Show Time

Our MA show is just around the corner! eeeeek. Here is the group invitation designed by me and my good friend Lizzie. You can also check out the rest of my talented classmates on the lovely blog www.camberwellmaillustration.blogspot.com 

My other life

I've been leading a bit of a double life over the past couple of months! Coinciding with my MA I've been doing an additional course in called 'New Creative Ventures' which is a joint venture between the University of the Arts and the London Business School. Over the 10 weeks of the course our team of 6 (some art students, some MBAs) have worked together to write a business plan for 'Own Label' - a new channel for up and coming fashion designers. Taking the course was a challenging but rewarding and I've learned some things which will hopefully stand to me in the future. To find out more about Own Label click here.

Crazy Bird Girl

I'm currently working on the sound for my animation. I want to use quite subtle, ambient noises so I set out on Friday to collect some sounds of the city. I felt a bit conspicuous at first walking round with all of the kit - headphones, furry microphone, the recorder and a mess of cables, but I soon got over the embarrassment. I started near London bridge and recorded some traffic, building site and train noises and then recorded some sounds on the underground. I wanted to record some crow sounds too so I went to a park near college. At this stage I really did look like a crazy - chasing crows around the park with a furry microphone!

One thing I noticed, especially in the park was that these sounds are around us constantly but I never hear them because I never listen to them. This everyday 'soundtrack' is made up of a cacophony of noises some of which are  natural, but most of which are man-made. The crow sounds I was trying to capture kept being swallowed up by the sound of over head planes. But it was the constant interruption by human voices which proved the most troublesome. Even in quiet places it was near impossible to get more than a few seconds of ambient sound before the interruption of human activity - talking, shuffling past, chatting on the phone. The whole experience made me think about how population dense large cities like London are and how we live all tightly packed into this grid. As the world continues to urbanise, this phenomenon becomes more and more prevalent.

Rotascoping fun!

I've been working solidly over the past few weeks on a moving image piece for my final MA show in July. I've been working in AfterEffects which was a new software for me so the initial learning curve was more of a learning vertical! It took me a while to get my head around the concept of the 'z' space, the third dimension as it were. I've gotten a handle on it now and it's all coming together. Now that I've got the basic structure and movement of the animation I've been investigating ways of adding detail and interest by introducing other techniques. The animation is primarily illustrated but I'm keen to overlay elements of video into the piece. When I'm mixing media in this way it's important that two elements gel together and there isn't an obvious clash. I used rotascoping to better integrate the video into the illustrated environment. I found this process extremely time consuming and rather tedious. It involved exporting the 12 seconds of video as a film strip at 15 frames per second. This essentially created a stop motion animation (of 180 frames) in photoshop which were each drawn over individually. I was surprised i didn't have repetitive strain after it! This image is a section of the film strip. Despite the labour intensiveness it was useful technique to learn for future reference. 

You-Me Artists

There's a bunch of us taking part in an exhibition in Osaka, Japan in a couple of weeks time. The title of the show is 'You-Me Artists'. Here are a couple of images I submitted to the show.