sooooo, thought i'd better edit my last post. It was just a petulant, childish outburst that was made in the wee small hours of the morning when i had been staring at vector images for hours upon end. Considering I can't come into uni today because a bit of wind and rain has public transport grinding to a halt.

Which is very annoying because some last minute tutor input would have been marvellous

Progress so far:

- not bad at all. All images are finished, with the exception of the contents page which i need to just add some text to. It's also part of my 16 page quota so need to put my illustration in there.. pretty basic should take me all of 10 minutes, touch wood, fingers crossed, salt over shoulder etc etc

- need to get it printed, which i should be able to do today from my local printers (which makes where i live sound a bit royston vasey)

- need to bind it - figured out how i'm going to do this, what its going to look like and how many cigarettes i'm going to bribe my sister with to do it for me

- write up a little blurb about my book as to what its actually for

- figure out what my book is actually for, without saying 'its for the d&ad comp'

- sketchbook stuff - just need to write in it because i've printed and stuck in everything as i've gone along which has saved me so much time in the long run.

i think thats everything. No doubt something will crop up on thursday that will throw my whole project into complete disarray

P.S note the non-sweary blog post as well

(re) touching myself

ok, my idea as it stands so far is still to have Kelly Doll's (all of which could kick Barbie's arse) but instead of having a brochure or catalogue like layout to have the book more like an instruction manual.

The style i want to use is kind of a mixture of illustration and photos, think monty python style and also the Rik Mayall 'Me and My Goldfish" animation



So far I've written all the text that I want to include and have started making all the me's. I've also learnt the art of retouching photo's, so goodbye hangover eyes and my harry potter style lightning scar. I've only been working on the different heads so far but this is quite quick to do so i can draw the different bodies and accessories (maybe) once the faces have been done.

Above: First Thing In The Morning Kelly Doll

The plan is to have the layout so it looks like an instruction manual, i've been experimenting with different layouts on paper but its difficult to get something that looks like its a manual but also looks interesting. I think this is the part of my project that is going to take the longest. Theres a couple of ideas that I've got at the moment but while they look alright in sketch form i'm not sure yet how its going to translate onto the computer and into book form, its kinda hard to imagine how the finished thing will look.

3 responses

Illustrated Book:

Response 1:

Clichés of what makes people interesting.

Think about what makes a person interesting with life experiences and perhaps apply to self. The brief doesn’t state that the book has to be true to life but perhaps this is a way of subverting the project. Concept could relate to online avatars and communities and how much of this is true and what is fantasy. A way of visualising ideals.

Response 2:

Major events vs. different choices.

Think about the events that have happened in my own life and how much control I had over them. How could my life have changed if I made different choices. Think of the movie Sliding Doors. This project would have more of a narrative to it.

Response 3:

Brochure.

Taking brochures of toys and using a similar layout but make myself as different sorts of dolls, like Barbie. All the individual aspects of myself given separate identity and as a doll. Could be a mixture of humour and serious traits. Each page would be a different character (different personality and looks) with price details, accessories and extras like speech or movement. Has degrees of truth and ambiguity, like having a different person on every page.


Prefer third response but will partially look into the first one as well

I was going to update this thing with more about transmediale but without copying and pasting from the website, there’s not a great deal more to say on it. I kind of wished I’d taken more notes, but conveniently forgetting a pen and more conveniently not being able to buy one anywhere, this wasn’t to be.

Touching down in Germany me and Colin decided to do what any other British person in Germany would do (if they were fans of the Izzard that is) and stand at the top of the steps, pride in our voices and sewage smells in our nose, and say “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”.. which means “I am a doughnut”

Hotel Transit was actually very awesome, but I’m cheap and easy and they won me over with there 24 hour bar that you can smoke in. They had me at “hallo, ashtray?” Given that I have been smoking since I was 13 (16 if my dad asks) I couldn’t smell the wonderful smog of nicotine and chemicals. Upon lugging my suitcase (mostly empty for extra fags) I was greeted by everyone else excitedly telling me we were allowed to smoke there. That was giddy knickers moment one.

That night also taught me, when drinking huge beers with the lads to always, always lace your stomach with food. I was one of those great people that decided to inform everyone else how completely fucked I was. But the main thing was, I wasn’t sick. I also earned the respect from the boys for downing what was practically a pint. I say practically a pint because the quantity increases every time I tell this story.

The rest of the night’s sort of blur into one of beer, fags and early morning bed times. I earned extra cool points for staying up till 7.30am and waking up at 9.30am strolling into breakfast looking as fresh as a daisy or a crazy Romanian bear.

Other noteworthy points were walking for hours before finding anything of interest, esp. the trip for the magical panorama bar. Stoneman’s look of terror and not being able to go will haunt my dreams forever. We did find it, but I buggered off home, deeming it to look shit. Glad I did because I got the early and restful night of 3.30 am that I needed.

Last noteworthy point was our film. I can’t put down all the details here due to legal reasons and I don’t want to really upset people, but let me say it was MY idea. It started with ME saying to other people equally as drunk as ME… “if we were all in a horror film, who would die and who would survive?” No one survives. Looking back this was at best an in joke that passed a few hours of boredom, although Me, Chris K, nice Pete and Zach were thoroughly convinced it was going to be a masterpiece and a new generation of wiki-movie making. Really all it is is being able to pin point the exact moment I got completely and utterly pissed just based on my handwriting.

As for the rest of the trip.. what happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin.

berlin and transmediale

Just a quick post to note down all my thoughts and experiences in berlin before i forget most of them.

overall i found transmediale a bit hit and miss, there were some aspects of it i really enjoyed and came away with a lot, the things i didn't really like were probably just the ones that didn't apply to what i want to do or am interested in.

Embedding Fear. The Internet And The Spectacle Of Hightened Alert:

4 speakers about the internet's 'open system' and terrorism. From the program it says that the open system makes it not only the worlds most powerful tool of conspiratorial narrative generation but also creates the broadest 'extranational' platform for the creation and dissemination of political, military and corporate propagand. Sounds interesting, but you'd be wrong. Only one of the speakers engaged the audience through storytelling and animations. The others just really talked at the audience, and while some people liked this conference i found it incredibly dull and disagreed with a lot of it. This was probably the only thing i really didn't like out of the whole event.

Constraint City - The Pain Of Everyday Life:

'Constraint City' is a critical performance in urban space, which stands as a scarcastic contribution to the discussion of 'locative' and 'wearable media' linking into a tradition of psychogeography, the philosophising of pleasure and pain.

I really enjoyed this talk. To sum it up very quickly, Gordan Savicic has designed what looks like a corset and tightens when there is a lot of wifi signals being sent in an area. Interesting use of something wearable interacting with newer and increasingly popular technologies and the elements of control the wearer has. At first i thought that the wearer had little or no control but thinking about it more, the wearer can change route, walk away or towards strong wifi signals and therefore controlling the amount of pain they are in. I thought of this film and talk as being representational of the pain and pleasure technology can give. I suppose just relating it to mundane pc use, the pleasure comes from playing games or chatting and the pain elements from slow connections, crashing and losing work?

When You're Strange:

A group of different films

Stranger Comes To Town:

Six people are interviewed anonymously about their experiences coming into the us. Each then designes a video game avatar who tells their story by proxy. Jacqueline Goss focuses on the questions and examinations used to establish identity at the border, and how these processes in turn affect one's own sense of self and view of the world.

Really enjoyed this film, and interesting how we can relate to avatars and sympathise with them and get a feel for their identity and story even though they are animations and computer graphics. What i liked about this film was that we would hear the persons voice before we saw their avatar which may have helped more in creating identity. Humourous in places too and reminded me a lot of the creature comforts adverts Nick Park did.

Arameans:

Video questions the mobility of the Arameans in the Lebanese social context. The film tells the story of an Assyrian Woman who experienced bombings. I'm not sure this film got its point across that well and felt a bit forgettable to me. Not really applicable to what i'm doing or interested in.

Bilder aus dem Tagebuch eines Wartenden:

This is a search for the lost, or to be more exact wasted time spent during obligatory military service on the edge of Schengen country, which is embodied by the absurd micro-performances of the young showoffs and in banal, everyday monologs about the sense (or lack thereof) of their presence, enlarged to almost Becket-like dimensions.

Probably my favourite film i saw over there and very memorable. Like a video diary and reminded me very much of a blog with the mundane activities of people you don't know. Clever how it was made to be very funny and made you care about what happened to the people in the film, which has given me more to think about for my own work.

Beach

A personal account in the form of an out of tune TV broadcast; an accelerating stream of images, depicting a family on the beach in Tel Aviv, is juxtaposed with a video of a girl running frantically on a bombed beach in Gaza, only about 100 kilometers away.