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Manchester, United Kingdom
BA(Hons)Interactive Arts Student. Manchester Metropolitan University.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

The 1st Solo Project - "Food"

Week begining 12/10/2009 and we have been given a brief for our first solo project..........well kind of.

Due to an evacuation of our campus and then being sent home after the building was closed down, the morning briefing was quite short, however we left knowing that the umberella theme for the project was "food" and we were asked to keep food diary, detailing everything that we ate and drank.

An afternoon of brainstorming prooved one thing........this could very well shoot of in any direction. It doesn't take very long at all to find yourself a long way from food itself and generating ideas around an action or a  process or an object associated in some way to it.

Where to begin??

Thursday 15/10/09

I found myself in the studio with very few resources apart from a pole of supermarket adverts and fast food leaflets that I had brought with me.

I had already put down a couple of ideas in my sketchbook, based on my earlier brainstorming. These were based around "building blocks" - food being mad eup of combinations of proteins; minerals, vitamins etc....the things that make them whar they are. I then started toying with the idea of food being made out of actual blocks and then using food to build things with.

I had no food with me that day but I did have the leaflets and quickly mad one into a  humanoid figure:



I took numerous photo's of the figure and created a small flick book from these, which then gave me the idea for a short film/ animation. I love animated films, anything from Aardman or Tim Burton but I also love the work of Jan Svankmajer (Dimensions of Dialogue etc) and the The Brothers Quay (Street of Crocodiles etc).

 I set about sketching a few ideas out and came up with a rough storey board and then I just had to wait until I could get the filming done.

Sunday 18/10/09
With a space cleared and a willng volunteer (my wife), I set up my camera (Fujifilm FinePix S5700 7.1 mp) in my kitchen and set about creating my first animated masterpiece (well kind of).

It took a little over 30 mins to film a total of 55 individual video segments,(this was due to every time I pressed pause it ended the video), not bad for the first ever attempt at an animation, but still alot of work to do as far as editing and the the auto focus on my camera has caused more than few issues, but  as they say....you live and learn.

The next stage was to splice all the segments together, digitaly that is and the only software I had available was what came installed on my laptop. That being said it was great fun playing around and splitting filmed segments into multiple frames and then deleting the unwanted bits. The audio element of this project was a completely diffrent story, I would have to go and ask around about this and learn a few things about exceptable sound file formats so that I could import what I needed.

Saturday 31/10/09

After sketching and experimenting with photographs on this project I thought I'd have a go at some computer graphics and so turned to "Google sketch up" to see what ideas I could generate. I based this work around a sketch I had already done under the title of  "Dangerous Fruit". The idea was to take a normal fruit , in this case an orange and add an contrasting element and something metalic and sharp came to mind. After all we use things that are metalic and sharp to eat our food, why not play around with a bit of morphing!


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