Today's sound design workshop opened a lot of interest for me that I didn't expect to have; after this session I have become heavily influenced by the combination of visual art and sound design, alongside, the many ways one can experiment with sound. The 'mood, tone and atmosphere' of a piece or an environment, I believe, heavily depends on sound as we associate different noises to different connotations for example: something soft and light may feel really soothing and encourage a serene atmosphere yet sounds that are loud and discordant would create an uncomfortable setting. 

The combination of an image with sound can heighten the audiences senses and emotions as they have something to confirm the atmosphere of a piece with. In my final video, my sounds are very atmospheric and airy, combined with black and white abstract photos, as a result, the tone feels conceptual and slightly strange. 

I used Garage Band to manipulate my sounds as there are endless possibilities with such a simple piece of software. To enhance the atmospheric noise in my final outcome, I played around with reverb and delay to create an echoey, long lasting effect which therefore made the sounds feel like they were lingering in the video even when they are technically no longer making noise in the moment. As a result, this definitely accentuated the feeling I was going for, especially combined with the water-like noises.

I'd like to explore sound design further in my work through continuing to record sounds in my everyday life to then one day implement it into my work and manipulate it in order to turn something so mundane into something that could evoke a specific emotion. 

The roles I was most interested in that were mentioned today were art director, photographer and filmmaker (mainly film-making and photography). After assisting stylists last year, I appreciate the art of it and the processes behind creating an effortless look, however, I realised that it just didn't spark excitement for me. 

I chose to do a mood board based on the film-making section; the task was to create the board centred around the 1959 film Black Orpheus, directed by Marcel Camus. The film recreates the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through the context of Rio Carnival in Brazil.  After watching the trailer and doing some research there are clear themes of music, dance, vibrancy and Brazilian that I feel in the mood board I could present through lots of colour and emotive imagery as the tone of the film feels predominately upbeat. If I was to link this film to the UK, it could be related to Notting Hill Carnival since there are similar elements of a full of life atmosphere involving culture, dance and music. 

I really enjoy making mood boards so today was a fun project to do, however, it was difficult to create a mood board from a final outcome as usually I make mood boards before creating the desired piece. It was an interesting way to dissect the connotations of a film and go backwards in the process to make an inspiration board that links to it but also other potential relating ideas. My ideas of fashion communication were challenged by Rhea's references as it taught me how fashion communication doesn't necessarily have to be purely clothes-based/ clothes advertisements, it can be relating to context, culture, music, life via fictional entertainment such as films or story-telling via a styling shoot and so on.

In today's session we did relief printing, something I have never done before but now I really enjoy and would like to do again in the future. I missed last week's session so I had to work really quickly in order to catch up with I felt a lot of pressure doing, however, I got there in the end through doing a short cut method of only creating shapes to cut out of the foam board rather than creating a design to scratch out of intricately. 

At first, coming up with a simple design that linked to my last work felt difficult as my last work was a pair of knickers loaded with string, pearls, tape measures, embroidery etc. it was very intricate and would have been hard to replicate for today. After doing some research on Pinterest, looking at simple line illustrations I was then inspired to just draw a really basic body in black with red knickers so there is still that trace back to what I did beforehand. The relief printing itself was really fun, I enjoyed the process of how manual it felt, making my print with my own hands with physical paint and a physical print press type machinery. This felt a lot more authentic and crafty than an automatic rise-printer and in the end I was happy with my final outcome as despite creating it in such a rushed amount of time, it embodied more of a sense of 'less is more' approach rather than a last minuteness messy approach. 

This is the first Thursday session that I didn't particularly enjoy and this was because I felt stifled by how unsuccessful my materials were and even when I tried to push through with the work and try to get something out of it, even trying abstract ways with the photography, material and light, nothing was being made that I was satisfied with. However, this is a learning curve knowing that maybe I would find this work more creatively stimulating and successful if I was able to work on it on a larger scale e.g set design, or stronger lighting, more varied materials.   

The materials I used were tracing paper, a brown paper bag, foil and reflective card. We cut up a cardboard box, to create a somewhat box diorama, and added 4 slits in the top to insert out materials into and flashed a torch through an additional cut out hole on one side of the box to hit the material and produce an outcome in relation to the property of the material.  

The outcome of this was quite boring, not much happened, no patterns were created; I do not believe that I chose the appropriate materials to be creative with this task and this is something that I can go back to and be a lot more broader/trial and error when selecting materials as I only brought 4 or 5 with me to the workshop. 

What struck me the most in today's presentation is the way that despite the age differences in, for example, the painting 'The Night Watch' Rembrandt Van Rijn (1642) and the 2007 movie 'Nightwatching' they have so many similarities which therefore shows how similar societies have remained in terms of composition and emotion even though they are both 400 years apart. I also found the different speeches of Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg super eerie as they both have similar expression and positioning; two very powerful people which shows that there is a certain way humans come across when having different status' and positions of power. 

I feel as though we focused on the Spectre project the most as it is a very relevant topic in today's social and political climate. With technology blurring the lines between what's genuine and what's not, alongside , data being used to secretly target audiences towards certain products/views etc, Spectre highlights the impact this has and also exposes the truth of it to the public. 

This presentation has a great communicative power as it has good balance between writing, imagery and video meaning that we have a variation of gathering information and so therefore the audience stays very engaged. Moreover, the information provided is controversial and topical in today's society, themes that open conversation which I feel is very important within having a communicative power;  being able to spark communication amongst each other.

I believe that having an ethical position in communication is EXTREMELY important. This is because communication is around us constantly, through the media, adverts, design, film, fashion. It holds a lot more power than we recognise as it is how we constantly feed off of for information so, yes, I think it is very significant to have an ethical position as by having the power to promote messages supporting sustainable and moral ideas, we are one step closer to influencing people to create a more equal and safe society. 

Making posters was something I was quite looking forward to as I find pre-2000s, DIY, punk and also Bauhaus style posters appealing and something I've always wanted to incorporate into my style of work within graphic design. I have been finding typography quite a hard aspect of the course so far as we have been working a lot with illustration, which definitely isn't my strongest aspects, so the poster workshop has been fun being able to include aspects of my creative skills that I am confident in. This also has made me realise that a lot of the things we do in the workshops that I am not necessarily great at, I tend to switch off on which can end up being a bad habit since I should just push through it and try to make the most out of it/improve from it. 

The benefits of going to the Kings Cross library was very very strong as there is such a selection of resources that we are so lucky to have access too, archival books and themes that I would have never of thought to look up or even known about when browsing the internet, but  have right in front of me when doing research at the library, for example: I am big film fanatic so I would search up film posters on the internet but I doubt I would've found all these interesting artworks and detailed information online in comparison to what I did find in the book 'The Independent Movie Poster Book'  looking at Harmony Korine's work. Another great thing about this was that I was completely focused on the research brief, fixated on flicking through and looking for physical information, instead of getting distracted by social media online. 

Using drawing to refine my layout gave me a good starting point to the poster, even though the drawings were  rough and rushed, I was able to identify the format, themes and shape that I wanted to apply when going digital with the design. I was able to quickly create different options when drawing the designs which actually pushed me to be on a roll with experimentation and playing around very fluidly, without being stuck in a creative rut. 

I was very excited about today's class as photography is my strongest skill out of all the pathways and also where my interest lies. Despite my main focus being around fashion and documentary  photography, it felt refreshing to try something new and work on still life photography within a team. Working with my team was very effective as we all were on the same wavelength with the task creatively and has similar ambitions for the outcome which I feel is very important when working in a team, otherwise, sometimes I feel quite hindered when I'm in a team where we are all different/one person is doing all of the work. The task for today's shoot was to art direct and shoot a still life narrative focusing around objects we collected relating to the themes of dark/light, colour blocking/pattern and fitted/oversized.

I believe that our most successful photo was the dark/light photography. This is due to the fact that we took an abstract direction to the task and focused on shadows and the way shadows and reflections of off the patterned glass we had could tell a narrative relating to our theme. Even though our objects themselves weren't light/dark we were able to create an interesting piece that uniquely portrayed the theme, as well as, additionally expanding from the theme to create further images in the studio. These photos didn't link so much to the theme but it was very exciting to be inspired by the original brief and branch off into our own separate ideas revolving around the theme of memories. 

New skills I have acquired from this workshop was learning how to do photographic shoots with a quick turnarounds successfully. Usually, when shooting I take 1000+ photos over the space of 4 hours or so whereas today's workshop pushed me to quickly come up with ideas and execute them in a clear and concise way within the space of half an hour. I think this is an effective skill to have as even though shoots do tend to be long, time management is still extremely important and being able to understand that it is quality over quantity. 

My favourite role was photographer as I am most comfortable behind a camera within the graphic communication design pathway, I really enjoy working with different camera techniques, focusing on composition and working with the studio being able to create illusion and playing with different forms of light. 

The three themes I brought to today's session in regards to my print from the week before were the body, experiences of a woman and pain, due to my print being of the female Fallopian tubes. From expanding on these themes branching out to further connotations of sex, body image, womanhood, feminism and so on, I realised that a lot of them related to what women would always get judges on. So, I decided for my piece, I wanted to create something satirical that would shove everything that is perceived as a 'gross' that a woman does (for example, having body hair, periods, masturbation etc) in the audiences faces. The intention behind this is to show the realities of the female body rather than what is expected. 

Originally, I was going to alter and distort a dress to create a contrast between society's idea of femininity and the actual realities of it. I wanted to also make an emphasis on period blood, however, I did not want it to feel cliche so I did extensive research on influences that I could follow which were a lot more conceptual (as seen on my research page). Yet, when going to the charity shops to look for a dress, instead I found handmade silk knickers that exuded girliness. I felt that this would have been a lot easier to work with as I work more effectively on smaller canvases and the dress may have been too overwhelming for me at this stage. I wanted to treat this underwear almost like a Christmas tree wanting to hang things off of it such as razors, tape measure, red string and pearls to represent this connotation of pain versus pretty. Moreover, I found myself doing a lot of embroidery with the knickers as playing around with different texture added an additional dynamic layer. 

Overall, this is my favourite piece I've made so far in the last three weeks as I love the physical and almost interactive aspect to it; the fact that you can touch it and relate to it as it is literally everyday objects made into artwork. I believe that this concept related to my theme really well, but to improve,  I think that I could've paid more attention to detail rather than just worrying about adding loads of objects/features to the piece. 

At the start of today's lesson, we were given two minutes per word (absence, organic, order and oppose )  to create four different designs emphasising on typography and our interpretation of the meaning only using pen and paper. I found this quite difficult as illustration and typography are not my strong point so to create a piece within a short space of time that I was satisfied with was very unlikely. However, the silver lining of this was that it stopped me from trying to overcomplicate things and just create and experiment within the short amount of time meaning that I had to let go of any doubts and accept any potential imperfections/quality of work. 

Our second task was to then pick one of these words and spend an hour creating a more refined version of a graphic communication relating to it. I chose the word 'Absence' and cut out letters from a newspaper which would altogether spell the word out. I used a newspaper as I felt like it had a similar theme of 'absence', the way it is so easy to feel lost and detached from the news because so much is going on. Like with all my work at the moment, I feel that this was an interesting concept, however, my execution felt a bit overcomplicated and busy. I'd like to improve this by making the newspaper black and white to therefore allow the 'ABSENCE' letters to pop out, as well as this, I think I'd like to put loads of newspapers together as a collage rather than using a whole spread to carve out the letters in different spaces. This way the presentation would be a lot more clear and simple; something I've learned that is very important with graphic communication. 

Then, we took out our collected phrases/words that we found and brought in to then transcribe them, discuss the connotations, the emphasis on specific words and how it impacts an audiences feelings and interpretations. A lot of the words and sayings I collected all related around the themes of the past, memories and nostalgia, as this is something that I hold a lot of significance to and means a lot to me. The saying I chose to work with was a piece of text I found in CRACK music magazine:  "A love letter to mixtapes". From learning that its best not to overcomplicate things and knowing that my strengths aren't illustration, I have come up with the idea to literally make a love letter to mixtapes through making a vox pop/animation with interviews from different people about their memories with mixtapes whilst spelling out the quote with tape from a cassette. 

Overall, I think my pitch was effective as I made it very graphic through a lot of colour and diagrams of how it could potentially turn out, alongside, mind maps to make it clear. I feel like people understood my pitch idea and enjoyed it, however, I felt that I lacked constructive feedback and people may have been too shy or polite to critique it so I am not completely sure how strong my pitch  truly was.

I turned to Claire, our tutor, for further feedback in order to get further feedback on how to improve and she helped me narrow down my decision to creating a simple animation combined with an interview as beforehand I had a plan to put interviews , music etc on cassette tape which may cause my idea to go in a complete different direction to what the brief is asking for. 

New insights I have learned from today's workshop is how much more effective language can be communicated when it is presented through a simple concept. 

UPDATE:

I made a montage surrounding the theme of mixtapes in relation to my title 'A LOVE LETTER TO MIXTAPES'; the video showed clips of nature, playlists, records, CDs, people performing and people dancing whilst a friend of mine who is a rapper discussed his ideas and relationship with what mixtapes mean to him. I am really happy with this as a first outcome as I feel I definitely captured the atmosphere I was going for, nostalgic and intimate, as to me music and mixtapes are super personal and have connotations of being a DIY gift out of love, friendship and memories. I think the voiceover was perfect for the video as I can hear the narrator drifting into his own world when talking about mixtapes and you can hear the reflectiveness in his voice which therefore enhances the intimate atmosphere. Next, I'd like to include more inputs from loads of different people and become more experimental with the typography by for example: using cassette tape to create letterings.

For this session, I was only in for half day so I experienced a slight glimpse of working with a group but also finishing the task independently. Overall, I enjoyed the session as it was fun to be creative when styling with very cheap / accessible materials rather than the whole expectation of having to 'pull' designer clothes to have a good styling piece. 

Working as a team was quite a weird experience for me, something I had to really adapt to as the whole of last year I assisted stylists on magazines such as Wonderland, Another Man, Heroine, Crack, Wave where I worked closely with one main stylist so I found it really threw me off working with 4 other people on the same look. Regardless, I felt like I learned a lot about taking a step back and compromising, as well as, being confident to give a personal input in order to collaboratively create satisfied final outcomes. 

I was able to use techniques I have learned from assisting stylists on set in order to create my own looks, for example: rather than using a material visibly, using it discreetly to enhance, alter, blow up, tighten the visible item the model is wearing. For example: I puffed up plastic into the sleeve in order to create one side of the shirt to appear extremely oversized and bloated in comparison to the other side and as a result creating something that seems quite offbeat. I learned this after watching a stylist I assisted, Effie Villagomez, doing this for a cyber punk photoshoot for Wave magazine. 

I think my ideas developed in a sense that after doing one year of fashion promotion in another university, styling with normal clothes, this helped me think more outside of the box and being resourceful and innovative with random materials rather than just creating conventional/trendy looks. Although it was a challenge at times as sometimes I felt limited and stifled with the materials I had and found myself at times in a creative rut considering how quick the project was. 

I feel that the photography made a HUGE difference to my work. I took self portraits and I am deeply inspired by Francesca Woodman's work and the emotions she evokes through her photography whilst being in front of the lens.  Due to feeling like the raw photos alone didn't feel so interesting, I definitely wanted to convey a narrative thoroughly through the editing process. I wanted to create that similar eerie yet ethereal look, Woodman' created, however per category of styling I slightly altered the editing method to suit the story. For example: Oversized/Fitted felt lonely and ghostly, whereas the Light category felt almost historical and soft whilst patterns felt almost trippy and 80s- like. 

I felt really inspired by my peers work in class and I feel their success was through use of location and the area around campus, something I didn't use working independently. One look that stood out to me especially was somebody creating a head piece out of the material; rather than just placing it on the body, the stylist thought unconventionally and gathered the materials to invent something which I found was really exciting. 

With today's the task of creating a collage out of an abstract quote, I find it quite difficult with how broad the quotes were; there was no specific theme to it and so it required us to either really breakdown what the quote was saying or just be completely straightforward. The quote I followed was "We are so obsessed with the net and technology that we forget the message we imagine to be able to do anything, and our software helps us believe we can but we must move beyond 'how' and reconsider the 'what' and the 'why'." - Neville Brody, one of the most renown graphic designers of our generation known for his involvement in the British independent music scene in the 80s.  From this quote, I instantly thought of technology, individualism and futurism; regardless of whether this was a right or wrong interpretation, I decided to just go with it otherwise things might have got overcomplicated. 

 My collage overall was about the argument of how the world is moving too fast and is out of control, with the advancements of technology, immense amount of inequality, climate change and confusing politics. This was heavily influenced by not only the quote given, but also a BBC television show called 'Years & Years" revolving around a family in Britain dealing with the hopes, anxieties and joys of an uncertain future beginning in 2019 and and propelling 15 years forward into an unstable world throughout each episodes. 

I found the poster making itself quite easy as I played to my strengths and played around with collaging, which is a technique I really enjoy and feel I am good at. Starting off the collage was really hard as I was just looking at a blank page, but once I started off with one idea, more ideas started to bounce of each other. To improve the collage, I could enlarge it onto a much bigger canvas and also to not be afraid of trying different experiments with cutting, folding, a range of materials in order to make the collage feel a lot more dynamic. 

In the 'Lost Letters' workshop, we were all handed a number or letter and the task was to construct an illustration or design that transforms the given number/letter out of its usual context. I was given the number 3, however, at first it was super difficult for me to get my head around what it could possibly become, without it feeling to generic, since the 3 was quite a weird proportion meaning that I couldn't do anything that had an exact centre. 

The people on my table and I started off mind-mapping and moving our numbers/letters around, rotating it, adding light sketches to see what ideas we could possibly use; quite a common theme was animals. Finally, I came up with the idea of creating the female reproductive system - transforming the 3 into Fallopian tubes. When designing this concept around the number 3 it was quite difficult for me as I am not an illustrator and I found it hard to work with the composition of the number. I was very slow when creating the final design but once the design was done, the colours were organised and the page was ready for screen printing, it felt like the idea translated effectively as a starting point at least. 

 With the final print, I liked the outcome a lot, even though it wasn't necessarily the most realistic looking fallopian tubes, I liked the abstract composition to it. If I was a lot more precise with my scalpel when cutting out areas of the design, it could have looked a lot more neater, in line and refined and I felt restricted by the number 3 being black as I attempted to make it red, its outcome was a murky brown that stands out a lot amongst black, white and red. Altogether, my biggest challenge in this workshop was creating a final piece in two fields I've never really focused on before, screen print and illustration, in a really short amount of time. Usually, I am very slow with my processes from start to finish as I have a habit of wanting to make things overly complex but this workshop has taught me a lot about how simplicity can be a lot more effective and efficient. 

ANIMATION:

With the animation, we used an app called Stop Motion, which I really enjoyed. The app is super simple and is has encouraged me to want to make a more detailed form of animation work. Due to the whole theme of my Lost Letters centred around the female body, I thought to continue this them through making the animation a feminist statement. I included 'My body is not your politics' as a link to the way men in power make insensitive laws and decisions/opinions that don't help women through potential traumatic experiences for example abortions/unwanted pregnancy, sexual assault, slut shaming etc. The black against the red is a striking and alerting colour combination which led me to want to add some typography. 

At the start of today's workshop, we discussed the word 'fear' and the connotations that revolve around it. We were then each given a number or email from another anonymous person in the class to talk further on a personal, private level of how we feel about the word 'fear' and our personal experiences with it. 

From this we then were to create a response to the theme of fear by turning these small, intimate quotes, from the anonymous exchanges, into something a lot more louder and present in the architecture around us. 

In my exchanges with my anonymous partner, I was drawn to when they said 'everything without connect to anyone'. I started to think about what this meant and, to me, it felt like it represented how we have all access to so much in our society, opportunities, networking, entertainment through technology, however, this instant gratification culture means that we never actually connect with what is in front of us due to never being satisfied. Moreover, I found this quite ironic as well considering I found this quote through exchanging messages with someone anonymously despite the fact that person was in the same room as me and we could have just had a face to face conversation. From this, I adjusted the lettering of the quote so that it would make more meaning to the message I wanted to get across and so I changed it to 'So many contacts, so little connections.' I was particulary interested in designers, Conor and David, who created a balloon installation spelling out '&'. Inspired by the subtleness of their work, I wanted to create something humble in size yet also thought-provoking.

Linking back to the theme of technology, I chose to incorporate my phone and charger with my phone screen proclaiming: "So many contacts" then the wire leading up to the plug that would then state "so little connections" once unplugged from the socket. After creating my piece, I wasn't happy at all with my final outcome; I felt that my typography was boring and irrelevant and that being just a simply phone plugged into a charger, I saw that it was left unnoticed when my classmates were looking round at everybody's work. Overall, my final piece lacked a clearness and may have been a bit too overcomplicated, however, with development and organisation it could be an interesting concept. When looking at my classmates work, I really liked the versatile use of typography and how it set an atmosphere, one particular piece I enjoyed was chalk writing on a wooden cupboard; I found it was a really smart yet simple way of creating  school-like imagery. 

I was given a concept, a material and a process to create a design proposal for. After rolling three random dice, I received the words: sensualism, hair and suspend. To figure out what route I was going to take with these words, I deconstructed the definition of each word and noted down the connotations, synonyms and even opposites to help spark some ideas. Originally, I came up with the idea of a mannequin with juxtaposing textures of hair suspending dramatically from different places of the body; in intimate places would be soft, silky and nice to touch hair whilst coarse and irritable hair would suffocate the mannequin's eyes and neck to portray how humans are being strangled, as well as, over consumed by their pursuit for pleasure. However, with a lot of my artist influences being based around super interactive exhibitions ,such as Olaffur Eliason's "In Real Life", I wanted to design something where the audience could connect through immersing.

Therefore, I created the concept of "a hanging wooden immersive installation with 3 different textures of hair suspending from the frame, the further you walk into the hair maze, the more shuddering the touch of these different hair's feel. We so easily succumb to temptation when something feels pleasurable but there's often times where we overly indulge. When turning to excess, we eventually lose touch of what felt nice in the first place. This concept is depicted through this experiential frame, you are first introduced to the exterior of soft, silky hair that is soft to touch and sweet to smell. Those who are tempted to continue further in to the mini hair maze soon discover less pleasant hair textures such as tangly, matted, greasy and wet. Hair is an interesting material to use considering it is from the body, it can often be an intimate connotation due to the traditional symbol of a lock of hair depicting love. Hair can make people feel vulnerable and self conscious, hair can have cultural connotations, aesthetic connotations and so on. It brings a lot of pleasure and interest into people's lives so it is interesting to see how in this installation we can see a gradual transition from feeling excited and fascinated to irritated and suffocated." (Taken from my presentation) 

Overall,  considering I only had one day to do this project, this is a good starting point for a hair-based sensory area which enforces the viewer to question human decisions rather than designing something that has a straightforward and efficient use. The fact that I had less than 24 hours to create something meant that I was able to let go of any egoism to do with how my work may turn out, alongside technique, and just play around with anything that springs into my mind. This allowed me to purely focus on simply creating a concept whilst filtering out any unnecessary insecurities or over complications. I feel that my work may have been a bit too fine art based for a graphic communication piece as with this concept, I would have pictured it as an installation in an exhibition rather than in the public domain. This has opened me up to questioning where the line is drawn between fine art and design communication. 

In today's session, after looking at a series of artists such as Barbara Kruger and Stefan Sagmeister, we discussed their influences on design and altogether mind mapped ideas, quotes and illustrations on what the meaning of graphic communications design is. Altogether, we established that it is a creative and visual way of communicating towards a specific target audience. This can involve mediums such as graphic design, illustration, photography, animation and so on.  We then looked at Carlos Amorales work ,'Life In Folds', where the artist created a whole alphabet and form of communication through folded papers. It was fascinating to see how he linked his interest with music into the creation of the new language; “There is a correspondence in these ocarinas between symbols and figures. They’re popular, simple and common instruments, and they all have different shapes just like the characters of a language. They’re intimate. They’re played by breathing into them, as if they had a spirit or soul of their own,”

Influenced by Carlos Amorales' work, as groups, we constructed our own alphabets. In my group, we first thought to create an alphabet based on different colours so that when writing a word, the colours would merge together and create a vibrant sensory experience. However, after realising that we only had limited coloured pens to use, we had to come up with an additional feature to our alphabet to distinguish two letters that might have the same colour. We used circles, lines and ovals in different ways to form our final alphabet. 

When making the alphabet, we added very subtle shape to the letters that somewhat resembles the English alphabet so that it was almost like code rather than a completely new language. In the end, we didn't feel the need to add colours as the shapes itself already made the page feel busy. In my opinion, the final outcome doesn't deliver a specific, in depth message relating to another theme, instead it just provides an alternative and abstract form of translation that have reminders of possibly hieroglyphics.