Week 8

Over the years the cost of creating a music video has become outrageous. I believe this is due to the fact that artists want to stand out from the pack, they want to create an image for themselves that is glamorous. It is no longer about the music, but about who has the most money and who looks the best. Creating an image that we can associate with their music.
Is it just me or these days many bands or artists are very good looking? The thought of showing anyone who doesn't look like a "babe" could possibly bring music sales down?!? Maybe so, but now certain artist seem to be bringing it back to the roots, to the music itself and aren't glorifying themselves. There seems to be a rise in what we could call "homemade" music videos. I think they are doing this to make a comment on how ridiculous it is to spend so much money on something as basic as a music video.
I really believe artists must make it about the music, not what they look like. When they can do that then maybe pre-fabricated pop music will finally come to an end.

Digital Art

When a computer is used in the production of a piece of art it becomes digital artwork. Is digital art really art? If a computer is doing all of the work for you wouldn't it be like cheating on a test? I believe that it depends on the person who is looking at this form of "art", and what that individuals definition of art is. I personally think that digital art is amazing. It's bringing traditional art like painting, for example and new media works created on a computer together. It makes for very interesting visual and sound productions. Another advantage of this medium is that it is opening the doors of art to many more people who can't draw, paint, etc. I am one of those who can not draw no matter how hard I try! As we evolve technology evolves and I think we should use it to our advantage to create bigger, better things! Digital art can reach the masses easily, because with the click of a mouse it's there!

Flash animation

For my flash animation I will be creating a title sequence for a fictional snowboard movie. I really had no clue what to do until a few days ago when I was watching one of the many snowboard movies I own. The title sequence to this particular movie is amazing, very original and creative, and it is done in flash! I have done a few snowboard movies in the past, but having no knowledge or even access to flash I had a very basic title sequence. Flash will allow me to integrate both interactive animation and still images into a title sequence. My idea so far is to have animated snow continuously falling while still photos, that I will have cut up and played around with in Fireworks before hand, of the fictional characters in my snowboard movie come in and out of the frame. There will also be funky, original animated text presenting both the snowboarders feature in this fictional movie and the production company, crew etc....

Very excited to see the final product!!

CD Cover

My concept was to create a fictional CD cover for my brothers band “The Garden Gnomes.” I wanted this CD cover to reflect the band’s personality, attitudes and the type of music they play. “The Garden Gnomes” play a cross between grunge (e.g. “Nirvana”) and alternative (e.g. “Radiohead”) music. The band has a very outgoing personality so I really felt it necessary for it to show through their CD cover. I decided to create a sort of psychedelic CD cover that brings all the elements mentioned before together. The target audience is males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. I think the edgy fonts and the bizarre look of this cover matche the style of music that they play and will attract that particular demographic.

I used the Fireworks program to create this CD cover. I layered a few images, used the Polygon lasso tool to select a certain part of an image that I placed on top of the background layer. I then distorted the colors of these images. I then found appropriate fonts for my target audience and incorporated them into the CD cover. I applied the principles of design we learnt in class as much as possible. Many colors are contrasting on this cover. For example the words “Weird dreams” are blue but they are highlighted with a complementary color, orange. The white background makes all the colors seem very vibrant. Although the colors contrast each other on this CD cover many of them are repeated. For example, I took the blue and the green of the background image and used those colors both for the band’s name “The Garden Gnomes” and the CD title “Weird Dreams”.

I was not too sure what to expect when I first started using Fireworks for this assignment. I knew what sort of feel I wanted to give the cover but was not quite sure I would be ale to convey it with the resources on Fireworks and my limited knowledge of this program. There were a few challenges at the beginning. What I had originally envisioned at the beginning did not turn out like I had planed and left me with a disappointing piece of work. I brainstormed ideas and found other ways of conveying my message with different images and a different approach.

In the end, my CD cover came out better then planned. It does not look like my original idea; but I think that after figuring out the limitations of a program like Fireworks I was able to get a better idea of what I was capable of creating.


***What I got from the in class feedback is that there is not enough distinction between the bands name (The Garden Gnomes) and the title of the CD(Weird Dreams). I see how it could be problematic, thus I should either make the bands name bigger or even underline it to make it more obvious that this is the bands name. I believe people in class thought it was an effective CD cover that really depicted what a weird dream might look like. It grabbed their attention. This is the target market I was going after with the CD cover so I believe I did a good job in making it appealing to this particular demographic.

Typography

http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/

I love this one! I like how the typography used is a font normal used in "Superman" movies or any superhero movies. It really serves its purpose, to be funny and comment on how stupid it is to think that a pig could be a superhero.

Typography

www.streetkidsclothing.com

The typography used in this poster is very interesting. It is chosen very carefully for their target market, which are teens from thirteen to early twenties. Each word is largely spaced out making this easy to read from far. Some of the letters overlap each other. In this aspect the letter spacing is problematic, it makes it hard to see or understand what is written. They are trying to project a young look, a look that says I don't care what you think, washing out the letters is very effective at projecting this image.

Typography

http://media.filmschoolrejects.com/images/07posters9.jpg

The typography is very effective on this movie poster. I like the leading that was used "Days of Night" seems to be crushed together to give an effect of tension. The font they used for this poster gives it a scary look. Lines are not straight, looks as if someone wrote this by hand..in blood! They definatly took into consideration their target audience which are males ages sixteen and older, when choosing the fonts.

Week 3: Colour

I really enjoyed the lecture about colour and how to use it effectively to make an image more appealing. I was already familiar with many of the terms discussed in class and had used them without really knowing what I was doing with the image. This lecture gave a new sense to what hue or tint really does for an image. What confused me a bit was how monitors produce colour. How does a monitor know what colour to create according to various numbers? For example, Red:32 Green:223 and Blue:80. How does a computer take these numbers and convert them into the colours we see on our screen!? This would have been an interesting subject to cover.