brief I started getting in to it when we were brainstorming ideas for the typeface; we spent a lot of time debating over who would want to use it and why, how we could get across the properties and uses of tape, and still make it aesthetically appealing. Overall I was quite pleased with our typeface 'Fusion' which wasn't the most 'out there' idea from all the groups, but met the brief we had been set as it could technically work as a typeface. Some of the other groups did some amazing stuff like taped letterforms up onto the spiral staircases, which looked really cool, but I didn't see how they met the brief we had been set which is kind of the idea of being set a brief. I enjoyed the brief but it's going to be a long time before I want to see another roll of sticky tape.

Another mini-brief we were set last week was to create an illustration of something from the Poole trip using coloured paper. Some of the work created was amazing, although I wasn't overly keen on my own piece; I spent most of the day thinking about one idea, then decided it wouldn't look very effective so started on something new after lunch. I think I could have done better if I'd got organised and stuck to one idea, as I spent too long umming and ahhing instead of getting stuck in to it.

Other than that we've spent Monday's in lectures and seminars with Dr. Anna, which is probably my least favourite part of the course so far. I guess creative people and sitting in lectures/writing essays don't really mix, but I guess it's important so i'm just going to try and get interested. I don't mind doing image analysis and deconstructing images in the seminars, but the lectures just seem to go straight over my head. I did find out I had an audio processing problem not long...still not sure exactly what that means, but maybe that has something to do with it?

We've now been set another brief for next week, to go somewhere new and record the environment, then design a document that records the journey. We're going to London on a trip to see Kyle Cooper which seems like the perfect opportunity to record a new journey, so...looking forward to that :)

Post number 1

OK, so as part of my course I have been instructed to keep a diary that "details your learning experiences and personnel (should that be personal??) development whilst studying on FdA Visual Communication." (Or at least that's what the brief says now I've gone at it with a highlighter, which I've found is the only way I can make the information stick to my brain). So now I've been on the course for two weeks it's definitely time for me to make a start, otherwise I'll never do it. I'm struggling slightly to even remember what we've done already, the whole 'moving 300 miles away to a strange and what seems to me a huge town without knowing a single soul down here' thing has slightly mashed my brain so far and I'm only just starting to get focused and back onto track. The first thing i can remember doing is sitting through a lecture with Dr. Anna about....something I can't remember. Umm... the learning style test we did on induction week was absolutely spot on, I came out as a visual learner and definitely not someone who learns by being talked at for hours on end. Which means I'm going to have to try hard in order to gain something out of Dr. Anna's lectures.
In fact, I think it might be a good idea to go through all the stuff I've been given and notes I've taken so far before I tackle this diary/blog.