Screen printing

Today was the optional screen printing workshop. I had been waiting ages for this in much anticipation as I had never done it before, but had heard good things about it. 

The initial concept within screen printing was quite confusing as I had never done it before. After a strong brief from Jo we got on with oiling our images and using a UV light box to fix them to a thin nylon canvas. After washing off the chemicals with water, we then heated the canvas in a warm oven to preserve our images. My images were of an old school camera and old school VW Beatle.

Overall the day was really productive and it is a strong technique which I will be able to use in the future.

Visual Thinking result & Flash Animation (workshops)

Just got back my Visual thinking result, am pleased with the mark and am happy with the constructive feedback. There are clearly areas I can improve on and still work to be done.

My flash animation is going smoothly, have done my background illustrations and have almost finished my character design. Although saying that, flash really isn't what I thought it would be; it's more complicated than I thought, the software is so deep and can drive you crazy. I need to be more patient with it and see the tutors if I'm struggling. Overall I'm quite enjoying the unit though.

Another Part of the unit is the ABC qualification in Flash. My workshop is wednesday nights 5-8, which is a bit of a mission actually. The first week was a bit tedious as it was really very simple, but it definitely did get much more difficult. This wednesday will be my fourth session.

Last week we were given a small project to have completed for this wednesday. We have to create an advertising banner for a website using measurements of 468x60 pixels.

Creating CV & Covering letter

Getting on really well with my final CV, is starting to look really smart. There's a massive difference between my original and current final CV; it's starting to look really professional and smart. Have also had a creative idea to send my CV in a small french fold style book, which firstly shows my current work from this first year; then when opened contains my final CV.

Still having a play round with the idea at the moment but should come out looking good.

Screen based communication- new unit

The start of another fresh unit today, really am excited for this! Flash (Adobe) is a totally new piece of software for me; but after the introduction to photoshop and illustrator there's nothing I really don't want to do!

The aim of this unit is to create a 30-90 second flash movie, based upon your chosen statistic. After much research into a variety of different statistics, I have chosen to base my short movie clip on newspaper recycling! Ok it doesn't sound overly interesting at first but when Looked in depth at the problems of waste paper, some of the statistics are pretty shocking.

In this first week of the new unit I also started the Flash workshop which was set up for an evening class (5-8), which at first I thought would be a bit of a mission but was brilliant. I really got into the introduction and am excited to see what my final result will be!    

Visual Thinking hand in!

Handed in my the Amnesty unit today; but again I feel like it's been going on a bit too long. Saying that though, I have enjoyed the unit a lot and have improved and gained more skills and knowledge. 

I initially found choosing a campaign to focus my ad on difficult. I was to torn between many shocking campaigns, such as "child soldiers" and "violence against women". I finally went with the disturbing campaign of "Rape in Darfur", there were many shocking statistics available to use and I personally thought (and still think) that this individual campaign isn't focussed on enough.

I looked into existing ads and actual testimonies from female victims to gain an understanding and feel for the campaign. I was able to come up with some strong ideas, not only with imagery, but methods of payment as well. After loads of crits and discussions I found my final idea.

I felt unsure at first with the idea of just using text, but after a few changes and different ideas I was able to create a powerful ad.

 

Final Amnesty Ad

Spend more save less & Black box (Visual thinking)

As part of this unit we were required to do complete two live projects to help us gain more understanding into encoding and decoding advertisements to a tight deadline. "Spend more save less" was the title of the first project. During this project we had to work in small groups to create an ad to help encourage people to spend more in order to help the declining economy recover. We started off by looking into existing ads and offers within magazines and papers. After discussing and creating some initial ideas we agreed on our final design. We took ideas from Mastercard logos and expanded them for a final, slightly comical ad. (see link above)

Black box was the other live project within the unit. This required more group and was also to a tight deadline of one day. Each group chose an envelope from a box, in which contained an existing logo. Our group ended up with Colgate Total. After much research in the library and ideas discussion we encoded our brand within a semiotic message- "Colgate Total". We then received an encoded message from another group after giving ours away. All the groups were then required to decode there given hidden brand. When decoded we had to create an advertisement; our encoded brand was Gillette Mac 3.

Our design was based on the history of Gillette; we wanted to take the stereotypical view of over the top razor adverts away, and put in more of a trustworthy and traditional aspect to our ad. Final Design  

Amnesty talk (Barry Tempest)

Today we had a talk from a member of Amnesty international (Barry Tempest); he gave us an insight to the wide variety of campaigns the global charity works upon. I found his initially quite slow and not overly interesting; yet after the talk we had time to gather some key questions in small groups, before being able to have a one to one question time.

I found this much more helpful, as I already had a small understanding of the campaigns and was able to have vital questions of my initial chosen campaigns answered in detail.

Overall the day was really useful and has kick started my interests into the project. Really beneficial day, cheers Barry!