This was my submission to win the chance to study abroad in New York, at FIT (the Fashion Institute of Technology) for a semester next year. The brief, set by last years winners, was to create a new celebrity. The chance to go to New York was one of the reasons I applied to Chelsea, so the weeks leading up to the deadline, and the results were fairly stressful!

I knew I wanted to make a video, because even though I’m not very experienced at video making, I knew it would be my best shot at making a big impression. I went for an over-dramatised film trailer, and tried to make it as cheesily cliched and funny as I could, but as I soon learnt, once you’ve watched a video a hundred times over in editing, it’s impossible to tell if it’s even remotely funny anymore!

I ended up being selected for the exchange, along with Irina! I’m still in a state of disbelief, just over a week after find out, but also incredibly excited that I will be living in New York City for four months later this year! 

(Here’s hoping I don’t get mugged/shot)

I’ve whittled it down to two quotes. The project is called “Inspired” so the quote is supposed to be inspiring, but I’m not sure if I’d rather have a more interesting but less inspiring quote. These are the two:

The sooner China starts making products that it can be proud of, saying ‘Made in China’ on them, the more its profitability will be in the products that it makes. Making products for Apple, which says Designed in California, rather disdainfully made in China, is not the way to go if you want to be successful.

I don’t know if this is very inspiring but I think it gives some food for thought. It’s also more to do with Wally Olins’ thought on branding and nations.

Second quote:

There’s no doubt, there’s no question about that. I mean everybody’s walking around with things to look at, whether they’re iPhones or iPads or you know, everybody’s looking at thi- YES and not just things to look at but things that move. It isn’t good enough that it should be static. A symbol can’t be static, a symbol has to jump about a bit because that’s the way you see it. And I think that that’s becoming more and more and more aggressive as a component of the way in which the brand expresses itself. I think it’s true, yeah.

This is more to do with the digitalisation of media. Quite relevant to this project (things not being static) but not very much to do with Olins, generally speaking.

*yawn*
crit tomorrow
yay

Made the dots really small to resemble pin-pricks a bit more. Playing with light and dark using dot size and line position.

PROGRESS this week. I was quite anxious going into the tutorial as I didn’t feel like my project had developed much further. One of the reasons for this is that everything takes 10x as long on Illustrator as it does with pen and paper, but I guess that’s how you learn.

Aside from some pretty horrendous vector drawings of a bodkin (featuring gradients!) this is where I’ve come to:

They are fairly rough, but I feel like the shape of the bodkin is pretty much what I want it to be. I tried to show the woodgrain of the handle using lines, just to add some interest and so it doesn’t look so flat and dull. Paul said that the background is a little too much, and that it should be kept to just the bottom third of the composition. Other things to do:

- vary circle shapes – create irregular, forced holes

- play with colours – is black too harsh? Try out some greys, maybe colours?

Here’s a close up of what I’ve managed to do so far:

I found out how to create a custom brush, so I’m just experimenting with that but it’s quite complicated with all the settings etc.

I use a bodkin for bookbinding, but on doing some initial research I learnt that they’re also used to make holes in leather. Interesting fact: Louis Braille was blinded by a bodkin when he was an infant, but the bodkin was what he used to invent the Braille writing system.

Here are some of my initial ideas from the first week:

My feedback from the first tutorial was basically to work with the idea of using dots/holes to capture the essence of the tool and celebrate it in this way. Not really sure where to go with it but apparently we need to “jump on to illustrator” so that’s what I’ll be attempting.

We decided to focus on the whisk part of the whisk, rather than the whole mechanism, as it was easier.  But the rotation itself was really hard to animate. The whisks had to be rotating, in opposite directions, with one set a quarter of a rotation behind the other, and all with the perspective as well. In the end, I figured out the easiest way to do this was to animate an X rotating 360 degrees, just flat on the screen – literally like an X. Then skew all the layers of the rotation so it made the angle/perspective we needed. Then project the lines down from the X, and then do the same for the second whisk.

After hours of labouring over Photoshop we ended up with essentially the bare bones of a whisk. We asked David for advice, and he said it wouldn’t be worth fleshing out the animation to make it look realistic as we’d already done the hard part of the sophisticated animation. So we just spent some time making it look a bit cooler. As always, white on black works better for some reason. And in this case it reminded George of a video game called Asteroids, so we decided to play on that and make it a very lo-fi 70s video game inspired animation.

This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this element which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also holds sway in the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with physical reality—a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.

From the Uncanny by Sigmund Freud: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf

I have found the uncanny in the work of one of my favourite photographers, Gregory Crewdson. His photographs are cinematic, lit to create an enigmatic atmosphere. The scenes are mostly suburban, and in this sense offer familiarity.

Ophelia

The uncanny comes into the details of the photo, the reactionary expressions of the characters.

The odd limb just disappearing off the frame, suggesting a second character, reflections in mirrors which give us a small window into an alternate view.

Most of all the ‘stillness’ of the photos is what, I think, makes them uncanny. Many of the characters appear to be staring at something, bewildered, or have completely deadpan looks.

There is a suggestion of something paranormal but it’s rarely directly shown – it’s all in the mind of the viewer. Similar to the fear of the dark – imagining things that are not, but could be there.