Extension Task - Research Media Products.

Print.

The news media are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public. These include print media (newspapers and magazines), broadcast news (radio and television), and more recently the internet (online newspapers, news blogs, etc.)
Examples of newspaper and magazine media are The Sun, The Daily Mail, Heat, Ok! and Nutz. 

Heat magazine is a British entertainment magazine published by German company Bauer Media Group. As of 2004 it is one of the biggest selling magazines in the UK, with a regular circulation of over half a million. It's miz of celebrity news, gossip, beauty advice and fashion is primarily aimed at women, although not as directly as in other women's magazines. It also features movie and music reviews, TV listings and major celebrity interviews. Heat was launched in February, 1999 as a general interest magazine, at a cost of more than £4 million. It was not an immediate success with a circulation below 100,000. A series of revamps quickly repositioned the magazine as a less serious, more gossip-orientated magazine aimed at women, and circulation quickly grew.

Editors of Heat are Barry Mcllheney (1999 - 2000), Mark Frifth (2000 - 2008), Julian Linley (2008 - 2009), Sam Delaney (2009 - 2010), Lucie Cave (20ll - present.)




Video.

Televsion and Advertising is a form of communication for marketing and used to encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to continue or make some new action. The purpose of advertising may also be to reassure employees or shareholders that a company is viable or successful. Advertising messages are usually paid for by sponsors and viewed via various traditiinal media. Example of Television/Advertising media are the Go Compare advert, Cadbury's, Coca-Cola, PG and BT Broadband.

Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drinks sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by the Coca-Cola company in Atlanta, Georgia, and is more often referred to simply as Coke (a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola company in the United States since March 27th, 1944.) Coca-Cola was brought out by buisnessman Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing tactics led Coke to its dominance of the world soft drink market throughout the 20th century.

 

Digital.

Social media technologies take on many different forms including internet forums, web blogs, social networking, microblogging and podcasts. Examples of digital media Internet/Social Networking are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, online blogs. Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the United States, a total of 234 million people aged 13 and over in the United States used mobile devices for Social Networking in 2009.

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February, 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. As of June 2012, Facebook has over 955 million active users, more than half of them using Facebook on a mobile device.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college room mates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The websites membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League and Stanford University.





Audio.

A new innovative online advertising media format has recently been used on the internet with varying levels of success. Audio advertisements are 5-30 second audio advertisements played the second a visitor lands on a website. This method is being used on thousands of websites already, this trend has been watched closely by the industry. Upwards of 15,000 website owners are currently placing audio advertisements on their websites as an alternative method to earn income.

Examples of Audio Media are Radio stations such as Plymouth Sound, Radio 1 and 2, Heart and online audio advertising.

In September 2008, it was announced that Plymouth Sound would be rebranded to Heart FM. It was rebranded to Heart FM on 29 March, 2009. By this time, most of the station's programming was produced in London, with local programming broadcast at breakfast everyday and at drivetime each weekday.

Commercial radio stations make most of their revenue seeling airtime to advertisers. Radio advertisements or spots are available when a buisness or service provide consideration, usually cash, in exchange for the station airing their spot or mentioning them on air. The first radio broadcasts aired in the early 1900's. In the United States, on November 2, 1920, KDKA aired the first commercial broadcast.  Examples of Radio Advertising are KDKA, AT&T, WGI and WEAF.

KDKA is a radio station licensed to Pittisburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Created by the Westington Electric Corporation on November 2, 1920 and is the worlds first firrst commercial radio station. Frank Conrad (1874 - 1941) was a radio broadcasting pioneer and is responsible for the founding of the first licensed broadcast station in the world: KDKA.

 

Extension Task - Research Animation.

Pixilation.

Pixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a movie, such as "The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb" by the Bolex Brothers, which used the technique to a compelling and eerie effect.

"Neighbours" is an example of Pixilation animation. Neighbours is 1952 anit-war film by Scottish-Canadian film maker Norman McLaren. Produced at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, the film uses the technique known as Pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop-motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles with the projetor read as sound.

The plot of the film is two men, Jean Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, live peacefully in adjacent caredboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight eachother to death over the ownership of the single small flower.

The term "Pixilation" was created by Grant Munro, who had worked with McLaren on Two Bagatelles, a pair of short pixilation films made prior to Neighbours. While Neighbours is often credited as an animated film by many film historians although very little of the film is actually animated. The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate, this effect was achieved in stop-motion, the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories.

Neighbours is the winner of both a Canadian Film Award and an Academy Award, the latter for which it was nominated twice, for Short Subject (One-reel) and for Best Documentary (Short Subject). This film has been designated and preserved as a 'masterwork' by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. In 2009, the film was added to UNESCO's Memory of The World Programme, listing the most significant documentary heritage collections in the world.


Neighbours - Norman McLaren. (A short clip of the 1952 pixilation film Neighbours.)

 

Claymation.

Clay Animation also known as Claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either a character or a background, is "deformable" - made of malleable substance, usually Plasticene clay.

In Claymation, each object is sculpted in to clay or a similar pliable material such as Plasticene, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. The object or character is arranged on the set, and then the object or character is moved slightly by hand and then photographed. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. Clay Animated films were produced in the United States as early as 1908, when Edison Manufacturing released a trick film entitled The Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream. In 1916 Clay Animation became something of a fad, as an East Coast artist named Helena Smith Dayton and West Coast animator named Willie Hopkins produced clay-animated films on a wide range of subjects. Pioneering the clay-painting technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film The Creation in 1980 and then in her Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase, filmed in 1992.

Some of the best known Clay Animated works include the Grumby series of television show segments created by Art Clokey, The California Raisins advertising campaign by Will Vinton Productions studio, The WB'S The PJ's produced by and featuring the voice of Eddy Murphy and of course, Wallace & Gromit created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations.

Wallace & Gromit - Nick Park of Aardman Animations. (An example of Clay Animation at it's best.)

 
Papermation.

Papermation is a technique for producing animatons using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. The world's earliest known animated feature films were cut-out animations made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani as is the world's earliest surviving animated feature.

Today, cut-out style animation is frequently produced using computers, with scanned images or vector graphics taking the place of physically cut out materials. South Park is an example of this transition since it's first episode was made with paper cut-out's before switching to computer animation. Other examples of this include Angela Anaconda, and Charlie & Lola. One of the most famous animators still using traditional cut-out animation today is Yuriy Norshteyn.

South Park - Trey Parker & Matt Stone. (An example of Papermation animation.)

 

Illustration.

An Illustration is a depiction such as a drawing, painting, a photograph or an other image that is created to dictate information such as a story, poem or newspaper article. The earliest Illustrations were pre-historic cave paintings. Before the invention of the printing press, books, such as Medieval illuminated manuscripts, were hand-illustrated. Various illustration techniques have been available to the artists over the centuries. The invention of paper pushed it's boundaries even further. Traditional illustration focuses on ways of creating illustration and can be classified into different types.

The Simpsons is a good example of Illustration. The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom written and created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a parody of a middle class American lifestyle eptiomized by it's family of the same name, which consists of Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield.

The Simpsons has won dozens of awards since it debuted as a series, including 27 Primetime Emmy Awards, 30 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. Time magazine's December 31st, 1999 issue named it the 20th century's best television series and on January 14th, 2000 the Simpson family was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Simpsons - Matt Groening. (An example of Illustration animation.)

 

Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know.

Wouter De Backer also professionally known by his stage name Gotye was born on the 21 May 1980 and is a Belgian-Australian multi instrumental musician and singer/songwriter. The name "Gotye" is derived from "Gauthier", the French equivalent of "Walter" or "Wouter". His voice has been compared to those of Peter Gabriel and Sting.

Gotye has released three studio albums independently and one album featuring remixes of tracks from his first two albums. He is a member of the Melbourne indie-pop trio "The Basics", who have independently released three studio albums and numerous other titles since 2002. Gotye's 2011 single "Somebody That I Used To Know" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making him the fifth Australian based artist to do so and the second Belgian after Soeur Sourire in 1963. He has won five ARIA awards and received a nomination for an MTV EMA for Best Asia and Pacific Act.

 

The song "Somebody That I Used To Know" is a mid-tempo indie pop ballad song. The song is instantly captivating. The official music video has now had over 300 million views on YouTube, giving both Gotye and Kimbra their break in to the mainstream whether they planned it or not. The song is given it's soul with Gotye's voice, it melts over to bass with palpable raw emotion. His voice is at it's most effective when he sings about a love now lost in the chorus.  The video depicts a man and a woman being painted on so it's looks like they are part of the wall behind them. They both sing about a lost love and the emotion in their voice as they sing is beautiful. It really gives you a taste of what they have felt/are feeling and what they have possibly been through.

Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know.

Check out the link above to watch the video, it's beautiful.

Countdown Extension.

Today Cam gave out a task sheet for people who had finished their final piece and had nothing to do and this was called the Countdown Extension. We had to hire out a point and shoot Z5 camera and go around the college taking interesting pictures of 1 to 10. Once we had taken all of our photographs we then had to edit them all together on Adobe Premiere with a soundtrack of our choice. I chose Turantula by Pendulum. We had to edit the image sizes correctly using Adobe Premiere. We then had to insert a different transition between each number clip such as dissolve, 3D and Peel. Once we had done all of that we then had to render, export and put on our memory stick. I actually found this task quite fun, although I had difficulty finding the numbers 5,7 and 9 so I took them off the internet which was a little bit cheating! I feel a lot more comfortable using Adobe Premiere now so this didn't take me that long to complete. I'm quite happy with it but it could have been better because I could have taken more time to try and find the correct numbers that I needed but I am happy with what I ended up with. Below is my final outcome.

Mind Map Of Final Piece.

Portraits.

Definition - When I hear the word Portrait, I think of family, friends, memories, facial expressions and movement. There are so many words to describe the word Portrait.

Ideas - Throughout planning my animation for my final piece, I came up with a lot of different ideas to use but my favorite idea that I came up with was to create an animation using dolls and and making the atmosphere all dark and creepy. I used three different dolls - an old china doll and two dolls from the doll collection called 'Living Dead Dolls', an old mask, and an old clock to create the background to make my pictures that little more interesting. I decided to use the song Middle-sex Times by Micheal Andrews for the instrumental soundtrack to go with my animation because the song added to the creepy and datk atmosphere I was intending to create.

Research - I have researched quite a few different artists who were all different within their styles of art. Some of the artists that I have researched were Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Alex Katz and two of my personal favorite artists David Lynch and Martin Creed. Martin Creed's and David Lynch's work particularly interested me because their styles of art are so much different to that of most other artist's work. Martin Creed films people vomiting, switches lights on and off whereas David Lynch ceates the most bizarre pictures such as a cow with all it's interstines hanging out and it's head cut off and women lying naked but the sexual organs are blurred and almost invisible to see.

Materials - The materials that I have used throughout this project to create my short film animation are a small stills digital camera, a tripod, a light, 3 creepy looing dolls and a lot of weird objects to create my background such as an old clock, china dolls and an old mask.

Above is a picture of my mind map to show as evidence but unfortunately it is mirrored and backward because I had taken the photograph on a Mac so my apologies but I have wrote everything that's on my mind map above.

Jan Svankmajer - Jabberwocky.

Okay, this video was totally messed up! But was so awesome! I was told to watch it by my tutor because it was relevant to the animation that I created and indeed it was but a little bit more stranger than mine. Upon watching the video, I thought it was created very well and obviously had taken the creator a while to make because it was about 14 minutes long. Boiled dolls, a bit of doll cannibalism and a dancing outfit on a coat hanger? Pretty strange indeed but amazingly created! I really enjoyed watching this video because it was different and unique and of course, it was stop motion which is the technique that we have been practicing throughout our course.

Jan Svankmajer was born on the 3rd September, 1934, was born in Prague and is a Czech film maker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, The Brother's Quay and many others. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He has gained a reputation for his distinctive use of stop motion technique, and his ability to create surreal, nightmarish, and yet somehow funny pictures. He continues to create films in Prague.



Jan Svankmajer - Jabberwocky.

Check out the above link to Jan Svankmajer's Jabberwocky, it's awesome!

David Lynch.

David Keith Lynch was born on January 20th, 1946 and is an American film maker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style. Born to a middle-class family in Missoula, Montana, he spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philidelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead in 1997. After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man in 1980, from which he gained mainstream success.

Over his career, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations, for best director and a nomination for best screenplay. Lynch has twice won France's Cesar Award for best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'OR at the Cannes film festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice film festival.

Lynch admits that his work is more similar to in many respects to those of Europian film makers than American ones. Lynch has commented on his admiration for such film makers as Stanly Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog and Jacques Tati.

Evaluation Of Final Piece.

Creating my animation for my final piece took a lot of time and effort, using the stop motion technique you have to have time and patience and fortunately because I was so in to creating my animation I had it. I spent the whole weekend perfecting taking my photographs. I had to take a picture, move the object slightly and then take a picture again and I had to continuously do this until I had all of my photographs ready to be edited. In total I had 159 photographs. Editing the pictures was easy enough for me but very time consuming but I am now more comfortable using Adobe Premiere and I have become better with it.

All in all, I am very happy with my final piece. It had came out just the way I had intended and hoped for. It's dark and synyster, the music flows with the characters and the movements and I absolutely love it. If I had to change anything then I would have taken a few more pictures but at the time I thought I had taken enough but after taking all this time to create my final piece, I am very happy with my final outcome. If there were ever a possible chance I could fulfil my dreams and exhibit my work to the world then I would choose a Cinema, the thrill of knowing that people are watching your work that you have put all of you time and effort in to would be amazing but at this moment in time my work remains on my blog site to be viewed by the public.

Final Piece.

Today I finished editing my final piece and putting it all together to create my animation. It took me quite a long time to edit all of my pictures together and put the soundtrack with it on Adobe Premiere. Once I had uploaded all of my photographs, I then had to edit them all on Photoshop, changing the image size and adjusting the color to black and white. I think I was very successful upon completing my final piece as it has the dark atmosphere and the creepy music that I had intended and hoped for. Below is my final piece. :)

Martin Creed.

Martin Creed seems to particularly interest me lately with his styles of work because they are unique and different. He films people vomiting, switches lights on and off, sends runners racing around Tate Britain; former Turner prize-winning artist Martin Creed delights in rearranging the rules of art.

Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, England. From the age of 3 he lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, London. After art school he lived and worked in London until 2001, when he moved to Alicudi, Italy. In 2001, he was the winner of the Turner Prize. He currently works and lives in London and Alicudi.

One of the most famous works by Martin Creed is The Light's Going On And Off, it has been donated to the nation by its creator. The exhibition is a room being illuminated by a flickering bulb every few seconds, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2001.

Stop Motion Technique.

Stop Motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved slightly between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Stop Motion is often confused with the time lapse technique, where still photographs of a live surrounding are taken at regular intervals and combined in to a continuous film. 

The Stop Motion technique is one of the techniques that we have been exploring and researching mostly in class lately. This technique will be used in my final piece to create the illusion of movement. I will be creating this technique by shooting my object, moving it slightly then shooting, etc.

Mind Maps.

Although I have wrote a page on my final ideas, I thought I would take some photographs to provide evidence that I have done it. The pictures are mirrored and backwards because I have taken them on a Mac, my apologies.

Media.

I.D. Cards - Take a series of photographs of ourself, join them together using Adobe Premiere to create a short film.
Countdown - Select a random number, design the number on a piece of A3 paper, include facial features within the number, walk around the college and find designs of the same number.
Comic Strip Drawing - Stop animation technique, black and white self portraits, doing something different in each of our portraits.
Paper Faces - Use different materials to create an animated face, Use colored card cut outs to create facial features, No less than 15 pictures, resize in Photoshop, edit them and bring them together using Adobe Premiere.
'Beads' - Lasting between 30-35 seconds longs, using a stills digital camera, light and tripod, resize pictures in Photoshop and edit them and bring them together and Adobe Premiere.

Final Piece.

Dark lighting with little bright light to create a dark atmosphere.
Use one or maybe even two doll faces, (preferably two if possible and looks good.)
Use stop animation technique to create the effect of the dolls' head spinning around and falling off in the end by taking a series of photographs and editing them together in Adobe Premiere.
Preferably a song from the Donnie Darko soundtrack to use as my instrumental soundtrack.
Use the song 'Middle Sex Times' by Micheal Andrews as the instrumental soundtrack for my animation from the Donnie Darko soundtrack.
Hire out items from the ERC for the weekend and spend a lot of time perfecting.

 

Paper As A Form Of Animation.

Using paper as a form of animation these days such as South Park for example is done by the animators by making new elements in Corel Draw and exporting them as Adobe Illustrator files. Adobe Photoshop is used for fonts, texture maps, and real photographs. The Photoshop and Illustrator files are then sent in to an Alias/Wavefront's Power Animator 8.5 and Composer on SGI 02 and Octane work stations, where they are used for animating the episodes. After the animation get's Trey's approval, it is sent with the audio to be edited and mixed using Avid Media Composers on Mac computers.

South Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central Television Network. Intended for mature audiences, South Park has become famous for it's crude language and dark, surreal humor. The on-going narrative revolves around four boys, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick and their bizarre adventures in and around the Colorado town.
Parker and Stone developed the show from two animated shorts they created in 1992 and 1995. The latter became one of the first internet videos and instantly became viral, which ultimately led to its production as a series. South Park debuted in August 1997 with great success consistently earning the highest rating of any basic cable programme.

The Shows style of animation was inspired by the paper cut out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which Parker and Stone have been life long fans. Construction paper and traditional stop motion cutout animation techniques were used in the original animated shorts and in the pilot episode. Subsequent episodes have been produced by computer animation, providing a similar look to the originals while requiring a fraction of the time to produce.

The characters and objects are composed of simple geometrical shapes and primary colors. Their movements are animated in an intentionally jerky fasion, as they are purposely not offered the same free range of motion associated with hand drawn characters. When the show began using computers, the cardboard cut outs were scanned and re drawn with CorelDRAW, then imported into Power Animator, which was used with SGI workstations to animate the characters. The workstations were linked to a 54-processor render farm that could render 10 to 15 shots an hour. The studio now runs a 120-processor render farm that can produce 30 or more shots an hour.
Power Animator and Maya are high end programmes mainly used for 3D computer graphics, while co producer and former animation director, Eric Stough, notes that Power Animator was initially chosen because its features helped animators retain the show's 'homemade' look. Power Animator was also used for making some of the shows special effects, which are now created using Motion, a newer graphics programme created by Apple, Inc.

Final Piece Ideas.

I have the idea of creating a very dark and synyster short animation film using a black and white doll face for my final piece. I plan on hiring out a stills digital camera, a light and a tripod for the weekend and spend a lot of time perfecting it. My idea for the doll is to have darkness but a bit of bright light to create the atmosphere and have the dolls head spinning around and eventually falls off. I think this idea is quite effective and amusing. For the instrumental soundtrack I am thinking of using Middle Sex Times by Micheal Andrews from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. This soundtrack will also add to the dark atmosphere...

 
The above picture is a doll from the collection of dolls named 'Living Dead Dolls.' The doll in the picture above is the exact same doll that I have at home and plan to use in my final piece.  The doll also adds to the dark atmosphere that I plan on creating because let's face it, we wouldn't like to see that moving around, would we?! I think that my final piece idea will be quite successful because I am so enthusiastic about this project and it's something that is my passion and I love to do. I honestly cannot wait to create some terrifying footage!

Today I messed around with some crazy objects and things. I made a background with different old objects and shot some pictures to see what they would look like, here are some of the pictures that I took today. Because this task is a black and white project and my pictures are all in color, I plan to adjust the colours to black and white using Adobe Photoshop. Editing all these pictures will take quite some time on Adobe Premiere, considering that there are 159 pictures in total. The instrumental song that I am planning to use with my animation is Middle-sex Times by Micheal Andrews which is from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. I think the song will flow nicely with my animation because it's creepy and so are my pictures so I think they will both go together nicely.

'Beads'.

Today we were required to create an animation lasting between 25 - 30 seconds long.
In pairs we had to go up to the ERC and collect a stills digital camera, a Tripod and a light. Once we were back in class we then had to take a packet of beads and other little items and a black piece of card, we had to use the beads and other items provided and have a black background. We had to take 30 plus photograph movements with the beads and our camera using the stop motion technique, shoot, move, shoot, move, etc. I found the beads and other items to be somewhat effective, I was able to create different things but the downside to using them were the fact they were sliding everywhere! Judging from my final outcome I thought I was quite successful but I could improve by spending a lot more time editing and changing the length of the time during the photographs. Once we had taken all of our photographs we then had to upload our footage and start to edit it using Adobe Premiere. We had to adapt the animation accordingly to our chosen soundtrack. We had to insert a title introducing our project, our name and our course. Once we had created our films in Adobe Premiere we then had to Render, Export and save on our memory stick and give to Cam.
My final outcome is below.

 

'Nobody Beats The Drum' Review.

Today we watched a music video called 'Grindin' by Nobody Beats The Drum. I have to say that I was expecting some boring music video to be played in class but to my surprise it was awesome and I really enjoyed it. The music video was about different types of blocks built by what looks like Lego and the beats of the song really go with it, they really flow together. The technique used in this music video is stop motion where you take a picture, move, take a picture, etc. Personally I think the soundtrack is awesome, the beats in the song are really good and get you moving, I also love the way that the beats kick in when everything starts to move. I think the editing was done very well but over a space of time as it looks like it must have taken ages! All in all though I find this music video really, really cool!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntc4l-poovo

To fully appreciate Nobody Beats The Drum's fusion of breaks, electro, hip hop and every other form of music, it's best to see them live.
At a NBTD show the pounding music created by Sjam's decks and Jori's keys are enhanced by Rogier's visuals to create a sensual assault that's impossible to withstand. As they're fond of saying, resistance is futile – Nobody Beats The Drum.
Nobody Beats The Drum were created by three people and the members are Sjam Sjamsoedin, Jori Collignon and Rogier van der Zwaag.

Ink Portraits Artist Research.

Alex Katz.

Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop Art movement. In particular, he is known for his painting, sculptures and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.

Alex Katz was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School Of Painting And Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today.

Katz is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are now seen as precursors to Pop Art. His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form. A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.
Beginning in the late 1950s, he developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings. Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s.

In 1977, Alex Katz was asked to create a work to be produced in billboard format above Times Square, New York City. The work, which was located at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, consisted of a frieze composed of 23 portrait heads of women. Each portrait measured twenty feet high, and was based on a study Katz did from life. The billboard extended 247 feet long along two sides of the RKO General building and wrapped in thee tiers above on a 60-foot tower. Katz has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions such as "Face of the Poet" combining his images with poetry from his circle, such as Ted Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, Carter Ratcliff and Gerard Malanga.

Katz' first one-person show was an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. In 1974 the Whitney Museum Of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition of paintings and cutouts titled Alex Katz in 1986. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally, Katz has since been honored with numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum.

 

Vincent Van Gogh.

Vincent Willem Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, thought to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still. Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still life's of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

Theodorus (Theo) Van Gogh (1857 -1891) who was Vincent's younger brother who worked as an art dealer and was Vincent's closest friend. Over three fourth's of the more than 800 letters Vincent wrote during his life were to Theo including his first and his last letters. Johanna Gesina Van Gogh who was Theo's wife, she was the first to publish the letter's Vincent wrote to Theo after his death. Anna Cornelia Van Gogh (1819 - 1907) was Vincent's mother and Theodorus Van Gogh (1822 - 1885) who was Vincent's father. Cornelia Adriana Vos-Stricker who was Vincent's widowed cousin who he fell in love with in the summer of 1881 in Etten. Still grieving the loss of her husband Cornelia rejected Vincent and returned to Amsterdam. Dr. Felix Ray (1867 - 1932) was the Doctor who treated Vincent after he cut part of his left ear lobe off. Dr. Paul Gachet (1828 - 1909) was Doctor and friend to Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. 

On February 22, 1890, van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was "the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events". This period lasted until the end of April, during which time he was unable to bring himself to write though he did continue to draw and paint. Hughes writes that from May 1889 to May 1890 he, "had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy."

Although an alternative theory exists that he was shot by someone else, it is widely understood that on 27 July 1890, aged 37, van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver.

While many of Vincent's late paintings are somber, they are essentially optimistic and reflect his desire to return to lucid mental health right up to the time of his death. Yet some of his final works reflect his deepening concerns. Referring to his paintings of wheatfields under troubled skies, he commented in a letter to his brother Theo: "I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." Nevertheless, he adds in the same paragraph: " ... these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside"

Leonardo Da Vinci.

A painter, a sculptor, an architect and an engineer. Da Vinci's fascination with science and his in depth study of human anatomy aided him in mastering the realist art form. While Leonardo's counterparts were known to create static figures in their works, Leonardo always tried to incorporate movement and expression into his own paintings. All the personages in his works are painted with great accuracy and detail that it is sometimes said that Da Vinci's painted from the bones outward. Having lived until the ages of 67, Leonardo experienced a very long career that was filled with times during which the painter was celebrated, but at times he was also humiliated and cast away. His life experiences all influenced his works and often, his paintings never left the sketchpad, or were only partially completed, as Leonardo often abandoned his commissions in order to flee from social situations. Today, there are record of only few Da Vinci paintings, and 20 note books.

He was born on April  15, 1452 and died on May 2, 1519 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic Of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”: his full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci". The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman .Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother, then from 1457 he lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. 

In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy and acquitted. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478 he left Verrocchio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478, he received his first of two independent commissions: to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and, in March 1481, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

Ink Portraits.

Today our task was to pick a few artists and draw their faces in bubbles which Lucy had drawn on big pieces of paper for the whole class to use. We had to go down to the Library and pick out a few books and collect images to draw in class. We were required to draw these images with Indian Ink. Whilst drawing our pictures we had to take photos of our progress, every time we drew something new we had to photograph it. Once we had done all of that, we then had to upload the photos onto our computers and put them all together to create a short film using Adobe Premiere. My final outcome is pictured above.

Paper Faces.

With reference to our NCFE portraiture project, we were required to work in pairs and create an animated face. We had to hire out a camera from the ERC and take a series of photographs of our animated face. We had to create our animated face by using colored card cut outs as facial features and setting them on a black background. I found using different pieces of colored card cut outs as facial features to be quite fun and very effective. We were required to use the stop motion process (shoot, move, shoot, move, etc and the face had to come together using no less than fifteen pictures. Once we had taken our photographs we then had to upload them and re size them accordingly to Photoshop. The face had to then be edited on Adobe Premiere along with the music track that Cam provided us with to use as the soundtrack. We then had to also fade to black at the end then render, export, save on our memory stick and give the final product to Cam. I thought I was somewaht successful upon completing this task but to improve I would have taken a lot more time and made sure I was taking the photographs the right way around as in some of my pictures they are not the right way around and it makes it all look funky! My final product is below.

ID Card.

To finish the day off today we had to do a task which involved pairing up with people that we hadn't worked with before. We were required to use a small digital camera and Cam gave us each a piece of red cloth matierial. I found the idea of the red material very effective as it created a really cool background. After watching my final outcome I would say I was somewhat successful but to improve I would have taken more time taking the photographs and making sure there were no bits of the wall in my pictures so I didn't have to crop a lot of the photo out! We had to take a series of pictures and upload them and join them together on Premier to create a short film. I found this task very fun, it was also nice to work with a partner that I hadn't worked with before and it was very rewarding to watch at the end knowing that I had made it. My final outcome is below.

Here is another video of I.D. Cards but this time it's of the whole classes short clips put all together to create a longer animation.

Animation Research.

For this task we had to research one animation artist. Whether it was a Disney movie or a stop/start animation we had to find out who made it and write about it. My research is below.

Nick Park.

Nick Park was born on the 6th December 1958 and is an English film maker of stop motion animation best known as the creator of Wallace & Gromit and Shaun The Sheep. He was born on Brookfield park in Preston in Lancashire, England and grew up on Greenlands Estate, Preston and later moved to Walmer Bridge where his mother still resides. In 1985, he joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial products (including the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer, where he worked on the dance scene involving oven-ready chickens). He also had a part in animating the Pee-wee's Playhouse which featured Paul Reubens. Along with all this, he had finally completed A Grand Day Out, and with that in post-production, he made Creature Comforts as his contribution to a series of shorts called "Lip Synch". Creature Comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. The two films were nominated for a host of awards. 

(Nick Park.)

Nick Park is the creator of the well known clay animation Wallace & Gromit. Wallace & Gromit are the main characters in a British series consisting of four animated short films and a feature length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. The characters are made from moulded plasticine modelling clay on metal armatures, and filmed with stop motion clay animation. 

Wallace, an absent minded inventor living in Wigan, Lancashire, is a cheese enthusiast who is especially fond of Wensleydale. His companion, Gromit, is an anthropomorphic intelligent dog. Wallace is voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis, Gromit remains silent, communicating only through facial expressions and body language.

The two characters appear in the monthly BeanoMAX comic and daily in The Sun. They are also heavily featured in 'Aardmag', the free online magazine that is unofficial but supported by Aardman Animations.

(Wallace & Gromit.)

Portrait Research.

This morning we were required to research two artists and explore two of their portraits. I chose to research the artists Edvard Munch and Leonardo Da Vinci. My research for these artists is below.

Edvard Munch.

Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk in Loten on the 12th December 1863 and died on the 23d January 144, to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjolstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie and three younger siblings; Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine and Inger Marie. Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherrited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to a painter Jacob Munch and histrorian Peter Andreas Munch.

Edvard has worked with various unknown artist in his career, and was artistically supervised by the artist Christian Krohg when he lived with a group of friends. in 1879 he enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry and maths. He learned scaled and perspective drawings but frequent illnesses interupted his studies. The following year , Munch left left the college determined to become a painter. Munch's father viewed art as an 'unholy trade'. Munch adopted an undogmatic stance toward art, writing in his diary his simple goal: "in my art i attempt to explain life and it's meaning to myself."and in 1881 he enrolled in the Royal School Of Art And Design of Christiana, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middlethun and naturalistic painter Christian Krohg. That year, Munch demonstrated his quick absorption of his figure training at the Academy in his first portraits, including one of his father and his first self-portrait. (Depicted below.) His full lenth portrait of Karl Jenson-Hjell, a notorious bohemian-about-town, earned a critic's dismissive repsonse: "It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of art. Munch's nude paintings from this period survive only in sketches, except for 'Standing Nude' (1887), perhaps confiscated by his father.

Painted in 1893, 'The Scream' is Munch's most famous work and one of the most recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man. Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized figure is reduced to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis. With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of "the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self". Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: "I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature." He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, "for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again."
'The Scream' has four versions: three paintings (1893, 1895 and 1910), and one lithograph (1895). The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004, and recovered in 2006 with limited damage. The 1895 painting sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for US$119,922,500, including commission.

(Self portrait with skeleton arm, 1895.)

(The Scream, 1893.)

The image 'The Scream' depicts a sky turning red and different colours merging into what looks like a whirl wind so most of the image is distorted. There also seems to be what looks like a man screaming with what looks a little bit like the mask off of the well know film 'Scream.' I really like this image as it's different and unique.


Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 and died on May 2, 1519 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Medici-rules Republic of Florence. He was an Itailian Renaissance Polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.
He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”. His full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci." The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman. In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478 he left Verrocchio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478, he received his first of two independent commissions: to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and, in March 1481, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin Of The Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria Delle Grazie.


'The Mona Lisa' is a half-length portrait of a woman which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world." The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a popular panel, and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The image 'Mona Lisa' is a portrait of a woman with very fine detail. Apparently this particular image appears to have hidden codes and hidden detail within it. To the naked eye the hidden codes and detail cannot be seen but with a magnifying glass they can clearly be seen. In the right eye appears to be the letters LV which could well stand for his name Leonardo Da Vinci while in the left eye there are also symbols but they are not as defined. Although probably one of his most used images everywhere, I really like this portrait because of the idea it has hidden codes and detail which makes it all the more interesting and gets you looking at the picture more closely. 

The Big Draw.

Today when we got in to class we had to sit down and watch the PowerPoint given by Lucy showing 8 artists who were all different and famous for their different artistic gifts.

The artists shown were Terry Frost who was an abstract artist, Anish Kapoor who was a Sculptor, Paul Strand who was a Photographer, Alberto Giacometti who was a Sculptor and a painter, And Warhol who was a Pop Artist, Patrick Caulfield who was an Illustration and Graphics designer and Alexander McQueen who was a fashion designer. In our groups we each had to choose a different artist and create one of their pictures and turn it into our own.

We chose Terry Frost. Once we had all chose our artist we then had to gather information about our artist from the LRC using books, magazines and the internet. We then had to print out that information, highlight interesting facts and make notes on techniques and processes used by the artist. We then had to produce a mind map to show our findings, then within our group we had to produce an A1 painting of one of our researched images, using the skills we have learnt such as mixing colors, texture, line, shading and scale.

We had to docs shot our working progress and evaluate our findings, print out 5 of our photo images and annotate how we felt about the work including skills we had learnt and presentation of ideas. Once we had completed all of the above we had to present the piece we had finished within our groups to the rest of the class and write an evaluation of the task.

Below are some of the photos that we took whilst working on our image.

Countdown.

Today we had to select a random number out of a hat and the number that we picked we had to design this number on A3 paper.

We had to include a facial feature with this number - featuring any parts of the human face, weather it be realistic or cartoon. We had to use different materials such as card, paper, felt tip pens and design ideas for this number and once completed we had to return the pictures to Cam to get them photographed. Here is one of my designs for my number pictured below.

We were then required to pair up with somebody that we hadn't worked with before. We had to collect a camera from our tutor Cam and using the same number as before and go around the college and take 3 photographs of examples of our number. We had half an hour to get 3 photographs and then we had to return to class with our images and upload them on to a computer. We had to select a favorite image of our 3 and save it to our memory stick, once down we had to give it to Cam to copy on to her computer. We then had to take a photograph of the number we designed earlier - upload it and save it on to our memory stick. I didn't think I was that successful with this task as I couldn't find any number 7's around the college! But I found a few and did what I could with them. To improve next time I would hopefully pick a different number so I would have more styles to work with!

Animation & Introduction.

Today we had to draw 3 small portraits of what represents us in a flm strip. We also were introduced to power points telling us more about the history of Animation. Above is a video of the whole classes film strips.

A little of history...

Felix The Cat, the most popular character and series of this period, started as the Feline Follies from Sullivan's Studio. The merchandising of Felix's image for dolls, watches, etc was very successful and paved the way for the later merchandising of animated characters. (1920)

1923 - Walt and Roy Disney found Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. 1930 - Warner Bros. Cartoons was born. First WB short was 'Sinking In The Bath Tub.'

1928 - Steamboat Willie was the first successful sound animated film; it made Mickey an international star and launched the Disney Studio of today.
Pluto character born in the Picnic. Fleischer introduced the character of in 'Betty Boop.'
1934 - Donald Duck voice debuts on Mickey Mouse's NBC radio programme. Warners, first Merrie Mellody in colour, the Looney Tunes were in B&W until 1943, coloured in 70's in Japan. In the 1950's Warner's burnt all their cels from these series to make storage space available.
1987 - The Simpsons started as spots on the Tracey Ullman show. 1991 - Beauty & The Beast, the first animated feature to be nominated for the Academy Award as Best Picture. 
1992 - Cartoon Network starts in 2 million homes, by 1995 in 22 million. Frog Baseball, starring Beavis Butthead, by Mike Judge, screened to an MTV focus group.

1993 Jurrasic Park use of CG for realistic living creatures.

1994 - The Lion King.1996 - The merger of Time Warner and Turner brings Warner Bros. Feature, TV, and Classic Animation. Hannah Barbara, Cartoon Network, plus a couple of others under one roof. 2001 - Shrek. This CG animated movie won the Academy Award for Best Animation. 2005 - The Simpsons. In it's 16th season, becomes the longest running television comedy series ever made surpassing The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, which tallied 15 seasons from 1952-66.

1995 - Toy Story. First full length 3D CG feature film. 1997 - King Of The Hill. 2000 - Finding Nemo. All time highest grossing animation of all time, beating out Beauty & The Beast.