The Archive of Archive - Welcome Week Part 1 - Scheduled Content

As a latecomer to the enterprise scheme, I was a little nervous about welcome week. Would everyone be super-duper neat and polished businesspeople with years of experience behind their backs? Would everyone be wearing suits? Would there be lunch provided? Lots of scary questions. But in the end it turned out fairly nicely. Rather than breaking down the week chronologically, I'll instead talk about the distinct sections. It's easier to remember and record things that way.

The biggest chunk of the scheduled week was spent with the instructors discussing how the year would work. It was broken into a series of shorter talks (assumedly because most of the chairs in the corner were pretty uncomfortable) about the various elements of the scheme. Whilst filled with useful information about the year and beyond, there's not a whole heap to report on here as everyone's experience would be the same pretty much, except perhaps the lucky people who got the comfy seats.

A couple of these talks featured guest speakers from previous EPY businesses. These were seriously useful and gave a proper insight into what would be coming, in a slightly more informal and memorable manner. They discussed scary topics like the fragility of partnerships but also talked about sillier things like making strange flavours of vodka. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards we also got the chance to talk with Ink, another graphic design and animation company from last year, who offered us a huge heap of incredibly useful advice. Like seriously, thanks guys. You're the best. 

Plus we got to try a little bit of the fancy alcohol.

In the slightly more unusual end of things, we did a visit to a local pipe-cleaner factory. The only one in Britain apparently. Admittedly not what I was expecting to be doing this week. On the plus side, the factory was a fairly interesting place. Sadly we didn't learn a huge amount from the talking that happened along the way as we were all wearing earplugs. It was hard to make things out. After the tour we were told all about the many uses of pipecleaners, and continued the week's unofficial theme of businesses evolving over time. It was interesting. But perhaps the most interesting stuff was to be found by just looking around the factory. It was full of interesting stuff. In particular the martial arts classes upstairs were an unusual thing for a factory to have. But the most memorable part of the entire trip was seeing the board of people who had worked at the factory for 'forty years of unbroken service' to the factory. That stirred up a lot of strange feelings in me. It's both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I didn't even know that was possible.

A couple of days later, Mr. Pipecleaner returned for a mini-project where we had to come up with new uses for pipecleaners. It was...interesting. As an idea presentation session it hit all the right notes. Everyone worked hard and the presentations were well arranged and strong. But my main problem lay with the pipecleaners themselves. Despite a few cool ideas, the brief just felt like it was dead before it arrived. Pipecleaners are just too limiting. Almost every winning idea could be summed up as 'cleaning something different'. Admittedly it's hard to come up with extra uses for pipecleaners (so massive kudos to Team Sex Toy in that regard), but I feel the more unusual ideas should have had more credit than simply 'clean some things'. 

Preceding that was a pair of workshops about organisation and creativity. The former was the better of the two, and whilst it flirted with many ideas I'd come across before, it managed to throw a couple of brand new ones into the mixing pot that I'd never heard of before. I'll definetely be using some of those in the years to come. Following that was the far weaker creativity one. Admittedly creativity is a hard topic to work around but I don't feel it managed to explore very much useful stuff at all. The main positives to be gleaned were the 'everyone can be creative' beats from the beginning as that's an important one to remember, as well as a couple of brief points about idea generation before the workshop wandered off elsewhere.

As for the rest, we had a few smaller exercises mostly based around getting to know one another. Pretty simple stuff but incredibly useful at the same time.

To wrap up the scheduled welcome week discussion, I have to say I did enjoy it. It was certainly an information-heavy affair, but that's hard to avoid. My main advice for next week would be to spread it over three days and have slightly longer days with a couple of the less useful workshops cut out. I feel by the end of the week most of us just wanted to get on with it. But all in all, rather good.

Designed By Archive

For the first half of the 2016-2017 university year, I have been creating work on my placement year as part of Designed By Archive, an animation company comprised of myself, Beth Brewster, and Merry Eady. We stuck at it for the first term, admittedly with some high points and low points, but we did alright. However, as the January term began, tensions began to rise within the group. I'd been doing a few projects on the side, and been enjoying those far more than Archive, and enjoyed the lack of restraint that comes from working by myself. Meanwhile Beth and Merry had found that their personalities and mine were clashing a bit too much for their tastes, and they wanted me to take a step back.

So for the time being I'm working for Archive for two days a week, and working for myself for the rest of the time. Depending on how things go, this'll probably change, but for now, this is how it works.

The next few posts will be excerpts from the original blog I set up for my time at Designed By Archive. After that will likely be some posts detailing the work I completed from the Designed By Archive blog. And from there on out, it'll probably be all about the work I'm doing by myself. See you on the other side!

Colouring the Arm

Despite having finished the complete robot print a while back and having displayed it in the Collide exhibition, I still wasn't quite happy with the finished picture. Something wasn't quite right. It took me a long time to come to terms with it.

I think I was expecting the picture to be a big joining of lots of different shapes, colours, and styles, like a pile of dirty laundry. But it wasn't quite looking like that. It took me a while to realise it, but instead of being a mash-up of different parts, it's instead become interesting for a totally different way. Apart from one limb, he's an incredibly cohesive bot. It took me so long to realise what needed to be done to make it work. It just needed the detail fineliner arm to fit in more.

I'm no stranger to colouring my robot artwork. Initially all of my drawings were coloured, mostly in pencil crayon. But starting with A Certain Romance, this stopped being the norm, and I  stuck with black and white art and focused on the detail. I've since had a few attempts at colouring my art, using the the gradiented technique I used on the first batch of New Captain Cool art. I had a little success with that but I never felt like it fitted my style. When I did the batch of Citybots that accompanied Bigger Chris, I had to find a technique that would do them justice. I decided to dial things back a bit. I set up a really limited colour palette of shades of brown with some greys and reds. There were about seven colours in all. I then used these as block colours, observing lighting and shading but also adding details and embelishing in the other colours. This worked well.

I had no doubts about using that technique for this arm. The usual robot colour scheme had partially inspired the colours of this bot, and I already had the vector arm to give me a colour guide. This made things fairly simple. I gave the robot a quick coverage of the basic colours of the other arm, adjusting for the new shading layout. Afterwards I used the more minor colours to add detail to the arm, simply by adding colour to individual sections across the robot. I then repeated this with the other detail colours. I took note of the area colours as well with this. The brown area mostly uses the beige detail colours whilst the dark green sections make far more use of the blues. It helps to keep the sections distinct. To finish I used the magic wand tool to clean up the edges, then re-added it to the C4D model. I also had the chance to make a few stylistic tweaks, making the arm slightly bigger as well as the head so it fitted onto the pipes on the torso. I then rendered it out at 800 dpi to account for the broken camera of the C4D file. For the finished robot I had to flip the image (as C4D flips it back) and I also increased the brightness as it looks too dark when the colours are combined with the high-density detailing. I prefer the dark one for the limb on it's own though. I feel it's a little more characterful.

Now the arm's been coloured the picture works so much better. It's got a symetrical colour layout and the only B&W parts are the waist and thighs. I'm proud of this one.

Changes (Lecture Greatest Hits & Discussion)

Another thing I enjoy about Allison's lectures is the way they detail the art world as it changes. She does a really excellent job of painting the transitions between movements and how one movements shifts into another. It's also fascinating hearing how much the movements can borrow from each other whilst seemingly want nothing to do with their predecessors. It's sometimes quite amusing.

It's also been a nice way of ushering in the change in my work. My style has shifted all over the place, and there was a time I'd be worried about that. About losing my current style altogether. But as time's gone on I've stopped thinking of this as a negative. I mean sure my style changes. My method of drawing people is completely different from this time last year. Even my robot drawing style has shifted into completely new territory and I'm so happy about all of these. It's taught me that change is necessary and should be appreciated.

It's also made me think about what I would like to change about other things, including the course. And as (I'm really hoping) this will be read by tutors this feels like a good place to say some of these things.

The biggest gripe I've not mentioned here so far is my concerns with the grade weighting of the course. Not to sound patronising or rude, but it looks at the moment like they picked three focuses and gave them all equal gradings without too much thought about the work that goes in. I'll elaborate a little. For our studio we're expected to work for around eight hours on a tuesday. Tracy has also expressed that she wants us working about twice that again at home over the week. The equates to somewhere in the region of twenty hours on studio work in a week. 

By contrast, we spend a scheduled four hours a week on production, with the expectation to fill a couple more with expanded studies. Even by doubling the production time, this gives us a number of eight hours. Something's feeling a little bit off here. This figures also reflected in the attention tutors place on our studio projects. There's nary a mention of production from any of our tutors all year. It's reflected as a really small part of our year. So why is it weighted the same as studio work? The part of the course we spend hundreds of hours on just to scrape a pass. It's such a strange way of working and feels somewhat unrefined and poorly thought out.

I still feel like theory deserves its place in the grading system at about the same value it is now. there's a lot of work that's thrown into that section and theory always tends to have a slightly amplified weighting due to its nature in most courses and disciplines.

So that's a lot of big talk. So what would I propose here? If the workload stays the same and I feel it should. The balance here feels quite appropriate. Admittedly I would love more production workshops but I can't see that happening in the current schedule. So I would propose a new weighting:

50% - Studio Work
20% - Production
30% - Theory

I feel this is a far more appropriate weighting of the units and is far more respectful of the workload required for the units. The studio work now carries the emphasis it should for such a huge part of our year whilst production is dropped to a far smaller part. Production is a massively useful part of this course and most of the time is the most rewarding session of the week. But I don't feel it needs to have a high weighting as it's all for our benefit. It's about learning new skills rather than creating polished outcomes. As I've mentioned in the last Discussion, it puts emphasis on the wrong things which seems to be a key flaw of this course.

Out of all of the points I have made about the course and the way it is run, this is the one I truly stand by the most as I feel that if this were addressed most of the other issues would fix themselves. As a result the context would be delivered resulting in less strain on the contextual portfolio allowing it to be delivered in the current way without as much pressure. It would even hopefully fix the weak parts of production, as those sessions would be more geared towards the method than the outcome, which is one of the key problems it faces.

To conclude, I'm aware this is a huge shift, but I feel it would greatly benefit the course and make things a lot clearer for students, and help make the aims of the production aspect of the course far clearer.

Context (Lecture Greatest Hits & Discussion)

One of my favourite parts of Allison's lectures is the way she introduces each artist and explains their backgrounds and aims in the industry. It's a really nice way of adding a whole lot of value to an artist's work. It's such an important thing when you're studying individuals, as it allows the viewer a glimpse into the context and reasoning behind pieces that might otherwise be ignored.

It's really made me think about the 'why' in all of my pieces. Where all the ideas come from, why I did things the way I did, what's to blame. It's a whole lot of really useful stuff to think about because it adds a great deal more to the projects. It's that neat connection between research and the final piece that's often overlooked.

Recently this has proved to be a huge dividing point between me and the values of this course. Recently it has begun to feel like context has been dragged apart from the work it's connected to. Whilst the contextual portfolio is still thankfully a thing, even that has begun to be dismantled from its original purpose. The first time I really noticed this was the visual appendix. Each design I made for that project was heavily based around research into other superheroes and real world outfits and cultures. I wanted each costume to be well reasoned and to have a function in the list rather than just a collection of useless lines and meaningless icons.  The word give context to the art and add so much more value to it. Needless to say I was dissapointed when I discovered the visual appendix was meant to be completely contextless. All of that reasoning, all of that background, all that inspiration. All washed away. Whilst I understand the vague reasoning here, and that the pictures are supposed to come first, the harsh word limit has only hurt peoples projects. Students now have to rely on tutors understanding their work right off the bat. As Allison has instilled on us from the start of the year, that's not how things work. That's not how art is effective.

As I understand things so far, the contextual portfolio still performs in its original function as a blog the tutors will look through, and I'm happy about that. But if that is no longer the case then something is deeply wrong at the core of this course. The presentation idea is a decent way of showcasing the core of what's going on but unless the blog is also looked at the entire notion of the contextual portfolio falls flat on its face. At this point the contextual portfolio has to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the studio work as well as its own regular function. If it's not read then it feels like a really important part of the creative process is being abandoned

To wrap this up, I feel like context is becoming increasingly

Lecture Greatest Hits: Crash

Another lecture I gained a lot from was Spencer's lecture on Crash, and about all the different covers and methods of advertising it. It was one of those strange lectures that didn't really interest me at the time but I keep coming back to the ideas from it. Every now and then I pick up on something and think 'wow that's been advertised terribly'. It's a thought I've had before but that lecture made me pick up on it a lot more often.

It was a really useful lecture in terms of opening my eyes to things. I'm a lot more critical of things like film trailers and posters doing a bad job of expressing the content of films, and sometimes advertising to the wrong kind of audiences. But it's also made me more greatful of the better advertising campaigns out there. Films like Deadpool have done an incredible job of communicating with their target audience in some really unconventional ways. On the negative side, I already scrutinise things too much and this has just added adverts and trailers onto that list. Oh well.

CV

I could've sworn I've talked about this before. No? Never mind here we go. It's time to talk about the mini-project that turned into almost as big a deal as the YCN brief.

The CV was a tough task for me. I'm not the most graphically-minded guy so putting together a set of graphics that make me not look like a cigarette in someone's perfect birthday cake was going to take a lot of effort.

My first attempt was the very obvious 'go into InDesign and try and make something' approach. It didn't get too far before I realised I actually needed an idea to make it look effective rather than just blind optimism. What I had made until then was a fairly nice-looking setup in retrospect. The orange looks really nice and the type is a long way from awful. I can imagine the round formatting being awkward later on though. I might use it for if I make a fore regular CV at some point.

So I thought for all of five seconds and decided I wanted to have it look like a machine to try and capture that robot spirit I'm known for. So I jumped back into InDesign and tried to put it together. I did quite a bit of it before deciding that this wasn't working out, and that it was going to be far too much work.

I also entertained the thought of drawing one by hand but I didn't like the idea of having such a constrained CV that I wouldn't be able to tweak much.

So in a move crazier than Spencer's lecture schedule, I decided to jump headfirst in and build a CV in Cinema 4D. Yes I'm a madman. Of course. From my perspective at the start, I wanted a CV I could easily edit that would really capture the robot spirit of my hand artwork. And I wanted to have fun making it. C4D was also a good idea in that it taught me a bit more about the software.

Somewhere along that line I forgot that Cinema 4D takes a really long time. But ignoring that, building this thing was a blast. Plus I learned a massive amount. I wouldn't have been able to make the torso nearly as good if it weren't for this.

I put together the first take based on my plans for the InDesign version. It's mostly based around a set of monitors with a ring I initially envisioned as a car speedo tracking my skill levels in each piece of software. I also added some sidebars about my history and education and such. It's a pretty simplistic build bit I like the glow effects I've used and there are some really cool ideas in there. I stuck with this design for a while too. I mean I never sent it to anyone but I still totally kept it. It was only when I was about to message people that I took another look at it that I decided it needed one more take.

For the third case I came in with a far clearer plan in mind which would economise on space far better and put the important stuff at the forefront. I also took the chance to tone down on some of the less useful information. Sadly this meant losing the really madcap camera angles but I think it's a worthy sacrifice. I was able to keep a lot of the elements I liked from the previous design. The glowy screens are back and look even better now. I've kept the awesome spotlight backdrop. But the big change was essentially basing the entire design around the speedometer idea, and placing the rest of the text inside that console. I'm so glad I did this. Other changes include separating the skill graphs into clear segments so they're easier to differentiate as well as making the skill levels more defined. The metal texture was also updated to the one from the robot torso, and I added the lighting pods from that thing as well, because sharing is caring.

The final big change that was half the reason for the update, was the incorporation of some of my actual artwork into it, which was the single biggest weakness of the last one. It did a really bad job of showcasing what I can do as an artist and I wasn't really ok with that. So now it shows my artwork in the panel where it shows which medium I'm talking about.

So to conclude, the CV process was mind-bogglingly mad but it's wound me up with a really unique looking CV and kicked my C4D skills up a notch. I'm pretty happy with this.