GEORGINA SADLER 1010094

GRAPHIC DESIGN YEAR 2

METHODS AND MADNESS EGRD 2009

In preperation for the Shooting Stars Brief, the task was given to re-tell the story of the storyboard below. I realised that there were many possibilities in which you could manipulate the paper hand-out. My first interpretation of manipulation was the stick figure drawings, which are quick sketches looking at perspective. The cut-out collages I then created were challenged at first, by size restriction. However, by photocopying and enlarging the storyboard, I had more freedom in creating perspective and layout. As a consequence, humour could easily be added, like the collage on the right displays.

Re-tell the story exercise

This brief challenged my skills in time management and aided me into learning how to edit footage in Quick Time 7, Premiere Pro and Imovie. I now know how to use video recording equipment, including sound, and a lesson well-learnt that filming in the dark requires lights that is more easy to use than car headlights!

Shooting Stars

With the London Riots being an event that took place in the city I live and grew up in, I felt that by choosing this from the news items list within the Shooting Stars Brief, would help me to learn more about London. The time-based outcome produced was a video which used footage from the news, and footage I had taken myself of a youth who was an instigator within the riots. The research done included going to Kingston Upon Thames and interviewing people about the riots. It was shocking to hear the different ways in which it affected people. I found that by the time I had collected my footage and recordings, there was little time to edit, and I was also experiencing technical difficulties in using movie editing programs. But nevertheless, a time-based outcome was produced which documents my perspective of investigating into the London Riots. By juxtaposing two different sound tracks alongside the footage, the viewer sees a cause and effect narration which is then cut off by darkness and only the sound of melanchony strings being played.

Serial Thriller - Chinese Whispers

This new find for me was like de-ja-vu; As a child, I had recorring dreams of this massive, fast-moving ball of black sgwiggly lines which got bigger and faster and more dense until it englufed me and I became part of it. The feel of the cassette tape reminds me of how I felt when I had these dreams, all tangled and over-whelmed with knots. Not only was this brief surfacing new materials and processes in which I was using, but was also sharing with people for the first time an experience that could otherwise not be felt. It was evident that I had to take this brief further, so incorporated as well was a rubber mould of my hand, (see next page).

In my First Year, I was fascinated with textures, surfaces and images that a lot of people found unsettling i.e a rubber mould of my mouth, and a spider book with animal fur stuck on it and a dead spider imprinted onto the front. I came across some old cassettes at home and pulled out the tape from the inside... the rustling, the light tickling it creates within your hands and the suprising restraint it has against tearing for me was so inviting! When you closed your eyes and scrunched it up in your hands, it was like a ball of spiders. I then decided to base my sound recording project on this. I created a sound recording which has been un-edited with no added special effects, purely just one recording which creates an intense feeling of un-ease, discomfort and confusion as to what the sounds are coming from.

The sound recording was played to 27 people who were blindfolded and had in one hand a box containing loads of cassette tape, and in the other hand was a biro pen and a pad of paper which I held still for the duration of the experience. During the time the sound recording was being played, the subjects were asked to draw what they could hear and feel. The result is on the previous page, and next to it is the warped paper underneath where they were drawing on.

The photographs of the cassette tape on these pages reflect the spindly delicate crispness it posesses.

The life-like rubber hand as well as the spidery cassette tape together create a true visual of the sound recording and a direct link to my childhood dream. This is an instillation piece which has a small speaker within the palm of the rubber hand’s grasp. The speaker plays a loop of the sound-recording and the audience touch, listen and see what I did. I answered the brief by creating a sound recording and then got people to respond to it visually. I pushed the brief further by turning it into an instillation piece.

Leafing A Trace

Being put in a group of three with Emma Ridgway and Antoniya Kuneva, the task for the 1-day brief was to Map out the University and explore new areas and incorporate the text ‘leave a trace.’ Immediately a play on words was adapted to the text and we set off as a group collecting different types of leaves and scattering them around the areas we were venturing into.

We became aware that there were areas within the University campus we didn’t know about, and as we went from place to place, we left our trace of leaves. We even expanded our exploration perimiter, and headed to Epsom Downs to explore further. We documented our journey through taking pictures.

Biography BriefTo find out about a person in history who I have never heard of proved to be quite challenging in trying to find new ways of sourcing my information. I asked my brother about who Emmett Till was and he gave me a description about who he was and why he was significant in History. The fact that Emmett Till was famous because of his terrible death is shocking. My dad told me that Bob Dylan had made a song about the boy, and luckily enough I found a cassette tape of the song. But before playing it, I noticed that the lyrics were printed inside the cassette box, so I decided to interpret the lyrics myself without hearing what it should sound like. I produced a sound recording of myself playing guitar, and my brother singing the lyrics according to how I thought it may sound like. I edited the sound files in GarageBand.

'Above all, you want to create something you're proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If

Richard Branson

Virgin Media is one of our newest and

Virgin

1995 2003

is one of our most

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#1How iconic...Within Virgin, comes many of it’s sub-brands, like Virgin Mobile, and Virgin Limited Edition. We realised that in order to show our target audience the vast amount of these sub-brands, we needed to catagorise them. From this, we developed a concept and an idea for the brief. We created a set of vibrant, colourful and playful icons which are shown here. These icons then became the foundation to our overall concept and our unique selling point for both our brochure and its coherent poster.

These icons represent the main branches of the Virgin Company. We took these icons and applied them to the different areas of our brochure in order to personalise them and make them more unique.

Paper Co BriefPaper Co set us a brief which was one of the most challenging brief’s I have come across throughout this course. Not only was I trying to work towards an actual deadline, but also was creating work for a highly reputable company; Virgin.

Within the briefing at the BAFTAS, it was said that the overall package we were to create should show a sense of fun, playfulness and be clear in communicating brand awareness.

In response to the brief, Emma and I created a set of colourful, playful and vibrant icons. These icons then became the unique selling point within our Virgin package.

Emma and I decided to continue our icon concept throughout the rest of our designs. We used icons to summarize the main Virgin brands as well as placing them next to the Virgin sub-brand logos, creating a link between the two.

Our original idea was to cut the icons out of the brochure and have a sleeve which had them printed on. This however, seemed unnecessary and it would be more simpler and easier to understand if the icons were displayed on each page within the brochure. The brochure (both right), folds into A5 size which is small enough to fit through a letterbox and has easily readable fonts.

The timeline which was also a requirement for this brief would be printed onto the back of the brochure which saves paper and in effect, costs to produce. The brochure also functions as a poster because it folds out to A1 size. When presenting our work to the clients, it was noted that we had needed to modify a couple of the Virgin logos as they were no longer the legitimate logos. Also, the time-line would be more easily read if it went from Virgin Records starting at the top, then at the bottom the most recent Virgin sub-brand; Virgin Galactic.

I feel that the brochure and poster Emma and I designed fully respnds to the criteria and requirements within the brief that was given. We also met the requirements to the use of paper being PaperCo’s 9Lives Paper which was written within the evaluation we had written.

As well as the brochure, we were also required to create an information graphics poster which Emma and I struggled on creating as it was hard to link the poster to the brochure without it looking like a completely seperate piece. We came to the conclusion to use our circular icon concept to create the shape of our poster, which then created a link between with the brochure. The poster’s intention was to celebrate 25 Years of Virgin Atlantic and to also show the global reach of Virgin. So in order to save paper, we printed onto both sides of the poster. The poster is A2 in size

On the opposite page are examples of the different layouts and colour layouts we came up with.The clients said within the meeting that they liked the angled blocks of colour as it looked like the wings of a plane, or even a mountainous plane where we see a Virgin plane taking off just behind. The poster is designed to fold and fit inside the sleeve Emma and I created, along with the brochure and timeline.

On the right is a picture showing a sleeve that we would have for both the brochure and the timeline to fit into. By having a sleeve, the overall package felt more personal and something to keep rather than just another layer

EvaluationDuring this semester, I have found myself a lot more technically adapted, and since the Shooting Stars brief, my confidence in film editing programs has become a lot better. In fact, during LAB I made a video and helped to do editing. I have also become more knowledgeable regarding sound recordings. I now know where and when I can go to get technical help too.

Serial thriller was a brief that truly brought out memories inside me and became a quite meaningful piece, which infused both my love of all things creepy, and made me want to expand further on the use of materials and processes I use.

There have been many methods to my madness, and madness to my methods even! I feel that not only has my radical experimentation in materials been varied, but also my ways of working. When doing the Virgin Brief for example, Emma and I did countless amounts of different types of poster designs that would link with the brochure and continue the circular icon concept.

I have also been putting what I have been studying in Contextual Studies into practice and realizing that the experience of art is based on sign rather than technique, and that the fundamental experience is that which is transmitted by the artist. But what must not be forgotten is what the viewer assigns to the sign. Each individual will have had his or her own experiences and so whatever signs are presented, it will have a different effect from person to person.

The Virgin Brief was my most favoured brief and as the role of Creative Director.

INDEPENDENT PRACTICE INTEGRATION

GEORGINA SADLER

A family friend of mine has an extensive collection of packaging, tools, small machinery and old car parts. In fact so much so that there is an entire wall covered with them! I found this obsession of collecting fascinating, and so went to take pictures using a polaroid camera on the opposite page. The polaroid camera produced a completely different picture than what the SLR took. What the polaroid was capturing was ghostly. Also I found that the view you see through the viewer is not the same as whatis seen through the lense, and so it

became quite difficult to frame what I was shooting. I found it interesting to play around with lighting too as it would create completely different pictures. I really like the way polaroids create a vintage feel which is why I wanted to use a polaroid to take pictures of these personal, vintage objects. Using an old process of photography gave anticipation and excitement; the time it takes for the photo to slowly develop before your eyes reminded me of how our memory works when we look back on the past.

Here are two A3 pages from my sketchbook which are composed of hundreds of squares joining to each other, creating chains and sometimes images within. I would like to take this further and perhaps produce a digital version, and then I would have more editable control over creating the boxes and making layers to produce images.

During LAB, I attended a workshop with Roderick Mills on the 23rd Novermber. He showed to us that anyhting can go, but the key is to experiment and expand your use of materials. Using photocopied print-outs of various images of historical context, I started off by producing simple collages, similar to what I did in the re-telling a story brief in my studio work. Roderick said to incorporate drawing skills within it, and so I started tracing and layering the images which produced the image on the bottom left. This work shop really helped my confidence in expanding in ideas and creating interesting layouts to tell a story, for example, I was having fun incorporating text with image to create meaning (see opposite page).

The image on the opposite page is a collage composed of cassette tape, pen and paper cut-outs. This was also a piece I composed within the Roderick Mills workshop. I find that white space can create balance within a composition, rather than pushing everything into one space. The drawings on this page were inspired by the historical images I had within the workshop. I found that I enjoyed working on top of different types of materials and so expanded on this new find further.

Using some cellophane I found scrunched up on the floor, I traced onto it an illustration of a knight on a horse which I liked the perspective of the horse coming towards the viewer. I then found a projector and put the cellophane onto it, which in effect, created a larger projection of what I had drawn. The quick, expressive lines used to draw on the cellophane made the drawing look like a stencil. I started drawing the projection onto a large piece of paper. The result made me feel more confident in my drawing skills and to work on a larger scale.

The previosu page shows an illustration I did which highlights an amazing New Year I had! I find working in pen interesting as you can get different shades like you can with a pencil.

In expansion to the illustration on the previous page, I then started to remember events slowly unfolding from that night, and wanted to show a visual journey of them unfolding. Using mixed media, I found that I had more freedom in creating layers of colour and texture.

A BULGARIAN FAIRYTALE