Moodpage.

Mr Shrigley.

Two very simple points about the artist, David Shrigley, and his website.

1. The layout of the website is actually quite appealing, easy to navigate and embodies his style of work throughout through the font in the links and the simplicity behind the pages. This is a website design that I wouldn't be against using myself, however;

2. The actual artwork is almost entirely against my taste, I think that in the current climate of everyone thinking they are an artist this type of thing to me just comes across as very pretentious and actually very artistically impaired. Sad face, but I just don't see any appeal.

(3. Okay shh there is one okay piece and that's his work at the skatepark, that is all. Let this be our little secret..)

eXistenZ; reSiStenZ is futile.

A short thought on eXistenZ:-


So here comes a film that has been made for the purpose of us questioning our own reality, with a flurry of quick scene changes and a disjointed narrative:sense ratio eXistenZ actually delivers on being ahead of it's time. After the first ten minutes of this film I reasoned with myself that if it'd been made recently I'd have a lot of criticism about the themes brought up as today they are much more common and it'd seem to me that this film was simply trying to be as different as it could to engage people with 'Shock Value'. After discovering from Jools that this was made in 1997 I have to congratulate it on it's ingenuity in a style that was maybe only really coming to development around that time. In this sense, eXistenZ is actually one of the few films that approaches the idea of alternate realities on a virtual plane and the way that the plot twists between one reality and the virtual reality and finally to another reality it kept me thinking about which parts are actually 'true' and which areas are completely fabricated.


Due to my own personal appreciation for the video game scene I found myself being able to interact with the concepts in eXistenZ as I'm interested in the trajectory of concepts like virtual reality and in which way the current 'games' market is going in terms of interactivity. Obviously we are a long way from 'jacking in' to a console in order to play completely mentally through a series of nervous responses, but just what form will VR take in future..? I guess only time will tell.


And yes they're still in a game at the end of the film, else the person who was 'Chinese waiter' would've been connected in with the rest of them.. interesting.

Interactive Space Rationale

For the interactive space module I already knew a little about html and CSS but I'd not used things like hotspots before. I spent a little bit of time looking into the code of these before attending the seminar and found a couple of similar things to what I'd already found out. I spent a bit of time drawing little plans and coming up with ideas for my interactive space because I couldn't use my camera as it was on the fritz. Instead of having photos that I used in my interactive space I decided to model all my scenes on 3ds max just for a little practice on that. I tried to employ a little bit of a mystery element by making people use one side of the site to get to the end of the other side. With an extended space it could be made into a kind of game where one has to find out stuff like combinations etc to get to a certain point of the story. Of course people could just read the html code and find out everything straight away =].. either way, I wasn't really that interested in this section of the module and tried to make it interesting by doing the 3d stuff to keep my attention on it.


-MZH-

One Shot Rationale

In the one shot project we were put into groups to create a short one-shot film in where there is only one camera movement (if any) yet the footage still tells a story. Firstly we were all shown a few one-shot scenes, often these take hours to choreograph and take several takes, however these are also often quite long so by having shorter footage we don’t need to spend quite as much time as mainstream Hollywood. Our first test shooting for the one-shot involved us having a stationary camera and a scene taking place where two people in shot are mourning over someone ‘buried’ but off shot we have another member of our group talking in a muffled tone creating the illusion that the person buried isn’t dead, as the scene comes to an end the camera pans up to show just the sky as the voices die out. We tried to incorporate some kind of techniques used in film to make shots look better, the first few seconds is just the setting where the rule of thirds points out the key areas of the scene. When it came to planning our final one shot we used some of the things we’d learnt while practicing using different lighting, we attempted to have a scene that showed 3 news stories which we could then edit to remove the sound from our footage and adding a voiceover from the news talking about the stories we were trying to ‘mime’. Overall this wasn’t my favourite project however if we were to do this again I’d spend more time trying to plan a scene however I think that maybe each member of the group should’ve had separate ideas and then we film them all helping with each separate shot, giving us all individual footage to edit for our own portfolio.


-MZH-

Animation Rationale

When I started the animation project I had the idea of a simple concept in creating a television ident, I did a little research into some different examples of currently used and previously used idents for BBC, Channel 4 etc. The earlier ones were very simple and just had a very basic theme that was just memorable enough to be used for a channel’s identity, some of the more modern idents show more intricate and sometimes subtle showing of a channel’s identity. I started off by replicating the first thing we were told to produce in order to get used to the tools of 3DS Max. After this I began drawing up designs of my first Ident idea, it was quite a short and simple design that simply featured the channel’s name and a small bit of dynamic lighting on an object in the background to make it more interesting, I then created a short piece of music to play as the ident’s theme and after layering them together on Premiere I took some time to go back and watch other idents again and noticed how short mine was by comparison. Rather than simply over-rework my first ident I decided to start again using a character that I developed to be the channel’s image. After animating this I added a number of lighting effects to make the piece more interesting then by rendering my ident from different angles and sequencing them together in Premiere I was able to create a much more interesting and active piece of animation. I then made another music track that was longer this time and added it to the ident with a couple of sound effects to create my finished product. If I was to repeat this project I may take more time to add more detail to the character and make the actions smoother.

-MZH-

I'm not italian but..

Been working on some 3d design work, spent a couple of hours (at least) modelling a Benelli M3, trying to get the hang of turning something from 2d to 3d and then modifying it as necessary. Started this by setting a 2d image of the design in the 'left' viewport then laying the necessary shapes over each other and creating the necessary depths and fiddly bits to turn it from a 2d image to 3d, after this I spent a little time adding a couple of extra bits and then attempting to add a little more texture to the image.

-MZH-