Thinking is Drawing in your Head

After enjoying the stop-frame project, my housemates and I decided to have another go at it ourselves. This short film uses a quote from Alan Fletcher's book 'The Art Of Looking Sideways'.

Mail Art

New brief is all about 'Mail Art'. 
The brief is quite open ended which is exciting, and we have been able to choose who we work with. As a starting point for the project, we spent a day in a 'Mail Art Workshop', which involved various skills associated with the art form, such as rubber stamps, wrapping, arranging, collage, etc..there was even a table for very important cups of tea to keep everyone going. A really good day...and lots of ideas to come over the next week.

Stopframe.

So first project of the term was to create a stop frame animation using only Zapf Dingbats, a common dingbat typeface:

I have never created a stopframe animation before so had a lot to learn! We spent the first day of the project getting our heads around the history of it all, this short film called 'Neighbours' by Norman McClaren was one of my favourite examples shown.

We were put into groups of three, each group coming up with a different narrative that would become a 10-20 second clip using only the dingbats. My group and I decided a fireworks display would be a way to incorporate some of the symbols provided..and began to work on a storyboard. We had not planned any colours at this point:

Although we were limited to 10-20 seconds, producing the film took hours. Once printed, each small symbol had to be cut perfectly, and after quite some time (and a bit of pain), were were we ready to start shooting. As we had a storyboard to follow, the making of the film was fairly straightforward but still very time consuming, as every slight move had to be accurate. We used 'iStop Motion' software, linked up to a camera as seen below:

Learned a lot from this project, and although a lot of patience was required throughout, the outcome looks awesome. Will have the final clip itself up shortly!

Bad Type Day Out

We began the day taking our terrible typefaces, cut from wood and painted white, into the photography studio. Mine was a 'Lucida Handwriting' letter 'C'. We were then each to be photographed somehow involving one or more of the letters.

Typoo..

All of the letters in the studio

We then took all of the letters around the rainy streets of Pimlico and Westminster..

Have a look at this film by Joe Egan which sums up the day perfectly!