End of Module Evaluation

FINAL Stings - As You Like It

As You Like It FINAL STING from Isaac Smith on Vimeo.

As it was in printed form, this sting again was far from what I thought I'd have been making at the start of this brief. I tried to get across the contemplative spirit of the scene in As You Like It that inspired it, in which Celia, upon arriving in the idyllic Forest of Arden far from the stuffy court, remarks; "I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it".
This quote was really the driving force behind this sting, I didn't want to overload the image with something like ten birds flying by and a squirrel hurrying up a tree accompanied by doleful harp music. The simplicity of her words is the very spirit of As You Like It, a play whose title literally means "Whatever You Like", that asks the questions of what wasted time even is, and if time spent doing nothing at all is a relief or a waste of valuable time. She sounds almost sarcastic, but also a little spellbound by the freedom she finds in nature, almost as if she literally doesn't know what to do with herself now that she isn't being told to do anything.

If my stings were to be viewed in any order, I think that this as the final sting would round out my progression through this module as a whole. I've learned a lot about my methods of working and I feel like my practice is totally different to how it was at the start of the year. The increasing freedom in the briefs we are getting is terrifying and liberating at the same time, like the feeling of staring at a blank sketchbook and simultaneously shitting yourself because its empty and thinking of ways to fill it. Its a challenging way of working and its tested my ability to adapt to new methods, facilities and more honest self evaluation and find ways to balance everything on this course.

It's like being taught how to swim by being thrown off Blackpool pier. At first you're pretty certain that you can't swim and you're definitely going to drown, but at the same time if you're going to even consider drowning as an option, what's the point in being here?

FINAL Stings - The Tempest

The Tempest FINAL STING from Isaac Smith on Vimeo.

This is my favourite sting, and it's the one that nearly sent me off the deep end. Making subtle movement really is a painstaking process (for me at least), but its the most rewarding. The tiny fraction of a second twitches of Caliban's fingers are the most blink and you'll miss them details, and they're the ones that took hours of sizing, dragging and timing to realise. My initial concepts for animation were full of lots of action and things happening on screen, but this brief has really taught me the value of subtlety and strength of idea being more important than aesthetic strength.
The animation around the hand isn't as fluid as I'd like, some of the fingers appear a bit sooner than they probably should, so in the future I would focus early on getting an idea ready so I have more time to spend on the meticulous little technical details.
Time management is always something I can improve, and I honestly tried to focus mostly on completing Studio Brief 2 before getting fully embroiled in animation (because animation scared me), when really I should have let them run alongside each other to allow for faster idea generation and general stronger synergy across both briefs. In the future I want to try to just be more confident in my own work really, and focus on just making stuff, instead of worrying about whether I actually can make it or not and burying my head in a different brief or module. Its been hard for me to balance this module with the others and the briefs inside this module with each other, so I feel that's something I'm trying to get right going forward.

ALSO
Animating that text writing itself took me an hour and a half and about 75% of a can of Pringles to keep me going. I'm very proud of it.

FINAL Stings - Macbeth

Macbeth FINAL STING from Isaac Smith on Vimeo.

While being a simple idea, I'm overall happy with the way this sting came out. My main aim for all three of my animations was to not overcomplicate things and force my concepts down the viewers throat. My aim for this Macbeth sting was to highlight the visual metaphor of Lady Macbeth's duality as an unassuming woman, and lover of murder, with her shadow resembling a dagger when it is fully revealed. As that's already quite a lot going on, I didn't want to have loads more things distracting the viewer from that, like I was initially going to have horses riding up to the castle to signify the King coming to Castle Macbeth (to be later sheesh-kabab'd in his guest room).
I toyed with the idea of outside elements entering the frame but visually there was just too much going on for the ten second time limit, and what I was trying to get across was lost in the "whos riding up, is that the road, what's happening why aren't that horses legs moving in unison" haze.
I also tried to have rain falling from the viewers perspective down onto the frame, but mainly because I couldn't animate it well enough for it to be convincing, I thought the background noise of a thunderstorm would be a strong enough signifier to the ominous tone of the sting.
What I've learned here is that it's best to familiarise yourself with a method like After Effects by experimenting with simple solid ideas, rather than trying to visualise vague complicated ones. This is a valuable timesaving lesson that I'll definitely be taking into consideration in future animation work.

Final Prints - Romeo & Juliet

I think this is one of my most successful prints among the five. The black didn't come out as strong as I'd initially intended in the design stage, but this weathered effect across the print works well to parallel the imperfection of Romeo and Juliet's relationship.

As narrative has been a primary driving force for me throughout this module, but particularly in Printed Pictures, it's important for me to try to visually communicate a sense of the story of each play I've chosen to illustrate. Screenprinting is the perfect method of conveying disjointedness and irregularity (as its so bloody hard to line everything up right and far too easy to ruin everything), so the visuals of this particular print align with the concept of Romeo and Juliet as imperfect in their relationship. The romanticising of their relationship in culture is so far from the source material, and they have become the household name for idyllic lovers.

The play is brimming with bloodshed and prejudice, and ultimately, these factors destroy Romeo and Juliet's childish, naïve vision of what love is, and they both kill themselves thinking that the other is dead. (Well, Romeo IS dead when Juliet kills herself so really it's Romeo's fault for spending too much time lamenting in verse over the unconscious Juliet to check if she was actually breathing or not. Which she was.) I wanted to highlight the tragedy of their love with the imagery of the intertwined puppets. The two characters are so embroiled in one another that the other factors of the image, the poison and their shrinking bodies (*cough* DEATH *cough*), are of little consequence to them. Of course, this blind adoration and ignorance is what dooms them both in the end, as in the end, they are both little more than puppets of their rival families, with strings tangled together so closely that they aren't aware they're slowly being cut.
I hope the gist of this comes across in the tone of this image, I really didn't want to romanticise them any further, but instead try to deconstruct that trope a little and show the much more sombre side of their love.

Final Prints - Hamlet

This is probably my least successful print, in terms of the printing quality and the theme overall. In honesty, the length of this project has really tested my ability to keep coming up with new ideas for the same source material, and I feel I started running out of steam when it came to redesigning my prints over Christmas.
I again wanted to aim for a cinema movie poster theme with this, but the lack of any real underlying visual narrative means it doesn't fit into the set as well as I could have made it. I'm happy with it as a logo, but the concepts that drove this weren't as strong as my other ideas for the rest of the set of prints. Because of this I used this as a bit of a tester in terms of trying out more graphic imagery in screenprinted format, as its a style I'm moving forward with in general with my work, and Responsive in particular. The icons work well to communicate the overly theatrical nature of Hamlet as a character, and the many factors that fuel him, that I was aiming to convey, but the execution just wasn't as strong as it could have been. (which could also be said about Hamlet because everyone ends up dead)

Final Prints - The Tempest

I'm happy with how this design came out, it isn't either too clean or too scratchy, much like The Tempest itself.
This idea was definitely influenced by the looming dread of Moving Pictures, as I began to consider over Christmas the logistics of what I was going to animate. I wanted to relate back to my ideas back in the beginnings of this module and researching Shakespeare from an illustrative point of view. My main overarching theme has been that I think the real hearts of these plays have been lifted into some higher cultural plane only truly available to people (white men) with English degrees (from Oxford) and beige suits (or tweed). These plays were never written for that, the upper classes of Shakespeare's day hated him precisely BECAUSE he wasn't university educated and managed to draw huge crowds consistently throughout his career as a playwright. These plays were written for the normal people, the equivalent of us in todays society, most of whom couldn't read, so theatre was their primary form of entertainment. They were filled with romance, violence, sex and magic, they were the blockbusters of their day, and I really wanted to get back to that common core in my exploration of Shakespeare.

Keeping with that, this design for The Tempest (which is full of so very much violence and witchcraft by the way) in particular has a heavy cinematic influence, taking inspiration from the corny swath of zombie horrors that have been everywhere since the 50s.
I didn't want to overcomplicate the composition as I'm keeping in mind the fact I still need to make this shift around in After Effects.

Final Prints - As You Like It

This is the furthest thing away from what I'm used to doing, but I feel that it's one of my most successful prints, as I just tried to throw myself into it rather than overthinking, over-measuring and worrying about the miniscule details of the composition like I've been getting trapped doing for the last few weeks (months? how long has it been, the days are a blur of Shakespeare and sandwiches for energy).
I let idea rule the piece here, I wanted to communicate the freedom in nature that is an overarching theme in As You Like It, whilst hinting at Shakespeare's suggestion in the play that ultimate freedom is often just a baffling prison. I thought the visuals of an opening in a twisted network of trees would convey that duality of containment and freedom. I wasn't sure about using the text at first, but seeing it printed I think it works to break up the concentration of the dense black right in the centre of the composition. I'm trying to do new things with my work in terms of concept and physical composition, and this design and my Macbeth design were definitely the furthest things from what I would've assumed I would be printing now if I'd been asked this time last year. I want to understand more strongly how to utilise shape and scale in future work to make more abstract images that allow for a more direct focus on the idea behind the image.

Final Prints - Macbeth

This was the first final design I finished and was happy with, and it has sort of set the tone for the rest of the print set. Since drastically changing direction with these designs (and nearly inducing a heart attack over Christmas while doing it), I wanted to use this as an opportunity to throw away anything that came into my brain too easily. I looked at illustrators with darker, more abstract visual signatures, such as Mike Mignola and Chris Bachalo for inspiration in getting further away from myself and trying to become fully involved in the process of joining idea generation directly with image generation without my brain faffing about in between.


This process has been refreshing for me as its allowed me to shut myself up and really start making work I'm beginning to feel a lot more connected to.
Most of my prints have a sense of visual duality to illustrate an aspect of the story of the play I've chosen, here I doubled Lady Macbeth's looming shadow with a dagger. Focusing on her character rather than the titular character was a product of stepping back and approaching this brief from a new angle, as she really is the catalyst for everything that happens. Macbeth is malleable and easily swayed, Lady Macbeth is very much the one in control, and truly responsible for all the death in the play. I wanted to get across her dominance and dangerous nature both at once, and I think that reducing this image to block shape works better for that rather than trying to convey a muddled and overly complex visual metaphor.

Screenprinting the last two prints :D

Today was thankfully another successful day in the print room, my prints are now all physical and complete and that makes me happy. I spent a lot of time over the last few weeks considering the visuals of the designs, so being able to realise them properly through screenprint has helped my confidence in regards to this brief massively. I can really focus this last week on getting animations finished and sorting out all the end of module admin.

Positives for last prints - As You Like It, Macbeth

Macbeth

As You Like It

Screenprinting final designs

I'm really happy with how today went, for probably the first time I feel I went into the print room with a totally clear idea of what I wanted to do and I just stayed in there all day until I got it done. I feel a lot better about the direction of the project in general now I've regained control of these prints. I've learned that practice is the only way to succeed at screenprinting, as its so easy to cock it up with one wrong measurement or a weird application of emulsion, or any number of factors really.

I've become a lot more confident with the physical process of screenprinting as a method of illustration, the stripping and coating of the screen and exposure, etc. I'm looking forward to getting back into the print room on Monday to finish my last two prints.

Positives for Print - Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest

Macbeth

Romeo & Juliet

The Tempest