CONTENTS

‘This is me’ Video 1-2

Dogme 95/Five Obstructions 3-4

Artist Research - Hamish Fulton 5-6

Early Experiments and Exploration 7-10

‘Night Walker’ Video 11-12

Light Painting Photography - Motion writing 13-14

Light Painting Photography - Bowl Riding 15-16

Push Away Flipbook 17-18

Info Graphics - Revs 19-20

Four Days, Four Journies 21-24

Daylight Journey 25-26

Weather Journey 27-28

Evaluation & FMP Proposal 29

Bibliography & Special Thanks 30

VIDEO - THIS IS ME

This was my first piece of work for the semester. I was excited to get a chance to experiment both with video editing and high quality video equipment. I enjoyed being able to create shots I hadn’t before, epecially with things such as shifting focus. The editing was modest - most of the style I wanted to create was within the camera work. The video’s contents speaks volumes about who I am, both in myself and as a designer. I like sleek, clean design, but also the more rough, handmade design. The video is very personal, and shows things I find inspiring for design, and not just the design itself. The things I do in my every day are my inspirations.

When I travel around, especially via skateboard, I am inspired by so many things, even the journey itself. Each shot shows something I feel is integral to who I am. My favourite shot was probably the one with the ‘94’ MTN paint can and the photographs and ring. Each object holds something close to my heart. 1

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VIDEO - FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS

For the Dogme 95/Five obstructions brief, I felt quite lost for a long time. I spent a lot of time thinking of what I could do to portray a similar message to my video for the first brief. I spent a long time hung up on how not to break the rules, which I initially struggled with.

I had always known that the outside world, the small details, the journies and many other aspects of everyday life were inspiring to me. I picked up my camera, and went on a journey around London, for no other reason than to take in my surroundings and document my inspirations.

I was determined not to break any of the rules. I spent a few days collecting footage from various journies, each one containing something that inspired me; whether it was small and overlooked, or big and proud. I broke no rules, and I felt the unedited sound added some charm to the video. My full write up can be found on my Blog: Click here for the full post 3

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RESEARCH - HAMISH FULTON

These are some examples of Hamish Fulton’s work that I have found inspiring. Hamish Fulton, born in London in 1946, refers to himself as a ‘Walking Artist’. His work is largely related to walking and the environment around him on these walks.

Hamish Fulton’s work is often created digitally from what I have seen, and has a strong, unique style. He tends to work on a very large scale with a lot of his pieces, often creating design that is displayed on whole walls. I find a lot of his work inspiring; one of the main

reasons for this is his strong use of typography. He mixes all sizes of type together in one image, bringing emphesis to certain parts. I particularly like how some of his work is made up entirely out of type, but still creating an image through this.

RESEARCH - HAMISH FULTON

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Another thing I like about his work is his use of colour. He uses a variety of colour, which usually seem relate to the journey or walk. Some of his work has a softer feel, whereas some other pieces are bold stand out. Another thing I find inspiring in his work is his simplicity. Hamish Fulton’s work is essentially

informaton graphics - A lot of his work shows a ‘map’ style path of the journey, some information about the location, surroundings and the walk itself. He uses a simplistic style, which is clean, smooth and has a very strong, well executed out layout. He also mixes type and photography in some of his work.

Something that really appeals to me about his work however is that his ‘information graphics’ have a unique feel. They’re not graphs or charts, they’re works of art, brilliant examples of design, but serving an informative purpose as well. The simplicity of his work is really inspiring to me, and it’s

something I would like to incorporate into my project. The way that his work is so simple, yet the journey that’s depicted was more than likely very long and tough, is something I also find really interesting. He’s effectively summarised his journies in a way that almost

disconnets them from their true scale, representing them in a simple way. I was particularly drawn to some of his pieces from his walks in Japan, featuring some Japanese type. I think his use of foreign type shows hispassion for, and the importance of, his

location and surroundings. In my project, based on journies and movement, his work has provided me with a lot of inspiration as it holds such a close link to my chosen subject. It’s also helped inspire me with style and use of information graphics.

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EXPERIMENTS

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I couldn’t help but feel a bit lost as to where to start with my project. I wanted to create a portfolio based on journies, movement and inspiration; the idea coming from my first 2 videos.

This spread shows a typographic image I created. I wanted to start off with something along the lines of a manifesto. Rather than instructions, this was to outline a part of my study. I have always felt that sometimes the journey is the inspiration, even if there’s nothing much at either end of it. The things you see a long the way are worth looking at.

I experimented with putting image inside the type. All the images used are from my Dogme 95/Obstructions video. The first two images used below show things I saw whilst skating. The image used in the type on the right page is of the sky. I felt that the sky was a good signifier of inspiration and freedom, making it a perfect image to use.

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EXPERIMENTS

This page shows some ideas I tried out for some early experiments. The images below were taken on my iPhone whilst out and about. I wanted to take photos to show the ordinary, but to try and show that the ordinary has more to it than people may think. I took photos of things that took my interest - I have always imaged the story behind things I see while I’m out and about, and I wanted to see if I could show that in the simplest way possible.

The photos were filtered with an App called ‘Instrgram’ - an application that allows you to filter photos with old, vintage style effects. This immideately gave the photos a new, interesting look, giving them a new feature to provoke thought - regardless of whether it was of the photo’s contents or it’s style, I wanted it to spark thought, even though the images were of relatively everyday sights. I really like how they tell a story to me, and hopefully to others as well.

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This page shows some expierments I did using some images from my Dogme 95/Obstructions brief again. I had an idea, vaguely inspired by Hamish Fulton, to show my journey, but with a path to show how I got there. Each shot was in London, so I traced my journey, and translated it into a simple graphical path. Each part of the path shows the tube line I took to get to where the shot was. Each part of the journey shows a ‘stage’ - Embark, Explore and Inspire; three things vital for me when on a journey of inspiration. These were rough, early ideas, but I quite liked the style and subject, and they gave me ideas to use further into my project. I found just getting out and experimenting and trying things really helped me build ideas. Action research definitely helped get me going.

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LIGHT PAINTING - NIGHT WALKER

At this stage in my project, I started gaining more interest in long exposure photography. My original thoughts and interest in it came down to how the long exposure can capture a light ‘path’ in a single still frame, showing a journey.

I had an idea of mixing long exposure photography and animation together. I wanted to animate a person walking, with only the light path to show the figure. For this, I needed one person as a figure, one for the camera, and one to ‘draw’ around the person in each shot. I set up the camera using test shots, and then drew around a friend in each position with a torch on a 25 second exposure. Each shot was then taken with the pre-sets I had made. The process was very long, even for such a short animation. There were problems during the shots such as breath condensation interfering with the light, but we got around it. In the end I was pleased with the result, but the animation was slightly more ‘jumpy’ than I would have liked. I also liked how the stills look when they’re together.

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LIGHT PAINTING - MOTION WRITING

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As with the previous pages, my interest in long exposure photography led me to create many experiments. This was one of the experiments I enjoyed a lot. Using the same light path technique us-ing a torch, I wanted to try showing my path to make type. This was a simple idea, that was actually more difficult than I imaged. Each word was done seperately, but I started and ended each word with lines so I could join them together. Each word took a lot of attempts, and it comes out backwards on the camera, so it’s very hard to make sure you get it right.

When I went through the photos and selected the best ones, I edited them together to make this spread, which I think has a nice, simple feel, showing my hand’s journey with the torch to create the words. Having enjoyed the style so much, there was still more that I wanted to explore with it.

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LIGHT PAINTING - BOWL RIDING

This was probably one of my favourite pieces of work. After experimenting with long exposure, I thought of trying to show my path while skateboarding round a bowl. I was really excited to try it out, but there was a lot of preperation involved before we could start.After finding a suitable bowl in Sutton, I bought 2 LED torches and attached them to my skateboard. We had to shoot it late at night so it was empty.

After being called off 3 times because of rain, one cold night we were able to go ahead. I had to clean the bowl out before starting. We set up the camera using test shots and used a 20 second exposure. In this time, I skated around the bowl to create a path, which was more difficult than I though, due to it being almost pitch black, and nothing but the torches on my board to guide me. We did the shot about 20 times to make sure we could get a good path.

Looking at the photos afterwards, not only did the paths come out fantastic, but the board also created shadows and shapes itself. The leaves and puddles also added great detail to the photos. I picked out some detail shots for this page as well as the best shot for the left page. I was really happy with how this idea came out, and I thought the photos showed a truely unique visual path of my journey on my skateboard.

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‘PUSH AWAY’ FLIPBOOK

This flipbook idea was something I wanted to experiment with in my project in terms of both medium and concept.

I hadn’t worked with book binding much since early on in university, and wanted to try it out. reused some footage from my ‘This is me’ video I made for the first brief of me skating. I wanted the mixture of the flipping and the skating to reflect movement. I went back into my old sketchbooks and looked into book binding - for this idea, I wanted to use the ‘perfect book binding’ technique.

I took screenshots of the video at about 10 frames a second, and arranged it onto 2 A3 sheets and cut each page down and bound it. I had to create a slight taper on the pages to make the ‘flipping’ easier and less clumpy.

In the end, instead of recording the flipping in real time, I decided to shoot it stop frame. This guaranteed every page was seen. It was very tricky to shoot, and I think the animation shows this with a bit too much movement, but I was still happy with the result.

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INFO GRAPHICS - REVS

After looking into paths and patterns in journies, I came to this. This is an info graphic, showing the results of the revs (RPM) a car was doing at ten second intervals. We used a quiet bit of road in Farleigh to ensure we wouldn’t just be getting 900rpm readings from sitting in traffic. At every 10 seconds, for 2 minutes, I recorded the car’s revs.

I wanted to display the results in a clean, simple, but effective way. I created a simplistic graph style info graphic, but instead of using bars, I made the numbers into different sizes and lightnesses of blue to show the amount of revs - dark blue and small being low, strong blue and large being higher. I also used another path vector to show the curve of the change over each 10 seconds, and averaged it out to create the ‘peaks’ style. My main aim was to create a functional, yet attractive info graphic, and this being my second version, I was pleased and wanted to explore the use of info graphics more.

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FOUR DAYS, FOUR JOURNIES

This spread and the next spread show my visual designs of my journies over four days. I wanted to create these after being partly inspired by Hamish Fulton’s work, and after working with info graphics.

This first piece shows my journey around London in a single day. The day was busy and hectic, but I liked how I could detatch all that from the journey and display it in a cool, calm way.

I recorded data from my journey in a notebook, which is displayed in the bottom left. When I created my path, showing only the parts of the tube map that I used further simplified my hectic day in terms of this visual. I reworked this image to match the others after a suggestion to create a series. I wanted to create a clean design, mixing basic shapes, paths and typography, which I feel worked quite well. This was a large scale journey piece.

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This is the second of the series. This was a journey to university via car. Again, I recorded data from the journey in my notebook and displayed it within the image. Due to traffic and other issues, this journey is never the same, so I thought documenting the time at certain points throughout the journey would be a good idea. I put these times at the relevant places on the path. This is another journey that is usually hectic, but the simple design completely transforms it. This was another large scale journey piece.

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FOUR DAYS, FOUR JOURNIES

This is the third of my journey series. This one was slightly different, as it was based off of a much smaller journey. The idea behind this was to document and visualise my journey within my flat in the morning before leaving.

I used the same style and technique for the path and overall design, but I recorded the data slightly differently. At each destination, I labelled it with what was there, and then numbered them in the bottom right so that they can be followed on the path.

I used colours that I thought helped show the ‘soft’ feeling of morning af-ter getting up. This was a small scale journey piece.

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This was the final of the four journies pieces. This is another small scale journey, and I used the same style and format as the first 2. This one was my shopping journey. This involved drawing out the shop’s layout and recording all the date in my notebook again. I really liked the ‘set’ layout of this one, showing a place where only a certain path can be taken. I used the colours I associated with spending money in this piece - red.

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DAYLIGHT JOURNEY

After having created a few information graphics, I was interested to try something with typography. After feedback on previous work, I was given an idea of trying to record data such as daylight and weather. Instead of using exact times of the day, I decided to use actions instead. I created a grid for my day, and arranged all of the actions into it using different font sizes. When I recorded my data throughout the day, I recorded how light it was outside at the time of the action. Now that the text was in place, I used a gradient to show the approximate amount of light at each action. I used colours to symbolise day and night: light yellow for day, and dark blue for night. I also added in vector shapes of the sun and moon to show when the sun came up, and when the sun went down, to give an indication of when day and night started fully. I wanted to arrange the type into quite a tight grid to show how busy the day was. I don’t usually stop much during the day, and I wanted this to show in this piece, as well as showing daylight information. I was happy with the overall appearence and function of this piece, and I liked how the colours worked to show the information. I hadn’t used type much before to show information graphically, so I was pleased to be able to with this. I also liked how this piece told a story of my journey throughout the day in an unusual way.

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WEATHER JOURNEY

Further work from my feedback encouraged me to create this piece. This works as an information graphic again, but shows multiple things. I wanted to create something to record weather, but with other details too. I took my notebook with me again, and recorded my journey around London. Starting from 9am, I recorded my

location, the time and the weather. The journey starts and ends at my home in Croydon, making this a large scale journey.With the data I collected, I created a collection of symbols to show the weather at each 2 hour interval; sun with clouds, cloudy, rainy, and a version of each with a moon for the evening.

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I also used the London tube map and google maps inside the time digits to show my location at that time, as well as including the name of the location in the first digit of each time. I liked this idea, and thought it could probably be made into an app, which is something I may look into in my FMP. Even though this piece does include

information of location, my main aim was to show weather information in a clear, appealing way, using simple icons alongside other information. This gave me a chance to again work with type and vectors, which is something I feel I have been improving with over this semester. I was happy with the result and feel I can build on this in my FMP.

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Throughout this semester, I feel I produced some interesting work, regardless of the problems I faced. I feel there is work for me to build on for my FMP, and that my chosen subject area still offers more to explore over the next semester. While I am reasonably pleased with my work, I feel there is more I can do; I just need to make sure I am creative and thorough. At the beginning of the semester, I found it quite difficult to get started; I knew what sort of work I wanted to produce, but I wasn’t sure how I could get the ball rolling. After a collection of experiments, I found that action research, and just getting out and about and trying new things really helped me build valuable ideas which I could then develop into work. I was really interested to get to work with video and editing at the beginning of the semester, and it’s genuinely something I have now become more interested in, and something I want to work with more in the next semester for in my Final Major Project. I found I had more incentive to work on something that I felt had a more personal feel to it, and as a result, I really enjoyed working on the video briefs. I also enjoyed working with real camera/video equipment as it allowed me to achieve much better camera work, and make my videos much higher quality. Being able to capture the everyday things that inspire me and put them into video was great, even if the Dogme 95/Obstructions brief was a bit of a struggle for me to begin with.

Working on experiments helped me find a way forward. I always find that having a sketchbook for me to work on ideas is an integral part of my project’s production. Sometimes experiments don’t work out, but it’s the ideas I take away from them that help me move forward. I felt my experiments helped me identify what sort of work I wanted to produce in the coming weeks.

After doing some camera work early on in the semester, I wanted to continue this with my interest in long exposure photography and ‘light painting’. I found that creating an image with a torch on long exposure photos to be a lot more difficult than I originally thought, but I still really

enjoyed working with it. My ‘Night Walker’ animation was an interesting experiment, and again, it’s something I feel like I want to expand on in the next semester. my favourite of the long exposure projects was definitely the skateboard bowl one. I started thinking of paths and had this idea after using torches to make paths on earlier pieces. There were a lot of issues to get around; Rain, how to attach the torches to the board, the right camera settings, working late at night to ensure it was empty and so on. After all the effort I put in, with some help from a friend, I was really pleased with the outcome, and it has definitely encouraged me to work with photography more. I think all the difficulties actually made it more pleasing when it came out well.

After this, I did a lot of work on vectors and type. The idea of documenting my journies was something I wanted to do from the beginning, but I had to make sure I did something unique. I found working with vectors very stressful at times, but it has helped me improve with programs such as Adobe illustrator. All the data recording that was needed for many of my pieces was something quite new to me, as were info graphics really. I discovered that info graphics can be interesting and visually pleasing. I found that the feedback I received to be vital to my progression with my portfolio, and the support throughout my project was greatly appreciated. I had been suffering with medical problems during this semester and past ones, which had gotten in the way of my work very often, so I had to work around it as best I could, which obviously gave me a huge issue to deal with throughout the production of my portfolio. I am hoping with further medical help (which I am receiving), I can improve more on my FMP.

I have learned a handful of new skills over this past semester, and produced work I feel will give me a head start for my FMP next semester. I was happy that I got to experiment with different mediums and techniques that I had not explored much in the past, or not at all. I had a lot of problems, both health and work related, but as stressful as it’s been, I feel that I have a way forward from here, and look forward to producing more work.

After this semester, I feel I have further identified the area I want to work on for my Final Major Project. I found working with the theme of Journies and movement to be really interesting, and I feel I want to continue this. I will more than likely change a few things and explore some other areas that can be linked to journies and movement, but those are the subject areas I really want to focus on.

After having enjoyed working with cameras and video, I would like to further explore video and photography. One thing I have become very interested in is high speed video - video that is shot at a very high frame rate so that it can be slowed down to show huge amounts of detail in movement; something I feel would be a brilliant addition to a study of movement and journies. This will involve exploring new equipment and software, but it’s something I’m very eager to look into. I want to try and also look into more software that will allow me to create interactive design.

Movement and journies can be linked together, especially with video and image. A movement captured can show a journey in itself, and the way in which certain things move can be very intruiging, sometimes beautiful.

I want to try and capture this side of movement, motion and journies that is often overlooked or missed. As well as movement on it’s own, I feel there are still areas of journies on their own that are yet to be explored in my work. As with this portfolio, sometimes I can’t forsee exactly what I will do, but I know what I want to do, and part of my FMP proposal is to further explore and create work that relates to movement and journies.

Another thing I would like to do in my FMP is create a publication. I would like to create a publication of my representation of journies and movement. Again, this is something that will require me to explore further into book binding and publications, but it’s something I’m very interested in and would like to explore if I can.

I really enjoyed long exposure photography, and I’d like to see if I can find a way to mix it with film to create a unique visual of movement.

These are all ideas I would like to explore if I can, but as I said, my first part will be further exploration. I want to feel like my FMP informs this portfolio, but also start a fresh project that stands on it’s own.

REFLECTION AND PROPOSAL

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamish Fulton research images & information: www.Hamish-Fulton.com

Hamish Fulton research images:www.accordionpublications.blogspot.com

Instagram application for photos:www.Instagr.am

Music for ‘This is me’ video (‘Kota’ by Bonobo):www.BonoboMusic.com

Music for ‘Night Walker’ video (‘Waltzin Black’ by The Stranglers):

www.Stranglers.net

Maps used in ‘Weather Journey’: www.TubeMapLondon.orgwww.Maps.Google.co.uk

SPECIAL THANKS

Slam City Skateshop, Lazy Oaf and Centre Point Food Store for allowing me to film in their stores.

www.SlamCity.comwww.LazyOaf.co.uk

www.Cpfs.co.uk

Craig Mcneice for helping me with photography when I was needed in the photos.

Vimeo for video hosting.

www.Vimeo.com

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