Movie staircase

I wanted to make a virtual room of pictures of movie title sequences and a few posters going down a spiral staircase to make the user feel the same way movie title do. For example catch me if you can title sequence makes you feel lost and trapped like you can't get out. You walking down a spiral staircase vertigo style and when you get to the bottom you go back up to the top it creates the same feeling. That your trapped and lost, can't get out etc. Through this way i've shown that i understand fully how title sequences make you feel and how they do this, i've also put in title sequence planes on the walls so you have to guess what title sequence is from what film, it's fun :)

Unity Web Player | movie staircase

« created with Unity »

creating my unity room and escalator in maya

A really helpful video i found off youtube - a quick way to make steps if i cant make a good escalator i think i'm just gonna do the vertigo one seen as there is only 2 weeks to do this in. No point in being over ambitious with it.

Essay research - film title sequences

Here's some of the title sequences i looked at most - watch them there's some really good ones here and artofthetile.com is a really good website to reference from, really interesting stuff. 

Context Of Practice - APPLY

So mike's just explained to us in more detail what to do cause i think we all were a little confused. We have to do the question what we did in the essay and take it and show that we've learned something from it.
Such as,

• We could create a title sequence ourselves and apply to our audience in ways title sequences do
• We could take a title sequence and recreate it demonstrating that you can change it's meaning so thats it's changed what it's telling the audience
• You could do the same with a line of typography create a few of them and show different ways people would feel about the typography if you changed it, like how the audience would feel different if you changed for example the word 'Spiderman' in huge black and red letters to the word 'Spiderman' really tiny in pink letters. It wouldn't mean the same thing to the audience anymore
• You could create a room in unity showing that you understand what a title sequence does, like how it makes you feel. 

I think i've decided that i'm going to go into Unity and make a room either like mike suggested like vertigo and create that trapped and lost sensation with movie posters passing you by as you run by or i like the idea of catch me if you can. I have an idea to create a room and put two escalators in it where if you walk up one you come out at the other one like a portal, so your stuck in the room and you can't get out. Then at the bottom i'd have a blank sort of airport floor and a sign airport style that says terminal 1 - catch me if you can. 

:) i really like that idea, just gotta not try be too ambitious seen as we only have 3 weeks to do it in. 

Here we go! 

Here's some mood boards i made up for idea's - 

Social Media & Communication

Visual Communication

Communicating visually can be in a number of different ways whether it be digital, art, a photograph, advertising, the list goes on. But what people can get from it is a feeling and an opinion from the other person. People use visual communication all the time and its a brilliant thing, showing a picture and you having to make your own assumption about what has happened or what its trying to get across. For example charity adverts use visual communication to try and get you to give money by explaining a horrible story through photographs and saying that you can help them. Vis Com is everywhere and everyone uses it all time, this lecture taught me to look around more and notice more in depth what things may be trying to say.

A History Of Advertising

What i learned from this lecture is that - 

The aspects of advertising what companies will do to make you buy a product, they will appeal to everything and use political statements and things going on in that point in history to make you buy something. For example -

the one above uses entertainment to sell a product - a monkey playing the drums and you know it's cadburys because of the purple straight away they use colours and other kind of 'tags' so people remember things subliminally and this causes you to have faith in the company and want to buy products from them all the time - cause you trust them, you know what they are.

The one below tells you that you need the product cause your ugly, so people buy it cause everyone 'cares' about there appearance and definitely care about growing old.

Here's my notes from the lecture :) -

Communication

Fashion as Photograph

Media Specify

Title sequences - essay

So we have to pick from one of the essay questions all my attention went to the title sequence question purely because i really like watching them. I find them interesting already so might as well find out more about them and write the essay! I think this will be the strongest question for me to pick.
So i'm starting out by doing a web graph and writing down any ideas i have to do with title sequences. From here i'm going to research research research!
Here we go... -

Avant - Garde/High Culture Vs Low Culture

Taking about avant-garde and high culture Vs low culture - 

Avant-Garde basically means to question everything, question the way art/design education relies on the concept of the avant-garde, question the notion of genius, the notion of being original, question art for art's sake and much more. 

Dictionaries link Term – ‘avant-garde’  with terms like
innovation in the arts or pioneers

-         idea of doing art/design work that is progressive – innovating

-         but also it refers to the idea of there being a group of people being
          innovative –


-         1. being avant-garde in the work you do  - challenging,
              innovating etc.
-         2. being a part of a group – being a member
              of the avant-garde 

In education theres a lot of pressure on students to be 'original' but then they say it's ok to copy and work from and experiment with others work to get knowledge. So how can anything really be original these days? Everything is just copied and recycled ideas. So that ask's the question, is there really something you can do that's Avant-Garde. Can you say to someone you know that's very Avant-Garde of you? 9 times outta 10, no, no you can't.

End of the 19th /early 20th C

two approaches to avant-garde art
 

1.     art that is socially committed [artists being the ‘avant-garde’ of   society, pushing forward political objectives]

2.     art that seeks only to expand / progress what art is (in itself
        and for itself) / art for art’s sake

This is about how people just recycle art. Art for art's sake, that people don't create original ideas they take someone else's art and make a different statement with it for example -

Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875)

James Abbot McNeill Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold (1874-78)

-It's not Avant-Garde it's just recycled. 

WHAT IS KITSCH?

Kitsch is basically art thats been taken and put onto something else for the modern eye. Such as a famous painting or a commemoration mug. Here's some pics to understand further - 

KITSCH

KITSCH?

DEFINITELY KITSCH!

Simplification of style – repainted masterpieces for the modern eye

Commemoration

(Animal Themes) This is true kitsch as it aims to be taken seriously as fine art!

So yeah you don't have to try to be avant-garde cause your uni or college will tell you to copy anyway, what i learned from this lecture mostly is to just be yourself and try not to care too much about what others think because to be honest everything's already been done before :)

Here's my notes from the lecture- 

A history of TYPE

Typography is a very powerful thing, i knew this before the lecture from college but having another lecture on it refreshed my memory and told me more about it. Typography as a whole fascinates me so much can be put across visually from a simple piece of typography such as making the reader think that your whispering simply by changing the font size and italic style of the writting. OR I MAY JUST BE SHOUTING AT YOU INSTEAD. It's as simple as that really.  

Here's another example i like from an article i found on the internet

'Romantic letters can be extraordinarily beautiful, but they lack the flowing and steady rhythm of the Renaissance forms. It is that rhythm which invites the reader to enter the text and read. The statuesque forms of Romantic letters invite the reader to stand outside and look at the letters instead.'

-The Elements of Typographic Style, page 130.

It's very true, a romantic letter can be wrote but it won't have the same effect as a romantic letter written in a better font with italic, it creates a different feel and makes you want to read the romantic letter or more, same goes for poetry. It's like music in games, everything works together and comes together to set the atmosphere and feel of the piece, without these things things would just be pretty plain and less intriguing. 


Typography has been around for century's evolving and growing as everything does, it's the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, line spacing, tracking (adjusting the spaces between groups of letters) and kerning (adjusting the space between pairs of letters.) In modern times it's been used in everything from advertising, graphic design, title sequences, graffiti art, comic books, loads. I found this quote from the internet that 'Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users, and it has been said that "typography is now something everybody does." 
I agree with this fully now you don't need a huge machine with metal plates with letters on them to print text onto a book or magazine or anything. Now you can whack out your laptop bring up photoshop and illustrator and just create whatever typography you want from your head in 5 minutes. Here's a picture of an old school printing press machine and the metal letters used from around the 1450's 

Typography is used everywhere and people walk past it blind everyday, a lot of people won't know that the font Helvetica is pretty much the most used font. It's on pretty much every road sign you will ever see. The aim of Helvetica was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in it's form and could be used on a wide variety of signage, I think they got exactly what they wanted. 

Here's a picture of Helvetica below next time you see a road sign or anything that points you in the right direction think of the fact that that's everywhere in the word and your not just looking at some text on a sign, your looking at one of the most famous typefaces in the history of typography.  

Here's another famous one - Oswald Bruce, Cooper Black, 1921

Maybe the most famous? - Times New Roman, Stanley Morrison, 1932

Here's a handout we got of information on type and what certain words mean and what things are. It was interesting to have a read over, there's so much about typography is unreal. 

These days we have ALOT of typography artists what i've noticed is that they mainly focus on trying to make typography even more than it is, they sort of use metaphors in words, such as writing the word wires and then constructing the word wires with wires graphically on the computer or some typographers take a more physical arty style and make the word wires out of wires physically and take a picture of it. Typography has evolved into it's own art, it's not just used for reading books and signs anymore.  

- Theo Aartsma

Below are some inspirational images of typography used in the fine arts

Viewers can only decipher the words “Avante Garde” when viewing Damien Roach’s wood and steel sculpture head on. From all other angles, it looks like a strange jumble of wood.

Exhibited by Richard J. Evans at the Free Range Graduate Art & Design Show.

This sculpture is called “Sometimes I Think Sometimes I Don’t”, by Stefan Bruggemmann. It’s made from black vinyl lettering and white neon.

Overall I learned a lot from the lecture the main types, the famous types, the function, the history and the art behind it. Looking into it more just shows how something can evolve from a simple font. Like the one i'm writing write now i could make s p a c e s, ConFUSe my reader, make it unreadable. I'll never look at type the same ever again :)

alfred hitchcock - film theory 1 ( the auteur)

The auteur basically means that the director has absolute control over everything. The lighting, the story, the clothes, every aspect of the film. They strive to create something absolutely original, they often start the conventions of genre, but do not follow them. For this first film theory lecture we looked at Alfred Hitchcock, he's probably the best example of an auteur, a genius in film making. Everything he does is just brilliant, he was born to do this. 

He had a great style did Hitchcock, dark and twisted, he liked to put absolute fear into every person who watched his film (even little children cause he was scared of them)

He had sort of a signature in his films where he would always have the victim as a blonde woman, even if the woman started off with brown or black hair and transformed into a woman with blonde hair, the way he did it was just amazing. I recommend watching Vertigo the special effects used in it for the time (dolly zoom, subjective camera shots etc...) 

He also used Voyeurism which is using colour to express something in the film, like in vertigo he uses the colour green to show the link between madeline and Judy. Everything the auteur does is for a reason.

Here's a video we were shown in the lecture it just shows how involved and creative the auteur is, personally i think Hitchcock knew what he was on about and created some monumental films that will never be forgotton. Film's today are just made to make money most directors just want a hit and pay day, there's not a lot of directors that care about the film over the money. 

Bring back the auteur! 

Here's my notes from the lecture-