STAR CITY;

My apologies for my inactivity over the de-facto half term, i was pretty busy and as a result didnt get round to blogging.

On the tuesday i visited nottingham contemporary's new exhibition "Star City", which takes a look at art, design, politics and life under the iron curtain.
there were modern installations taking a retrospective look at communism alongside poster design, propaganda and and product design from the cold war years.
The exhibition was very similar to the COLD WAR MODERN exhibition that was put on at the V&A a year ago. The main difference being the cold war modern looked at and compared what was going on the other side of the iron curtain too. We saw the differences (and the startling similarities) between what communist russia was doing and what capitalist america was.

Star City, however, concerned it self purely with the communist perspective.
It should be said at this point that Communist art and design is by far my favourite area of art and design. My favourite pieces of designer are made by Alexander Rodchenko, so any opportunity to see a cold war exhibition is quickly snapped up.

I think the exhibition sheds light on the communist approach to design. The work has a recurring theme throughout it, most people who have visited the exhibition will now know that "SLAVA!" (Слава) means Glory!
What i think is good about the exhibition is that in most cases it is politically agnositic. It talks about the space race, it talks about communism and its competition with the west, but rather than focus on its downfall and its secrets, it takes the stance of retrospect and nostalgia. It represents communism's pursuit of utopia.

Don't say i didnt warn you..

Changed my website already, as a short spell as a CSS site, i decided to completely redesign it, partly from boredom, partly due to experimentation.
The whole point of this site is for me to learn. Web, i feel, is the area i want to go into, regardless it was an area i was curious of and decided to explore in my own time.
The site is now a lot simpler, but now utilises text image and shape far better, which i think represents a designer far better.

heres a small clip of what my website now looks like, but can be found here.

Adobe Fireworks

This is a program i hadnt previously used, but since taking to Web Design in my own time it is a piece of software that has really opened things up.
From personal experience, i have found that designing a website is inredibly time consuming. First you have to know what is going to go into the website and what you want to acheieve and then you go about setting up its structure and design.
I tend to design on paper and know exactly how i want it to look first, before making a mock up on the computer, but then you have to go about breaking it up into css and html. If a similar template can be found this will save time but generally its a very time consuming process.

Fireworks helps irradicate this and allows you to quite quickly generate a rough idea for a website. This is good as it speeds up the time between concept and product. It allows you to create on the spot with a client, or at least allow you to produce a prototype very quickly. You can also make fully functioning websites with it and then break it down to XHTML/CSS. Which is fantastic.

This isnt all fireworks is for, however, it is a very diverse tool, that unlike photoshop, is made to work with the web.



At the moment i am just experimenting with it but i intend to redesign my website using fireworks. I think it should allow me to concentrate more on the way it works and looks due to it concentrating more on the form of the website, rather than the function.

Post Production:

So, we finished filming last week and transferred the footage to Mac on friday.
As mentioned our filming went quite smoothly all things considered. It was shakey at the start as it was our first time filming as a team and with individual roles. But we got ourselves organised and we filmed quite successfully.
We have since studied the footage and are satisfied with what we have and are now in the process of editing.
Jess has spent the week gathering additional recordings of sounds that would be happenning.
We had some serious troubles getting the footage off of the Mac and onto harddrive so we had a copy spare and so it could be worked upon out of hours, niether mine nor dora's hardrive would work and niether would the uni harddrive we rented out. In the end Dora was able to use her camera to import the footage onto her own Mac and work from there, but this did waste valuable time over the beginning of the week.
I have written work that i had been doing over the course of the project, storyboards, research, considerations that i havnt been able to upload as i havnt had a scanner but when i go home this weekend i shall do.
We are meeting tomorrow to go over the footage and collaberate on the editing.

Useful Web Research;

For me, the best way to learn is by hitting walls. I throw myself in the deep end and then learn to swim. By breaking, i learn how to fix and what not to do last time. So rather than reading through books and theory i find that forums, blogs and resources are the best way to get help and learn new things.

I have found a site called Populair which is a database of over 400 blogs,and websites on colour, font and typography. This is a great place to begin looking for help and inspiration.

Web Design

Since the christmas holidays ive been teaching myself css and html. I did this partly to keep my brain creatively active but also out of curiosity. Web Design is something that really interests me. Not just the ability to create a site. But in a art and design perspective. I see the similarities between the likes of a website and the Flash project we were given.
Although my flash didnt come out so well, one thing i really grasped and was interested by was the interactivity.
Like websites, the flash project was a case of form must follow function. This is a tightrope that all designers must walk when creating something with a form of interactivity.
Unlike a gig poster or an advert, where if it looks good people will approve, if a website looks good but is hard to use, complicated and frustrating; people simply wont like it, regardless of how good it looks, which results in losing returning visitors and custom.
Infact in many cases the most successful of websites are very simple but are very well structured, for instance Ebay or Amazon and the BBC website.
This shows how the interactivity for the user is more important than how it looks.
For a designer, this provides huge opportunities to explore the area of interactivity. Therefore a designers website might be a little less obvious and well structured, but will in turn be much more interactive.

As a result ive produced my own website. At the moment it is a simple 2 grid css website. But as two pieces of code that i have written which successfully makes this a functioning website, i am pleased with myself.
I intend to make constant changes to this website. It is not so much an advertisement to myself as an open ended investigation into web design and a great chance for me to gain experience in handling various web languages.

My website can be found here.

I want to carry on experimenting with my website as a form of understanding the interactivity of text and image and layout with users.

Post Filming:

So on thursday we completed our filming. Everything was pretty manic to begin with as it was our first time producing a film as a team, each with different roles collaborating to create the film. The 2 actors were fantastic and patient. We tried to be as efficient as possible with the filming, by studying the script and working out what should be filmed in what order. This saved time both for ourselves and for the actors.
What this ultimately means is my section of responsibility is pretty much over, i did my research and developed my storyboard, i knew what i was shooting where and footage captured seems sufficient.
We have started editing the footage which Dora is in charge of. Though i suspect we shall all play a part on this section.
We still have a few bits of sound to be recorded to be added to the footage, so no doubt the editing will be what takes up the majority of the rest of our time. Fingers crossed we wont have to reshoot anything.

Pre-filming.

We are filming today in an hours time. We have practiced with the mics and the camera, we know what sound and sight were intending to capture and what angles we intend to use. We have props and costumes which will hopefully be adequet. We intend to over film, in the sense that although we know where we plan to cut to different angles etc, we are going to film each angle longer than this so we have more than enough footage meaning we have more flexibility when it comes to editing. My Biggest influence from a filming perspective is Citizen Kane without a doubt. One particular scene where he is at the dinner table with his first wife. It is a series of clips over the days/weeks/months, depicting the progression of their relationship. As we intend to film the same scene from multiple points in time, - when they were once getting along, and later on when they arent - Citizen Kane is a huge influence.
Ill update after we have filmed on its outcome.