Bradford.

Here are a few pictures form Bradford Museum, i found the museum really interesting.

This was our group task for gaming in Bradford...

This was the task in our envelope which we got when we arrived in Bradford. Along with this we got a map and the route...

These are just a few of the images i took for my colour in the group which was red...

EXPANDED CITY.

The idea of the 'EXPANDED CITY' is to create, develop, test and evaluate an urban interaction. Our place of study would be Bradford but we tested our own 'game' in Leeds, putting together instructions for another group.

'Expanded Cinema'. Gene Young Bloods' term from 1970, was coined as a name for new forms of artistic experimentation with the language of film. The EXPANDED CITY brief extends the concept of expanded media. The city becomes a metaphor for shared space...for exchange and communication. (An exciting way of exploring Bradford). Options for creating a game were... Psycho-geography, Role Play, Transport Networks, Signs/Symbols and Time based gaming.

Ideas the group came up with...

- Mapping out a random walk in Bradford and asking a group to photograph places you wouldn't normally go to, photographing/annotating what drew you to it and why you wouldn't walk there.

Also having a tourist approach an getting people to photograph you in places.

The game my group created we named 'FETCH'.

The aim of our project is to force a group of people to explore a city (Bradford), by having to find certain items and photographing the journey along the way. they will also mark their journey and the places they found each item on a map. Finally they will make a sculpture depicting the city or their feelings about the journey with the items and pictures found.

Here is our list of items...along with a few photos we took when we did it ourselves...

After this we all had to Geotag our maps and task. Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification, to various media such as photographs, video, websites. They can consist of longitude and latitude co-ordinates but it can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.
The place names is the one that most of the groups used in order to sho where they'd been and where they'd found what photos. Geotagging is a good and fast easy way to document where you've been and look back at it.

1983 Praktica MTL3.

....This was an amazing camera to look at and marvel at how old it was. However, being very heavy, it was hard for me to carry about and to take pictures quickly. It took me a while to work out what all the buttons did as well, as well as trying to sort out the lens. Also, whilst taking the pictures on different cameras, i also used film in two of them --> Colour film in the Lomo, and Black and White film, in the Praktica. Unfortunately, me being the idiot i am, accidently wound the film round the wrong way when it had finished and consequently the light got into the camera and the photos were all pretty much ruined. I believe this says something about the progression of the worlds technology... being so used to my digital camera i was not used to putting in a film and therefore messed it up, i also found it hard to use and hated that i couldnt see the image or delete it after i had taken it. However i do think this is bad, as old cameras are beautiful, and it is quite special when you finish a film and the photos are all a suprise...  

2008 Canon Digital Ixus 85.

This camera is little and light, meaning i take it with me almost everywhere to quickly and easily capture a moment without having to set it to anything. Although this camera has also got the option to be manual and has lots of different settings to it, including a large span of zoom, image stabilisation and ISO settings.

Below are the photos and also some illustrative drawings i have begun based on the photos...

Canon SLR.

These are some images that i took with the Cannon on 'manual' taking full advantage of its range in shutter speed, ISO, RAW and lots more... this is most deffinitly not a camera to just take out with you though. Its heavy and much bigger than the little digital one that i own, the little one is good for capturing quick photos, however i feel that this camera is to be used properly focusing on our object/scene, making adjustments and then taking the picture.

Lomography...FISHEYE.

This camera was easy, light and lots of fun to use. When taking a picture from far away, the closest thing to the camera lense is the most eye catching, most clear and sharp. This is true of the fingers in the picture of my friend and his work behind him. When pictures taken up close everything is sharp and looks nice in its fisheye-circle framing, 'cool'. In my opinion fisheye cameras are best used at odd angles, the proportions of things appear to change and the closest thing looks really detailed with a vague background. Sexy! 

Technology?

For my own Exploration into the fast changing world of technology, i have decided to try and base my research and exploration around what i am interested in, which is mainly illustration and printing. I enjoy taking photos and working from them when creating images for print. I'm going to follow the way in which i work and produce my drawings that way, also looking for other artists who have a similar approach. My main exploration for this brief is to firstly compare four different cameras...

- 1983 Praktica MTL3 (self devloped in a black and whit film)

- 2008 Canon Digital Ixus 85

- Canon SLR

- Lomography camera...FISHEYE.

I will compare the pictures and the ease at which i took the pictures with, picking a a couple of best pictures from each camera i intend to see which one creates the best illustrations and then will explore printing processes, however i dont believe i will have time to actually do the printing, so i will question the printing staff about possibilities of where and how my images could finally end up...Which printing process is used the most frequently and for what kind of image. Also how many different ways illustrations can be formatted and what illustration is produced for?...constantly looking at the history and changes that illustration, photography and printing has gone through. Also the future for illustration and print? For a final piece i would like to put together a big montage of illustration, with drawings from most of the photos i've taken showing development of the type of camera used to draw from.

http://www.milktwosugars.org/

This is the link to a guy called Bobs site, who joint runs the drawing evening 'Any Which Way'.

I love the colours and quirky animation, i am hoping to produce something this way. Along with the technologies and processes i am exploring in 'The Sandpit' brief, i hoped to look into where illustrations and what format they end up in. This is an example of something they could be produced for.

Cafe Revolution 2.

Here are some pictures from the latest evening of 'Any Which Way' held at Cafe Revolution in Huddersfield. Growing ever more popular, as everyone worked it got hotter and hotter and more and more packed. I even found coloring tiring!

In the future i hope to introduce these evenings in Leeds. Tying in with my project in 'The Sanpit' brief, this is also an example of what format an illustration could finally end up as/in. This is an example of working with NO TECHNOLOGY. It's interesting to see whats different about your work when you use a computer and when you don't. Different ways technology effects you?

Final Cut.

Final Cut was introduced in 1998, with a mac and windows version. In 2003, Apple announced a program for Premiere users to trade in their discs for a free copy of Final Cut Express. FCP benefited tremendously from the relative maturity and stability of QuickTime together with the new FireWire technology as it was applied to video editing. In April 2004, version 4.5 of Final Cut Pro was introduced, and rebranded by Apple as "Final Cut Pro HD", with the release of Final Cut Pro 5.0 in May 2005. The lastest Final cut which was released in April 2007 is Final Cut Pro 6.0.
These are just a few of the films edited using final cut.

• Full Frontal (2002)
• The Ring (2002)
• Cold Mountain (2003) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing – Walter Murch)
• Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
• Open Water (film) (2003)
• Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
• The Ladykillers (2004)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
• Super Size Me (2004)
• Corpse Bride (2005)

Learning to use Final cut seemed quite easy as the software is easily accesable and easy to understand. This is an already formed animation that we took apart and learnt how to put together. I hope to produce my own...

This is the one of the earliest stop motion films. Its' Walt Disneys' Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie and was made in 1928. 

Here is an animation i found, which i think is really great, and is a good example of how illustration can be easily manipulated to produce an amazing life like piece of animation. Also watching it after the Steamboat Willie animation from 1928 really shows the comparison between what it was then and what it is now... It is the trailer for the upcoming film made by Louis hudson of Dice Productions, All Consuming Love (Man In a Cat). Coming out of a cats' ass near you! 

This is a really quick little animation i put together. Well its so awful, i wouldn't even call it an animation. but it was just me having a go and making something and making it move with my camera and using final cut...

 

Narrative Construction.

...and interaction on my mobile phone.
Putting together a narrative through 'chinese whispers', we produced separate images to communicate each sentence of the narrative, taking the pictures on a mobile phone. Then to use the technology of bluetooth to send them from the phone to the computer.
A mobile phone is a long-range, electronic device which is used for mobile voice or data communication over a network. As the mobile phone has got more popular and newer and newer phones are being invented the technology becomes greater, with the phone developing we have seen... SMS, email, packet switching for access to the internet, gaming, Bluetooth, infrared, camera with video recorder and MMS for sending and recieving photos and video, MP3 player, radio and GPS. What will they think of next...apparently mobile TV is in the pipeline, it's just finding adequate battery power to supply the tuner and perhaps digital radio?
Here are some of the photos of images we created for the narrative, both the first and second time we did the task, taken on a mobile phone. The quality is shit!...

Film.

That is the storyboard we put together using some of each of the drawings we did.

In a group of three we created a 30 second piece of action, on one of the finest pieces of technology, the video camera. The video camera is used for electronic motion picture. The earliest video cameras were those of John Logie Baird. Video cameras are used in two modes, live broadcast an example being television and also videotape, recording things. Cameras are used everywhere and for so many different reasons. Videotaping is key in society today for CCTV, and it is said now that England is recorded as the country with the most cameras watching us.

Before actually getting the shots on camera we had to each draw a story board, either close-up,longshot or extreme angles. It was important to discuss, the shooting order which we wrote down to make the filming possible, the length of each shot, point of view and also writing a short risk assesment. This consists of cautions we were to take during the filming and taking the concern of others saftey and also that of the expensive equipment we were using.

Here is our final storyboard ready for filming and also a few little annotations to help the people editing our film. 

This is the clips that we put together for another group to from their initial film idea from their storyboard.

This is our film which we put together...

The sandpit.

A new brief...
Communication Technology - Research, explore and document your relationship with communication technology.

It is Love.

Sabrina Ward Harrison.
Messy Thrilling Life.

This arrived from the USA today, and is now possibly one of the best books i own. The surfaces and illustrations/photography is amazingly put together to create subtle soft images.
LOVE