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My Work, Project 2 Zine: Process

2D II ZINE – Process

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2D II,  ZINE PROCESS

Assigned Location: Bukit Batok

After my initial research of the area of Bukit Batok, I narrowed it down to the neighbourhood’s nature parks. And within those nature parks, I picked the topic of lamp-posts to investigate and display in my final zine. 

The process has been a very educational one; I’ve learned so many things from using InDesign to developing an actual product and figuring out what would look best visually to convey my message. 

Learning InDesign – –

One of the biggest areas in my process documentation was learning InDesign itself as a software. I have had no prior knowledge or use of the application and it was a really useful experience to understand what terms like ‘bleed’ and ‘slug’ were. I was taught to format a product with the end result in mind, and having to think about the printing helped in the process of construction my zine.

Specifications for the A5 zine document.

Crafting the Zine – –

I started the process of creating a zine with the idea of ‘lamp posts of Bukit Batok’. I knew that I wanted to do illustration in my zine, rather than use photographs, so I just used my photos as reference and created illustrations based on them. At first, I found it extremely hard to figure out what colours to use. Admittedly, I hadn’t planned out the actual narrative/storyline to my zine, I only knew that I wanted to characterise and bring the lamp posts that I saw so often to life. However, the more I worked on the zine, the more I started to figure out what I wanted to do.

In the end, I would create a narrative with dawn, noon, and twilight and attribute these times in the day to different ‘guardians’ – that is, the lamp posts. I ended up with 15 total versions of my zine, from start to finish as I tried to figure out what I wanted to show visually. Below is the progression of my zine from start to finish in screenshots.

The first draft of the cover page of my zine.
The second draft of my cover.

I knew that the illustration above was one that I wanted to keep – it had good composition and it showed that I wanted to talk about lamp posts in Bukit Batok’s environment. However, I was frustrated with the colours as well as the font – consulting with Shirley showed me that the fonts you use are very important to the tone that you want to convey. And at this point, the font was too serious. I didn’t want a goofy, silly font that was child-like, but I still wanted to show that I was telling a story rather than an information pamphlet.

Changed the colours on the previous illustration.

The first thing I did to try and fix the problem was change the colours of the illustration so that they were more cohesive and aesthetically pleasing. I liked this illustration much better than the one before and this is the final one I would use for my zine’s cover page. Then I went on to experiment and play around with different fonts that would help convey my message better (and not be so serious!) Below is the final cover page, where I made the font more light-hearted and ‘story-like’ (if you will) and fit it into the page so that it would look cohesive as an entire layout. I am quite pleased with this cover and prefer it enormously over my two earlier versions.

Final zine cover layout.
The Rest of the Zine – –

After jumping over the tough hurdle of the zine cover, I moved onto the rest of the zine. Like I mentioned before, I want to convey a story that takes us from dawn to noon to twilight and associate different lamp posts with these timings (e.g. the dawn lamp post would be shy and quiet, like the dawn as an entity itself). Dawn was relatively easy to do; it was harder later on to craft the noon spread and the twilight spread.

The first spread.
The second spread.

Above is the final end look of the second spread in my zine. It was hard at first to figure out what I wanted to do with this page, because I wanted to use this illustration:

But the illustration itself would obviously not cover the entire spread. I needed to think about what I wanted to do with the spread, so then I tried to balance out one area with empty space and the other with more complicated designs and patterns. Heavy on one side, and light on the other. Below is my process of trying to figure out the composition for the spread. 

After I was satisfied with the composition, I tried to follow the rule of thirds with placement of the texts and kept them from being right in the centre or the middle of the spread. This was to provide more visual interest. I like the contrast between the empty right side and the heavier left side.

The final spread.

Above is the final spread – the ‘twilight’ guardian. So as I reached the end of the zine, I tried to progress it throughout the timings of a single day; dawn to dusk. For this spread, I had some troubles with choosing colour. Initially, I was going to use this image:

But obviously, the style of the above illustration doesn’t match the other two spreads or the cover page. So I went back to the reference photo used:

And created a new illustration that would keep the consistency across the zine. The final illustration for the twilight spread has a common colour scheme of warm browns and oranges and tries to communicate a sense of dusk/twilight. 

I had fixed up the odd green/blue/yellow colour scheme and replaced it with one that would match better with the rest of the zine. But I then had issues with adjusting the colours of the text. 

 

As you can see above, the word ‘twilight’ is different – one is yellow, the other is blue. I was struggling between which one would give more visual interest. In the end, I decided on blue because it would match the blue of the previous noon spread and also makes the word stand out.

Learning Points + Takeaways – –

This entire project has taught me many things, from softwares to composition and thinking about end products. One of the biggest things that I had to think about was both colour and composition. Using different elements of design like the rule of thirds and so on really helped me create a zine that would be more interesting to look at. For example, in the beginning I would split up the composition of the spreads down the middle because of the left and right pages, but then after consultations, I realised that I could bring images across the middle divide to create the rule of thirds and so on. Thinking about consistency across a product is also an interesting aspect of this project. Usually when I create artwork or paint, I only have to think about a single frame on a page. In a zine, not only do I have to think about individual spreads, but also about how they transition from each other and the consistency across the entire document. I enjoyed this project very much and it represents learning milestones in my design career.

 

 

 

Final Project, Research

4D II Project 2 – Individual Research

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  • Santiago Sierra
    • Santiago Sierra is a performance artists that has caused waves in his exploration of capitalism: the exploitation of workers and immigrant poverty. One of his most controversial works was when he blockaded the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion in 2003, during the  Venice Biennale. He only allowed entry to Spanish passport-holders; a form of discrimination. He has also questioned the nature of employment in art institutions – he paid a museum watchman to live for 365 hours behind a wall at MoMA. In another installation, he filled the Kestner Gesellschaft museum with 400 tons of mud (a reflection on the creation of a Hanover lake using unemployed people as cheap labor).
House in Mud (2005)

 

  • Maurizio Cattelan
    • Cattelan has done many controversial works commenting on the ‘readymade’, seemingly lackluster effort in many modern contemporary artists’ work. He has stolen an entire artist’s show from a gallery and tried to sell it as his own, titling it “Another Fucking Readymade.” However, his most controversial work was “All”, a Guggenheim retrospective.  He hung his work from the ceiling. However, what was hung was high-end, valuable internationally collected art suspended in the air from cables.
“All”
  • Guillermo Vargas
    • Guillermo Varga’s work is controversial for his installation featuring an emaciated dog. He featured the words “You Are What You Read” behind the dog, the letters spelled out with dog food. The controversy behind this work is that the dog died after the exhibition from starvation, but Vargas argued that no one who saw intervened by feeding the dog.
“You Are What You Eat”

What I have learned from all of these controversial artists, is that they make headlines and draw attention because they focus on work that is very of the ‘now’. What I mean by this is that within their given contexts, they exhibit and display work about things that they notice and observe about society today. Specific things that they want to comment on, the things that they believe are affecting society today. For example, Sierra’s work on immigrant discrimination and capitalism is something that has affected human behaviour and he creates a very glaring, obvious commentary through his performance art. What I have learned from my research is that they take aspects of life that surround people (e.g. contemporary ‘ready made’ art, capitalism) and bring it into the limelight. Such things make us (as the audience) uncomfortable because we choose to live amongst things that may be otherwise morally wrong, and to face it head-on through installations or performance art is forcing us to face it ourselves, that this is the society we live in.

My Work, Project 1 Que Sara: Process

2D – Que Sera Sera PROCESS

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After all the initial research that went into my jobs, I started the visualisation of my final pieces. Like I said before, I went through many revisions of different jobs (e.g I thought about criminals but I ended up scratching that idea) but there are a lot of thumbnail sketches of possible compositions that I came up with.

Some of the different thumbnails I did are here  below:

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I focused a lot on the fisherman job, because it was the one I was most excited about, but I also did preliminary sketches of possible ways I wanted other jobs to look too. Especially for herpetology, I sketched out snakes in many different ways to make the A and the G look very prominent. I also worked on the composition for the astronaut; I wanted the G to be the planet and the A to be a rocket (since A is easier to manipulate into a rocket than G is). Consulting with Shirley reinforced my idea: she like the contrast of colour, shape, while all still under the umbrella of the same space-theme.

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For two of the jobs, I started out doing traditional mediums of pencil and watercolour first (and some marker) to see what they would look like. I did this for the architect and for the herpetologist because I thought that both of these jobs were especially close to the use of traditional mediums.

Herpetology – because like my research showed,  there’s a sepia/vintage like vibe to it. I imagine coffee stains and other debris as a herpetologist works on the diagrams of the animals he studies. So I tried to emulate that with my own watercolour painting.

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I will later digitalise this so that it can make for a clean print.

Architect – you often imagine an architect drawing and sketching out buildings. Though I know that perspective is a very inaccurate tool in drawing and architects don’t use it, I decided to include perspective to give it more of an ‘artistic flair’. But I felt that the pencil drawing still remained a little plain and messy, so I eventually will change the medium to digital and use the colours of white and blue like blueprints.

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As for the other two, I started out digitally and continued to just work on them digitally. A process screenshot for the astronaut can be seen below:

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My Work, Project 1 Que Sara: Research

2D – Que Sera Sera RESEARCH

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The prompt for this project was to portray our names (whether our full name, real name, nick name, initials, what have you) in relation to a future job ambition.

I wanted to use my initials ‘A.G.’ so I explored that, with the jobs that I had in mind. Initially, I wanted to be a zoologist, a criminal, a fisherman, and an astronomer, but eventually as I started sketching out and planning the way my deliverables would look, I ended up with these 4 jobs as the finals:

  1. Fisherman
  2. Astronaut
  3. Herpetologist
  4. Architect

For all of these jobs, I will use only AG and try and explore different ways that I can incorporate it into the job-type to see if it can be expanded to be used as an actual font.

RESEARCH

First of all, I started out researching the type of visual aids that are related to the jobs that I picked.

Fishermen are often associated with nets and fish (obviously!) and so I thought it would be best to look at photos of nets and see what kind of ideas I could come up with.

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Bozo fisherman using a net on the River Niger, Mopti, Mali
Bozo fisherman using a net on the River Niger, Mopti, Mali

Often with these photos of fishermen, there isn’t much in the background except the sky and the water. I thought this contrast in detail (the cluttered texturing of the net vs the clear and vast sky) could be an important part of my composition. Symbols of the boats would also help.

Astronauts are obviously associated with space, planets, asteroids, and rockets. Since planets and asteroids come in different shapes, I thought maybe I could use these to create the letters “A, G”. I came across cute clipart/cartoon pictures of astronauts on the internet and liked the way they looked.

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For this one, I especially like the colours of yellow and red for the planet and the rocket. They work well together to stand out against the dark background.

Herpetologists are experts in the study of reptiles and snakes. I actually initially wanted to do something with snakes because I am a big fan of some artists on instagram that do insane art with snakes. (e.g  @christinamrozikart).

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I think snakes are a fun, organic way to make letters, and I was into the idea of making a cursive font in the midst of all the other blockish fonts I was visualising. Herpetologist’s diagrams are also often pictured on sepia-type backgrounds – a kind of vintage scientist vibe that I wanted to capture.

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Architects work with blueprints. I like the look of a strictly white and blue colourscheme, with all the little lines and details in places that outline a building. I looked at a few blueprints (like the ones below) to give me some reference for my own piece.

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My Work, Project

4D II Project 1 – Alter Ego

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VIDEO

 

STORY LINE

The storyline of this film follows through the interview of a girl some people could describe as pathetic. Coming to a therapist to discuss her problem with mediocrity, the girl – who remains unnamed – talks about why she’s come in the first place. Outlining roughly the thoughts that go through her mind about her place in the world, we come to realise that she is someone who is characterised by a sort of ‘empty’ ambition. Immortality, fame, all the rest is what she wants. She wants to be the best, to be legendary.

However, she looks at everyone as someone or having something to be envious about. Making comparisons to piano players and painters, we don’t see any focus to her speech except wanting to be great. But she herself doesn’t know why she’s so envious of everyone. As a person, her character is one that is slightly paradoxical. Great ambition but without great aim, she wanders aimlessly in a mental wasteland of her wants – without any plan of action. Concluding with the very thing that plagues her, she ends with the futile realisation that no therapist can help her problem with mediocrity.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT/RESEARCH

Starting with the character of Antonio Salieri from Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, my research took me into not just visual composition, but the composition of time. The film is directed by Miloš Forman.

The film/play is directed as a ‘flashback’. That is, Antonio Salieri is the narrator, telling his own story from first person as the play/film cuts to scenes that relate to what he is saying. I wanted to do the same for my project, so I made the overlying narrative one that is a dialogue between me and a therapist – the character I’m playing has a problem with mediocrity (which is Salieri’s main gripe with life).

I had to look at stills of the film to see what kind of visual composition would work for me (see below) and I decided on the typical ‘interview–interviewee’ scene. But this would be overlaid with cutaways to different scenes (randomly chosen) to show the confusion that exists in the character’s mind. As a result, the film itself has thoughts and sequences that are slightly convoluted.

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My cutaway scenes have a focus on nature (and the world around you) to show contrast with the character’s insistent focus on herself and her own mind.

The above idea (about the odd structured randomness of my project) came from my professor after consulting with her about my idea. The cutaway sequences were initially going to follow what I was saying – illustrating the script (which can be seen below under storyboarding). However, her idea was to make it more interesting by being slightly confusing as well; the script and the filming are simultaneous and parallel in their characteristics. In that way, the film itself can also become a supporting entity for the character that I am acting out.

Challenges included trying to write a script that accurately incorporated Salieri’s traits, as well as organising the cutaway scenes to nonsensically ‘make sense’, if you will.

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STORYBOARD

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RESEARCH AND EXPLORATION

TASK 1 – List 5 characters from literature/fiction which whom you have a special affinity.

Ashitaka (Princess Mononoke)

Salieri (Amadeus)

Howl (Howl’s Moving Castle)

Azula (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Aomame (1Q84)

TASK 2 – List 5 public figures.

Hayao Miyazaki

Alexander the Great

Jesus Christ

Wes Anderson

Haruki Murakami

TASK 3 – List 5 people you know or have known.

Ashley

Crystal

Theresa

Yuta

James

TASK 4 – Take two from each list and write a brief description of what qualities each person represents and what dilemma seems to typify them. Explain why I have an affinity to these characters. 

Ashitaka

His dilemma is the fatal curse he’s been inflicted with, yet he represents the will to keep on living (a difficult trait to persevere with). Ashitaka’s purity in his desire to celebrate the life that exists on the earth is something raw and beautiful.

Salieri

Salieri’s dilemma is the uprising of the young and talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (rivalry and threat) and he represents the very raw, very human anger, jealousy, and insincerity when it comes to matters of the self. Selfishness is what connects me to him.

Hayao Miyazaki

Miyazaki’s dilemma exists in the meaning to his works and the meaning to his life – which, ironically, he’s resigned to letting it flow as it may. I have an affinity to this great director because of his acceptance of the incidences of living.

Alexander the Great

His raw, powerful and roaring ambition of the ancient world. To be great and to be known, I want to experience the same successes, to achieve the same potency in history. Alexander’s hunger is what connects me to him.

TASK 5 – I have chosen Salieri. First person. 

In class, we were made to do an exercise where we wrote  a letter from the point of view (POV) of our character. In hindsight, we could also easily use this as a form of expository narrative for our video. The script for my letter is below:

God, 

I often wonder at the incidences of Your hand. Though the passing  of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is in the past, I am plagued. Was I not your instrument? Did you not come to me as a child, with my promise to devote my life, my music my work to you?  

…

To be stuck, rotting and rolling in this living corpse of flesh is agony, to listen to the timelessness of a man I disposed of; God, You truly have dealt Your best hand. I accept my fate. I will expire when your sentence has been complete. Yet, I pray You remember this – I will still exist as another god. Mediocrity is a passing bloodline, no matter how tragic. 

– Antonio Salieri

The letter, in effect, needed to be understood in the context of Amadeus. But as this project is entitled “Alter Ego”, I will not be acting as Salieri, but have some of his traits be part of my character. Analysing the traits of Antonio Salieri gave me these characteristics:

  • Selfish
  • Competitive
  • Self-centered
  • Manipulative/plotting
  • Pathetic (often self-pitying)

 

Assignment 3

Foundation 4D Project 3: ‘disregard’s’ finale

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disreposter

After filming, editing, and lots and lots of eating, here is my final film, entitled ‘disregard’.

I used iMovie to execute the editing and focused on keeping it simple, to let the meaning of my film filter through clearly (leaving a certain type of ‘clear’ ambiguity, I suppose).

My 50 word narrative is below, just like it was before:

‘disregard’ follows the behaviour of humans while they eat and relate it to the concept of desiring experiences. What do people think of when they eat? Do they get irritated when they’re bothered? Perhaps they insist on solely living in the moment, disregarding and blocking out any intrusions. Yet, they do not realise what happens to the food they enjoyed in the moment – forgetting what time brings to the indulgence. Food washes away, and so does experience.

Ironically, every time I wanted to stage a film time with the people in the film, they got irritated, saying things like “why do I have to do this now while I eat” as well as “now I feel self conscious.” I think that the process of making people star in my film while they eat and seeing their reactions for myself gives the entire process a much deeper understanding between me and my own work.

4D was a very rewarding course in terms of teaching me about personal storytelling. I was given the opportunity to explore different ideas and the process of developing a story myself, from thinking to executing and to documenting the journey.

Assignment 3, Research

4D Proj. 3: Progress report

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I have updated an improved version of my film: Disregard.

As I continued editing my 4D project 3, my main concern was about how to sequence the clips between people eating (being extremely engrossed in their food) and clips of the after math, whether it was fish bones on a tissue, empty bowls, cutlery being washed, or food being thrown away. I think, for my idea, it made the most sense to sequence them interchangeably.

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screenshot of my film sequencing in iMovie

I was debating between staging a scenario where a person would continuously get annoyed at me (the photographer/interviewer) as they ate, showing how people don’t really register much or care for what happens around them as they eat.

However, I quickly began to realise that a video consisting just of people getting irritated would be rather bland. While I was filming, I then thought of the idea of just making that irritation a small part (still significant), but also combined with the narrative of the viewer themselves experiencing the feeling of eating food (either eating at home, in a hawker, etc) but then thrown in with scenes that will quickly remind you that the food will disappear afterwards, just like our own memories and experiences.

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Assignment 3, Research

Foundation 4D Proj. 3: ‘DISREGARD’ process

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These words outline the main idea for my film:

This will follow the behaviour of humans while they eat and relate it to the concept of desiring experiences. What do people think of when they eat? Do they get irritated when they’re bothered? Perhaps they insist on solely, themselves, living in the moment, disregarding and blocking out the intrusions. Yet, they do not realise what happens to the food they enjoyed in the moment – forgetting what time brings to the indulgence.

I wanted to focus on people eating, so at first I filmed people at hawkers as I walked past, and just people eating in general.

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But since I wanted to include what happened to food after the indulgence and after the consummation, I needed to grow mould. Or at least, show  what happens to food in the events afterwards (ones that we don’t give much thought to).

I intended to use food moulding (like my Project 2) but to do that, I would need to use found videos as I do not possess the right cameras or resources to be able to do such a long timelapse – over a couple of days – for food to mould.

So, I had to think of an alternative to growing mould – I think the process of washing food off of dishes and throwing it into waste bins is similar.