Wednesday 27 September 2017

Minor project | Technique Development

After shifting my idea it's become clear that I need to find an effective way of controlling my experiments so that there are limitations to each set, but also physically showing these on my blog whilst communicating what the specific brief for each set actually is. Phil suggested looking at glaze tests as a way of successfully presenting my experiments and making them identifiable...


I think that these tests show an effective way of showcasing experiments and with a few changes could suit the work that I'm planning on making, I also looked at microscope slides as a way of labelling and presenting what I create, both could potentially lead to a possible aesthetic for this project.

These tests that I posted from my previous project are starting to knock on the door of a possible method of showing my work...


With clearer differentiation and labelling that communicates the limits and tools of each brief this method could begin to house the pieces I create from this project.

I'm currently considering designing each brief with a different set of tools, or technique in Maya, and a different aim, for example one set of models could all be given a time constraint of 20 minutes per model, an aim of being modelled into a human hand and a limit of only using the extrude tool. This could not only lead to an interesting pipeline but also a varied set of end results that would work well as a series. 



Tuesday 26 September 2017

Minor Project | Idea Development\Shift


After a long and in depth with discussion with Phil it became apparent that this major project would be more successful if the focus was on something slightly different, as my dislike for Maya itself could potentially lead to a more engaging and rewarding end result.

  I'm planning to create a serious of different moments in Maya that express my anger towards the software and the ways in which I feel it prohibits me as someone trying to create work that I personally find interesting, much like these pieces of instillation art... 


I'm keen to highlight "the ugly side" of Maya in my work, the little breaks and glitches that occur when trying to model in the software, something that gets overlooked or resolved by most working in Maya when in fact its actually some of the most pure work created.


 Today I created a number of models within a time limit of ten minutes, not allowing myself to fix the problems that occurred to the structure when put through various tools I hadn't really worked with before, I'm very happy with what I've created so far but want to push it to be more "broken"!

Wednesday 20 September 2017

Minor Project | Idea Development

After deciding that I wanted to focus my major project on the idea of privilege, something that was sparked after viewing Dunkirk over the summer, I decided to see if there were any interesting in my family's history. Once I had spoken to a few relatives I discovered that my great grandfather was very heavily involved in the second world war, although I knew I didn't want this project to be specifically focused on conflicts or military I thought that this would be a perfect place to start looking for more in depth inspiration.

Amongst countless medals and artifacts from his time serving in Scotland and Africa, I found this valentines day letter that my great grandfather had send to my great grandmother whilst he was stationed in Africa, there was also a reply that she had written him asking him to bring a banana home from his travels as their son had never seen one.


Finding both this card and the reply really struck me as I couldn't quite get my head around the idea that I was sat talking to my granddad with an iPhone in my pocket that is capable of ordering 100 bananas in a matter of seconds and he spent a period of his childhood having never seen a banana. This hit me as a perfect vessel for the idea of privilege that I'm hoping to depict in this project, as it opens a massive fissure between our generations and highlights just how different our lives were.

A notion that I'm really keen to adapt from this artifact of their life together is this idea of effort, or more importantly difficulty, as we live in a world where its not uncommon for valentines day messages to exist on screens it seems like nothing short of a miracle that a couple went to this much effort to communicate on this day of romance whilst living in completely different countries, during a world war. I'm currently looking at ways in which I can illustrate this theme of effort or struggle through more subtle ways that suggests this topic if the audience looks deeper but can still exist as an entertaining piece of film without this extra step. 
    
           
                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsg1y2ZrPfA

          
                           https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCCXq9QB-dQ

In the above videos I feel as though the idea of what it is to struggle or suffer is beautifully depicted, illustrating the theme itself but not blatantly depicting the source material, something I'm hoping to achieve in my work for this project, in whatever form that takes.