Gorillaz Art Style

Masked behind an animation, Gorillaz has made a significant impact in the way I designed my characters in my animation, primarily influenced by the black-eyes look that is the band's trademark.

Salad Fingers

David Firth's Salad Fingers - I was quite impressed with this online flash series, especially it's non-coherent but uncanny storylines. I plan on making a flash piece that tells a story in a structure similar to that of Salad Fingers

Characteristics of Web 2.0

1. Dynamic Contribution: Dynamic contribution is the combining of different websites for broader or deeper user interaction. For instance, google maps merged from the traditional google search software and online maps to create a new online service.

2. User Contribution: User contribution refers to contribution to a website provided by users. Wikipedia is the ideal example, considering that it’s an online encyclopaedia entirely composed to use contribution to articles. Incidentally, the sole reason why professors discourage the use of Wikipedia as a reference is because it’s a website that centers around anonymous, usually unqualified users around the globe.

3. Social Media: Social media encompasses such collective, networking websites, facebook being a great example. In social media, the public has access to create and manipulate information on a network system. Facebook does just that, with different profiles, instant messaging, e-mail, and more. Collectively, facebook is a social gathering place online, and that is what make it social media.

4. Online applications: Basically, simple use-input programs found on the internet, such as Jetman, a flash videogame that can be found on Facebook. Harnessing collective intelligence: The internet, being so globally utilized, has the potential to hold a collective intelligence. E-Bay, Google, Yahoo! – they are all examples of agents of collective intelligence. What that means is that a slew of topics from across the world is being written and posted on the internet by experts in the field.

5. Harnessing collective intelligence: The internet, being so globally utilized, has the potential to hold a collective intelligence. E-Bay, Google, Yahoo! – they are all examples of agents of collective intelligence. What that means is that a slew of topics from across the world is being written and posted on the internet by experts in the field.

Album Covers: Then and Now

The album cover for Ein Heldenleben (completed in 1898) reminds me a lot of a recent album cover, entitled "Spiritual Machines", by rock band...

...Our Lady Peace, as they both appear to have an abstract, cut-and-paste artwork.

Idea for Flash Animation

The idea behind my animation followed a person who is trying to diffuse a ticking time bomb, while experiencing extreme anxiety, only to realize that it’s all just a test. As I’ve already said in another entry, my primary inspiration was David Firth’s “Salad Fingers” and his erratic, nonlinear plotlines, as well as a certain example that Lori showed us during lecture that used a poem for narrative and had a shady atmosphere, entitled “Ross Macaulay” (I’m not sure if this is the title of the animation or the creator of the animation), and his design of characters (with big, circular heads and no arms).

I designed my characters to have black holes for eyes, similarly to the members of animated rock band “Gorillaz”. In creating my animation, I relied on conventional generic action movies for research – I wanted to parody this genre, to a certain extent, by mimicking the formulas that are recycled for many of them. Police helicopters hovering over skyscrapers, hostages, bomb diffusing squads – these are all formulas that I wanted to employ into my story.

Inspiration for the Poster Assignment

The album cover above is for Death Cab for Cutie's new album "Narrow Stairs". As I attempt to make a poster for this particular album, I'm trying to imitate the same color scheme and patchwork style.

Typography

Radiohead Poster





The font shown here is a twirling, sketchy, jester-like art that produces a shady, monstrous, under-the-bed effect that looks similar to a black cat with it’s hairs standing on end. The smaller text underneath uses the same font but on a different scale, making it a scratchy patch of writing, and although it might be hard to read from far away, still produces the desired effect for the sake of this poster, which is for Radiohead, a band that would enjoy that kind of visual scrabble style. Notice the use of circles within the text, inside the “O” of “Radiohead” and between the numbers on the date. I theorize that the use of this shape is geared towards maintaining the silly, curvy style of text. The text is quite effective in appealing to Radiohead’s demographic, which favour the dark, haywire atmosphere of the band.



"Billy Talent 2" Album Cover




The font above appears to be “Impact”, or if not, it appears to be influenced by it. The album title, “Billy Talent 2” is slapped center, just above the bold picture of a screaming mouth, as the absolute hook of the album cover. It certainly does make an “impact” on the viewer, and it’s blocky, pitch-black, overt style conveys a musical genre that is heavy, in-your-face, and bold – which is good, because the band’s punk rock sound also fit these descriptions. The space in-between letters are also very small, which produces an air of straightforwardness, and even the words are positioned close to each other. Together, the title and the screaming mouth make for a very effectively aggressive album cover geared towards lionhearted teenagers.


"The Butterfly Effect" Movie Poster






The font in the cover for “The Butterfly Effect” seems to mimic the text inked into test tubes/beakers found in an ordinary laboratory – some letters are even slightly smudged out for realism. It’s red color, complimentary of Kutcher’s red eye, gives the text an eerie, ominous, science-experiment-gone-wrong effect that is accentuated by the thinness of the letters, sharing characteristics with bugs and insects, and the spaces in-between letters and words, which gives it a dreamy, floating atmosphere. I would say that this text is very effective in capturing the spirit of the movie, which is also weaved into an eerie atmosphere, constant references to science and laboratories, and entirely linked to one symbolic insect, characterized in this light by skinniness and twitchiness, the butterfly.

Flash critique & web production

I feel as though I’ve come very far in learning about digital media, and I already have a couple of finished assignments to prove it. All of our flash animations have been handed in, but only a couple were shown. I was impressed by the work of everyone else, it seemed that practically the whole class had a good grip on animation. We’ve just begun web production, and all the material is new to me.

The only experience I have with working with HTML’s is when I used to post on public forums, and it demanded you used some HTML codes to convey different fonts. I’m having a hard time following all the logistics behinds HTMLs and memorizing these different codes, so I’m hoping that I break through that hurdle. I did more research on Tim Berners-Lee, the invent of HTML’s, and found out that, during his time at college, he built a computer with only a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old TV, and later was caught hacking computers and was banned from using the school computer.

Ironically, he managed to prove that he was capable of inventing communications technology from scratch and, in later years, innovating upon it, but also that the internet had already developed a strict, confidential line of communication by which, if ever breached, is punishable by arrest. It is amazing to see that internet has come such a long way, from a means of communication in battle to a world wide web ranging from every topic imaginable, all accessible in a fraction of a second.