Seasons Greetings!

The Meeting Place

As a self directed brief in my third year, I made a short film heavily influenced by French New Wave and 1960’s popular culture. I have only attempted film making once in the past, with a short Skateboarding film called ‘Grey Lights’, shot of my friends who are all Skateboarders in Norfolk.

Film making is something I’ve always wanted to get into, so the ‘Self Directed’ (self written) brief seemed like the perfect time to do it, especially when our tutors were really encouraging us to be experimental with writing the brief and explore something we’re interested in but never attempted.

This is the description written for the film, which I had help in drafting from my Journalist friend:

“The meeting place is a short film that explores the stylistic features of foreign film. It does this by manipulating expected stereotypes of 1960s French New Wave cinema, such as British actors who look European and shot against the background of London’s streets in a typical black and white grain. By combining the features of foreign film with strong beacons of British identity all the important cinematic techniques used to achieve the ‘foreign film’ are made more apparent.
The story follows a young man traveling to meet his heartbreaking ex-girlfriend who is returning from a new year in Paris with her new husband.”

Here is the finished movie, written, directed, shot and edited in about two weeks. I advise watching it in fullscreen:

The idea for the story was inspired by old Walker Brothers songs and the script was lifted from an old François Truffaut film ‘Jules Et Jim’. The subtitles don’t match up to the actual French script, but due to the time constraint I couldn’t find anyone that spoke French to do the voice acting for me. So I’ve simply put in the French audio track to emphasize the language barrier. The two main actors in the piece are local fashion models that I came across at my university. They suited the part perfectly with European facial features and French styled clothing. The locations are mostly in and around London to subtly hint at the fact that it’s a British homage to Foreign cinema. When scouting out the locations I knew that the film would be shot in black and white, so tried to find locations that would really compliment the b&w grain.

★★★★★

I recently got involved in running a new film club every other week at my University in Epsom. Each four weeks two films will be shown as part of a season. The season will be explored through the idea of the first film being from a different decade from the second film, such as one from the 1960s and one from the 1990s.

I got given the task of creating two posters to illustrate the first season -The “Live Fast, Die young” season, which explored rock and roll films. Part of the brief was to also create a rigid visual style to the poster, which when other designers at the University take on the brief, will have a template in which to apply their creativity. I had to create an identity that would become familiar to the viewer over the weeks the film club ran. To do this I came up with a simple grid structure of centering the content, and making the poster bottom heavy on the information. I used the simple, aesthetically pleasing ‘Helvetica Neue’ font and put some horizontal lines in to break up the information from the visuals. When other designers approach the brief, they will generate a piece of imagery that incorporates their given quotation and place within the top two thirds of the white space that I have created.

Performance (1970) - Rather than just using something simple like a still image from the film, I decided to highlight a good quote from the film to create an intrigue and an interest in watching it. I used an expressive image of oil painting to present the film title ‘Performance’ and embedded the title and quotation within the image in reversed out text.

Dig!, 2004 - To re-inforce the idea of the films being from different decades, I stayed with the same aesthetic of a heavy black image and embedded white text, but this time changed it from a hand rendered painting to a simple geometric shape rendered digitally. This is to create a clear identity for the film club as the weeks go on, and will give the viewer the familiarity that they’ve seen a poster very similar to this one a few weeks before.

Something In The Making Promotional Material

As I created all the artwork for Franko Fraize and Lyrical T’s debut E.P, I was also given the task of creating promotional material for web and print. The posters I created were put up in independent record shops around Norwich in Norfolk such as ‘Sound Clash’ and the web banner was mostly used to promote through Myspace.

A3 Poster - I decided that the E.P. cover is interesting enough to advertise itself, especially at A3 size where the photography can be better viewed. So staying with the same design format as the E.P. information – Gill Sans font type, white text on black background – I put all the provided information and visuals into a grid structure that created black space to the left and right of the poster.

Web Banner - A web banner to be placed at the top of Franko Fraize and Lyrical T’s myspace pages. The banner is also able to be pasted on other pages with a ‘html.’ format. Taking note of the A3 poster I balanced the E.P. cover on the right of the banner and the relevant information on the left. The different lines of text have varying colour to highlight the more important information.

Web Screenshots - Here are three screenshots from the Myspace page where the banner has been used. The great thing about editing Myspace’s visuals is you can manipulate what the viewer sees as they scroll down the page. Here the very first thing they see is the top banner promoting the E.P.’s release, then as they continue scrolling down the rest of the information comes into play, as well as audio samples of some of the songs. You can see that by using css coding I have also manipulated the background and text colours to match the E.P.’s general colour scheme and identity. It’s amazing how professional a page like this can look even for an unsigned artist like this.

www.myspace.com/frankofraize

www.myspace.com/lyricalt1

www.hoodlem.bigcartel.com

Rapsploitation Sessions

As mentioned many many times on this blog, Franko Fraize – who’s E.P. artwork I worked on – invited me along to a gig he was performing at under some big name acts in the UK Hip Hop world such as ‘Task Force’. He asked me to bring a camera along and capture the event in photographs.

I’ve always been interested in film making and have never properly got into it. But when I went a long to the show I decided to film it on a low-grade digital camera, and then edited it with the very basic apple ‘iMovie’ software.

Here’s the outcome, which for a spur of the moment idea, I think came out very well. Other than the poor sound quality of the performance!

Here’s some related links:

http://rapsploitationsessions.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/taskforce-rapsploitation-sessions-re-cap/ – Review of the event.

www.rapsploitationsessions.wordpress.com - Rapsploitation Sessions Blog

www.myspace.com/frankofraize – Franko Fraize Myspace

Hoodlem

Hoodlem is a promotion and recording company created by Franko Fraize (the rapper I worked with previously), and his cousin. They aim to promote urban musicians such as rappers and producers in the Norfolk/Suffolk area and give them a platform to release unsigned E.P’s.

The duo commissioned me with the work on creating an identity and logo which they could place on printed materials such as posters and CD artwork, as well as a range of T-Shirts for the people involved with ‘Hoodlem Promotions’.

1. I began by playing with geometric shapes and trying to represent the word ‘hoodlem’ in simple typography. Initial inspiration came from Constructivist and Bauhaus styles.

2. I then got the idea that I could use the iconic and recognizable font of ‘Rizzla’ tobacco rolling papers packaging as a starting point. I re-rendered this font by hand and did a few photocopies of it to lower the quality and grade. I’m not sure where the Rizzla inspiration came from. I think it’s because it’s such a recognized brand in the urban environment where the company would be situated.

3. Another rendition of the photocopy but coloured in quite vigorously with Letraset marker pens. I love the energetic simplicity of the colour behind the black and white text.

4. A digital render of the previous logo.

5. Preview sheet containing digital versions on the right side and hand rendered on the left.

6. The Rizzla style logo was declined. So I went back to the original Bauhaus inspiration, using the font ‘Bauhaus 93′. I re-drew parts of the type to fill in the ‘O’ characters and add a drop shadow to the whole font.

7. Final Logo - The logo with the drop shadow was liked, but I was asked to tweak it, with the intention to make it more simple, add a stroke to the characters, get rid of the drop shadow and fill in the ‘O’ and the ‘D’ characters. I also added the little tail to the inside of the ‘D’ to create a subtle ‘P’, standing for ‘Promotions’. I also adjusted the leading between characters to make all the red stroke touch. I personally liked the previous version of the logo (no.6 above) and thought it was much more interesting, but it’s just a classic case of it coming down to what the client want.

Visit Hoodlem’s online shop here: http://www.hoodlem.bigcartel.com/

The A-Z of Vikki Blows

I was asked to create some illustrations for a journalist friend of mine who wrote an article on glamour model ‘Vikki Blows’. She asked me to just create any style of illustration I thought suited the brief because she didn’t want to use bog standard photo’s to accompany her article. The article titled ‘The A-Z of Vikki Blows’ was written for UCA student fashion journalism magazine ‘Bespoke’.

You can see more of Vikki Blows at http://www.vikkiblowsloveshates.com , and you can find the journalist’s work who commissioned the piece: Laura Hall at www.the-witch-girls.blogspot.com

Thetford’s On The Map

A while before Franko Fraize commissioned me to create his and Lyrical T’s E.P artwork, he asked me to create a poster for one of his local shows. The brief was pretty open and the only idea I had to bear in mind was ‘Putting Thetford on the map’. So I thought of ideas of mapping and transportation, as well as being inspired by Peter Saville’s old yellow Factory Records poster for it’s very strict grid structure.

 

Declined Poster – Played on the iconic London Underground map

Final Poster - Colour scheme inspired by London Transport identity. I kept to a strict grid structure and varied the text colours and weights to highlight the more important information.

Forget All the Rules You Ever Learned About Graphic Design

While still on a summer break from uni, I’ve been indulging myself a couple of books written by Bob Gill who, along with Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, started Fletcher/Forbes/Gill design studio, the forerunner of Pentagram design studio.

“The audience who will see a company’s logo is the same audience who will have seen the latest alien film, and the hottest music video, with special effects that are dazzling. How can a graphic designer compete with this magic? We can’t. We have to go to the other extreme…to reality! We must take a look at the real world, and in effect, say to our audience, “Look! Have you ever noticed this before? Even though it was right under your nose?”  – Bob Gill on the subject of reality in design, taken from ‘Logomania’

Gill’s books are so enjoyable to read as he seems to create endless solutions to design problems which are always so seemingly simple yet so bloody clever! Reading through a couple of pages will completely refresh your understanding of graphic design problem solving again and again.

Visiting The Far East

I’ve been away from my work for a month to visit Thailand with a few friends. Here are some of the photographs that were much more interesting than the rest I took.