DPS YEAR BLOG
The ongoing record of my Diploma in Professional Studies...
Blog Date: EASTER!
Over this Spring holiday I have taken a step back from the day to day workings of the course, consolidated my practice and my routine and I think I am now coming back stronger than before.
This isn’t a traditional break for me, my involvement in the Bambuu incubator for SIP continues each week, requiring my attention and work while allowing me to still slow down for the holiday.
I think this has been very valuable for myself as a creative, as I definitely recognize one of my struggles this year has been self motivation, and building up a work ethic where I don’t explicitly answer to anyone. A break where meetings and short pieces of work still remain has stopped me from being so overwhelmed by potential expectations and actually going further than what is required of me. After my first tutorial for Bambuu I spent a couple hours later in the day transferring some of my 54321 sketches into Photoshop and Illustrator, teaching myself how to make vector designs out of my work. This is a piece of work that’s not specifically needed but 100% useful and I think if I were in any other situation with a time crunch involved I wouldn’t have pushed myself to learn more about these programs. Now in my free time I am continuing to develop my skills and develop a bank of assets that we can use for 54321 that otherwise we might not have, or may have been to a lower quality.
In the sessions in the incubation we have been learning more about the successful ways that brands are able to build a specific audience, cater to that audience, and how they communicate with them. I think it has given me more depth and perception when approaching the SIP. As I’ve mentioned before I want every decision to be examined and reasoned to bring us a better end product. These classes have helped me greatly develop that skill, especially compared to where I was last term, creating the prototype work for 54321.
Through a friend I was also able to bag some professional work. It is to be in the art department of a film, creating some in-world posters for the set design. The film is feature length but very independent so don’t expect my name on any blockbusters anytime soon, but it is bigger than a student film, the writer, Bobby De’Buze has a history creating short films, directing adverts etc, and has a IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12109509/) which is more than I can say for anyone else I’ve met.
The film is about a writer who is struggling to make his film his way without studio intervention, but it takes place after he has already written a trilogy of successful adventure blockbusters. My job is to design the posters for those three films.
Creating these posters months on from the ones I designed at the start of the year I think it’s fair to say my work has become a lot more refined and I find almost all stages of the development to be easier to me, including the communication with the client.
My process was first to clear sketches with the client based on the brief and find inspiration posters, which I could take inspiration from in concept, image or colour. I began the poster by blocking all the important colours on Adobe Illustrator where I can keep track of the more technical aspects of the image. After this I brought the image into a sketchbook app where I could add detail to bring the image closer to what was needed. In the second poster for example this was adding detail to the canyons and adding lineart that couldn’t be done in illustrator. After I had added sketchbook detail I would then take the image back into Illustrator to add text both above and below, and finally I’d take this image into Photoshop to add grain to the filter and final adjustments.
For most of this project I was in daily communication with the production designer of the film but after a week the existing posters were taken to the producer of the film for review and some final notes for the posters. He had me change the colours of the titles to a consistent silvery white, add more text such as the tiny text that you often see in film posters, change the look of some things like the helicopter propellers and add a second person to the poster of the second film, and add a big compass into the skyline of the first poster. As always it's good to be working with clients who help push you into areas you wouldn’t have gone before. I’m becoming more and more confident with illustrators from where I was this time last year. I thought it was a complete chore and now I rely on it a lot to help me realise my ideas. Adding textures, effects and gradients to the text was one of the new things I began to do in this project, with my fair share of troubleshooting and running into technical errors.
Overall the experience was really valuable for me. I think it’s one of the only times this year I haven’t really been working around other illustrators or really people who understood how I would be creating the posters, which of course is frustrating but it also prepares you for the industry where you can be taking jobs like that all the time. I also think it shows a great development on my poster work since the start of the year, also seeing as all this was done in just around a week where I was working for so much longer on the live briefs at the start of the year.
Blog Date: 17/04/24
This term is a particularly short one, at only about a month. Even so, work has been pretty consistent for the first few weeks. I’ve discussed working for Taureau Films and designing their posters pretty heavily in the last blog post, which overlaps with the time this week. Filming began on the 12th of April and I was working pretty consistently until that date. I now have pictures of the posters printed out.
Other than that Fred and I have continued our work on 54321 assisted by the Bambuu incubator scheme. Recently we have been in sessions that provoke us to think about our audience, how we talk to that audience and how we develop a relationship with that audience. This has been really eye-opening for me as it gives much more depth to the project with another lens we can view our project through.
One key event I think we’ve gone through in this period has been the struggle to pin down our first interview with Harry “Hartex” Sims. For about the last week or two we have been in contact with him looking for a date for the meeting, a couple times it has happened that we found a date but then with very short notice he cancelled, usually with pretty reasonable excuses. Obviously there’s no point getting upset or angry about this, it’s out of our hands and we can’t control it, but I have been getting a little frustrated in the lead up to tutorials where in the last one I expected to be coming back in the next week with an interview done. This week in the library after another one of these cancellations Fred and I decided to look back on what we had for him and looked to see if we could prepare any further for our interview with him, this lead to a great afternoon of polishing what we had prepared for him and furthering our concept for his nightmare scenario that it really bolstered our excitement for the interview and the production of the magazine itself.
For context, previously we were planning to develop the nightmare scenario with our interviewee, live on the spot during our interview, but due to the set back in time and reconsidering what would lead us to the best outcome we reconsidered and created the nightmare scenario beforehand.
First it started with theorising over his fears to do with his shop, flooding or infestations, then we brought this to the next level by combining his love of snooker with his fear of spiders, creating a scenario that I truly believe Fred and I could have only come up with together through our dynamic of bouncing ideas off each other. Harry’s nightmare scenario became being shrunk down alongside his shop to live on a pool table, where we envisioned an undercity populated by seedy and dangerous, or arrogant and irritating spider customers for him to live out the rest of his life among. I did quite a few sketches that day and it has really reinvigorated my passion in the project, this is what I have always wanted it to be and based of all the conversations with our incubator tutors about developing our unique selling points and identities, I really think we are that much closer to concentrating something mad and great from me and Fred’s brains.
Alongside this we have reached out to an artist, Cian Jay for another interview which we can schedule for our second magazine. The organisational setback with the Hartex interview I think has absolutely led us to go back and reconsider our process and refine it into something significantly better.