Idea generation

Before the project began we were told to form groups of our choice however I wanted to try and work with people I had never worked with before in class, so I teamed up with Rachel Dare & Anna Fearon. We began our idea generation as soon as we came out from Nigel's presentation and luckily enough we came up with lots of great ideas.

+Postcards in form of -text-email-post-internet.. but return in a different format to what they were sent.
+Discover the message- layered postcards, first sent with information on, second with some blocks cut out, and the third with more blocks cut out which once layered would reveal a secret message (my personal favorite which i will try out once the project idea is complete and finished)
+Someone to photograph the route in which the postcard had traveled (with a polaroid camera)
+Postman's choice- give two stamps, two addresses and see who receives it
+ Have a party and the invitees need to send in a party item which when bought together would make a good party ie party hats, drink, food, plastic cups, plates. etc
+ jigsaw to form a picture
+ Different people given a camera and to photograph themselves at the same place and in the end you would have the same landscape but from different views.
+ Fabric swatches sent to us and we create a giant blanket
+ Send in the front of your favourite book/ any book and we bind them together to create a book of say? book covers
+Weird and wonderful sandwiches
+Then and now picture book
+ Send in something Red
+yellow ribbon round an old oak tree - Send the ribbon they send us the picture and we create a college of them all
+Documenting how long the Postal system takes
+Message in a bottle ?Milk delivery?
+ We post you a scarf you wear it take a picture and send on the scarf til it returns to us

Notes

Before we were to begin the brief Nigel put together a presentation to sum up the Mail art concept which we all gathered in the lecture theatre to view. I was looking forward to finding out more in depth about the concept and design features within Mail art. Below are some of the notes I took down during the presentation:

1950's in America (late 50's) 

Ray Johnson - Founder

Bypass the american system

Produce works of art on a free basis

They were like artist pen-friends

Mash potatoes art/posters were all mashed until you felt it was done

Quirky ideas

fluxous movement 

Yoko Omo touched on it

The network grew in the 60's-70's but more in the 70's

Picture notes

Singing postman from Northfleet

Herbert Malling- Vienna - Collage and drawings

Michael Lee - Waste Paper LTD

Concrete poetry - old archive of pictures

(walking downstairs to find art on your doormat and not just in galleries)

ZERO - can be found in our college library

Complaints letters - some even made up complaints to see what reply would be

No address just circle place on a map and they amazingly received it

POST YOURSELF - Henry Tuner 1st to post himself he was escorted 

Alison Wilson forged stamps for a collector and got sent to prison

Its illegal to deface a stamp (due to the queens face)

MARK PORSON- http://www.mpawson.demon.co.uk/

ROBIN CROZIER

MAIL ART

I'm a tad behind on posting for the mail art situation so here goes..

THE BRIEF.


Over the next 4 sessions you will be working in groups no larger than 3, with the task of creating a mail art project. You are to follow the standard format of the project in that you are to produce an announcment for it: this is then to be distributed through a network. The results are then to be co-ordinated, documented and then distributed to all the participents. (The concept of mail art is to be thought of in the litral sense; ie the postal system is not the sole method of communication)

Poster newspaper

Recently I was in brick lane doing the usual shopping, eating and browsing at things I want but know i can't afford. I went into the big music shop there, Rough Trade, they have a giant variety of music and i came across some free mags, and newspapers as you do and one of them happened to be a newspaper made of a collection on A2 posters on newsprint. Most of the posters were really nice but out of all of them I wanted to share this one. I just think its a beautiful picture with such intricate detail and symmetry.

Bad type day out!

Before christmas we made our wooden bad type letters and the time came to take them out for a bad day out. We all gathered in the courtyard with our letters, some as big as your body and some as small as your hands palm and we set off. Joe Egan (the bright guy that he is) decided to film the day with his laaaavvvly camera and in the end he produced a really good video recording of us all and all the events that happened while we were out.

Here are a few snaps from the day and a link to Joe's short film:

http://vimeo.com/18856460

Bad type having a bad time

Our team posing with the bundle of crap type

Zapf DingDong!

After having the weekend to think about how it would be a good way to achieve what we were after and what size would be best to cut out the individual dingbats, I settled on the idea on enlarging the sheet of dingbats on A4 to A3 which would only slightly enlarge them giving me more space to cut around each glyph. On Monday with Jo falling ill, Charlie recently saw an animation at the science museum of particles (represented by tiny triangles) creating the word 'atmosphere.' The way in which the particles moved around and misted in and out pretty much explained the whole idea which we had for the face of Hermann.


The next task was to get down to the painful business of cutting out the glyphs, this in my case took forever and it felt like i was getting nowhere. I printed out about 8 sheets of dingbats on A3 hoping to do as many as possible. I think i reached about 4 pages maybe and my finger began to swell up from using the craft knife so i decided to throw in the towel.

The cut outs which seem like nothing but there are more than you think

The mess! (and before you say NO i couldn't find my cutting mat)

Round two

So back to university we go, tails between our legs wondering what deep waters we will be thrown into next.. and luckily it a very intriguing project. The project we have been given is a style of Graphic design that I have never personally worked with before so I am looking forward to what lies ahead.

Brief summery: In the next 2 weeks we will be working as a group of 3 towards creating a 10-20 second stop-frame animation based on Herman Zapf and his typeface, Zapf Dingbats. Using only the glyphs in the typeface to produce the whole animation. We will all be given a slot of 2 hours to produce our animation and no more!

The rules: 

YOU MAY USE NO OTHER ELEMENTS.

YOU MAY REPRODUCE MORE OF THEM.

YOU MAY USE FEW OF THEM.

YOU MAY CHANGE THEIR SIZE.

YOU MAY NOT CHANGE THEIR SHAPE.

YOU MAY CHANGE THEIR QUANTITY.

YOU MAY CHANGE THEIR COLOUR.

For this project I have been teamed up with Charlie.P and Jo.W, two people which I haven't worked with yet on the course so I'm looking forward to seeing how we work together. So... since Monday we have been working on this project coming up with a few ideas for instance creating a beat for the dingbats to pulsate along with however none of these ideas seemed to link in with Zapf. Seeing as I needed to leave early on Monday I came back in on Wednesday, to find that the guys had come up with the idea of creating the face of Zapf using his Dingbats typeface, I felt this was a pretty neat idea. During the day on Wednesday we focused more upon the story boarding technique and how it helps to pan our what needs to happen to get to the final scene. 

We were all as groups set the task of creating a story on the theme of changing a light bulb. We were all given a genre to go by with ours being Musical. After this we then needed to put the scenes that we had just produced in our story now onto a 18 framed storyboard BUT a spanner was thrown in... we were to illustrate our story again using only the dingbat glyphs. This was quite difficult but by the time we figured out which glyphs we would use for each character it began to piece together.

Having practiced the whole storyboard technique we were now to do the same but with our story about Zapf. Before continuing with our story board we double checked to see if our idea of 'Dingbats crawling onto the page from all corners to reveal Zaphs face' would work, and we were warned about the timing and to make sure we move more than one glyph to ensure we create the face in the 240/480 shots. Now with this information we will now begin mapping everything out for our 2 hour slot on the following Wednesday, until then fingers crossed!