I felt so much pressure from this project. It was so fast paced and I wanted to produce the best work possible, which I don't think I did. I feel like everything I've done could be so much better. I think My photographs could be so much cooler. I may do a re-shoot outside the project.
I spent the last few hours before the deadline Thursday trying to finish off the presentation of my article. I was trying to find and figure out a good borders for it because in the annual Rookie prints they always have interesting and cute borders. I decided on trying to scan a border of lace ribbon. I then got very distracted because I decided to rewrite my entire article last minuet. I am glad I decided to do this because I feel like the second version is so much better.
I also spent some time drawing little illustrations that I wanted to use as decoration for my article. I drew a cup of tea, basketball, spaceship (because the title of my article is 'I am an alien', dollar bill, crown, and a few other things. The last thing I did right before the deadline was write a quick playlist. Rookie Mag posts playlist every Friday. In the annual publication Rookie year book they usually add a playlist with every article.
The playlist I made for my article - Image authors own
I spent the day trying to get everything together. I had to finish editing the photographs so that I could print them and cut them out. I simply just boosted the contrast a little. Then once they were printed I began thinking about collaging them onto different backgrounds and trying to make them look very Rookie Mag. I bought a bunch of very British postcards thinking they would be perfect. I wanted to print off some images of Oklahoma to use as the background but I didn't particularly want to use someone else's images. If I had more time I would of drawn or painted backgrounds for the collages.
Overall I think that the collages turned out pretty cute. They are very young and fit with the publication I chose well. However I think they could be even better if I added more on top of them, a little more detail. I could of gotten images of very American and British things to go with the backgrounds. If I have time I may do some little illustrations.
On Monday my friend was coming over to let me take photographs of her in the umbrellas and wellies. I had cut the waits band off a pair of my brothers basketball shorts, then I also clipped off the fabric part of the umbrella and cut it at the point large enough so it would fit around her waist. I then cut up another umbrella but made the hole smaller just to fit around her neck. When I first tried to get the fabric off the umbrella I made it really difficult for myself by trying to clip every wire, I wanted some to still be on the fabric to give it volume while on the model. However my abilities to do such a thing were non existent and thus I had to find a different approach, this approach turned out to be much simpler and less time consuming. I just ripped it off basically.
Detaching the wires with wire cutters
Cutting off the top to make a nice circle in the middle of the material
Ripping off the fabric from the wires
The waist band of the shorts being used for the waist band of my skirt (All images authors own)
I had timed the shoot right with the sunset, so the lighting was directly on my model which helps the photos come out a lot sharper. I did not focus to much on the background because my plan is to cut her out of the photos kind of like a paper doll. However looking back I wish I had done a photo shoot where the background and whole setting was nice so I could have a combination of nice cut outs and just photographs.
I also wish I had styled my model in more colours. The publication I chose generally is very bright, they use a lot of pastel, brighter, funner colours than the ones I used.
I was struggling with the styling section of this project. I was not entirely sure how I was gonna dress my model or show what I wanted to show and how I would make it look good.
I had a sudden thought inspired by the workshop we did using clothes we styled on the mannequins to create a new article that is far from its original purpose. I was also inspired by the collaging workshop where we had to try and be very conceptual, thinking so outside the box that the box turns in to a sphere. I was looking at different very English things and also very american things. On the english side I looked at pictures of the Queen holding umbrellas. On the american side I looked at the idea of jocks, but mainly girls wearing basketball shorts. One thing I notice when I go back to my home state of Oklahoma and America in general is that they don't dress nice. They walk around in old looking sports wear. The young girls wear basketball shorts and t-shirts everywhere. I never felt comfortable wearing my nice long floral skirts or dresses because I felt over dressed. So I want to try and combine basketball shorts and umbrellas into an article of clothing so far from being an umbrella and basketball shorts. Will I be able to do this? I don't really know but thats not going to stop me from trying. I shall keep you updated on my progress.
After receiving the brief I made loads of notes in my journal with my immediate thoughts and feelings. I have my idea for the premiss of my piece. The next step I needed to do was choose a publication. I remembered this fun, young, online publication called Rookiemag.com, I thought this would be a great piece because that online magazine publishes pieces a very pieces on a very broad range of subjects. Their target audience is young teenage girls and the website is run by young adults and teenage girls. I love that, I think it is a great place for young women and girls to come together and talk about things that matter and interest them. I know if this online magazine had been around when I was 13/14 I would of been obsessed with it (not that I'm not obsessed with it now.) I genuinely think it is the coolest thing. The contributors are all very open and expressive woman with a very pretty aesthetic. The website always looks good. It looks young and has that air of messy childhood arts and craft time, this is enhanced by all the collages and illustrations that occupy every article. It's articles, photos, and pieces are all very nostalgic and at the same time very hopefully and full of longing. This must be because it is young people writing, so there is the genuine feelings that young girls feel being expressed.
With my piece I aim to write about clothes in the perspective of a young muddled person. By that I mean I wish to express and show how being multicultural and having to different styles from two countries can effect the way we think but the main influence on the way we dress (and by we I mean those who are living in a different culture from that which they were born.)
Today we began our new project. I already knew the title of the project and premiss as I had read the brief so I walked in very excited to get started. While listening to Becca talk about the project at the beginning of the day I wrote down loads of notes and began trying to set myself a theme or come up with an idea for this project. A few words popped out to me and a few came to me.
The words...
Frankenstein
Clever
Ariel (From the little mermaid)
Aliens
Recycling
Details
During the day I made some collages and worked on the mannequin with clothes I had brought in, I tried to use them to create other garments. I must say I absolutely suck at working on the stand. It is fairly clear I am not a designer. However I did really want to give working on the stands another shot because I see the designers always working on them and coming out with these amazing looking pieces. So I stood there pinning my pieces up and was so unimpressed with my results, I think I shall stick to promotion work. I did manage to do at least one look on the stands I was reasonably okay with, I just did not think it was conceptual enough or out of the box.
As I sat on the train on my way home I was determined to come up with my idea so I could spent the evening researching and developing. For my photoshoot or film I am thinking about the idea of aliens. BUT not aliens how you are probably thinking. Aliens in other countries, so foreigners basically. I was thinking about aliens like space aliens at first and how if they came to earth and deconstructed and had to reconstruct it using only things of earth and humans things they would not know what was what and how it is supposed to be used. I thought trying to portray what they would do would be interesting. But then I began thinking about how when you go to another country you are an alien and have no idea about their culture and customs. My character would be an alien in England who begins to deconstruct the culture they brought with them and reconstruct it with the culture and customs of the English. I feel like this could become an interesting concept if I dive a little deeper. However there is always the possibility that I could change my mind tomorrow.
My next step is to research magazines and decide which one I would want to write a feature for and how I would go about doing that. I need to develop a good solid story to write about and begin that tonight and take it further tomorrow. I am excited for this project.
My goal is to push one idea till it is completely saturated.
After our group tutorial with Becca it was unanimous that we did not want to present our work in a boring way. We wanted to do something conceptual like our brand and work. The idea was to creat an experience for everyone watching. Some of the initial ideas were to just stand there with our work on slides and just be silent while it flicked through, another idea was to not accept any questions. We then thought about standing in a circle around the audience holding candles while the presentation flicked through on the screen, we all liked this idea however we couldn't use the candles as flames and smoke are a safety hazard. One of our group members was creating a head piece out of a burlap material so we decided that if he made six of them we could all where them during the presentation. This idea got everyone excited. Most of my group just thought we should do a power point and have voice over of everyone explaining their work. However I had a thought that our work was strong enough to need no explanation and Comme are not the type to explain themselves. I wrote a poem and read it to our group, they all felt it summed up our concept really well. I suggested that maybe we could just have voice over of the poem going through the presentation while showing everyone's work.
I have a long history with PowerPoint, there was a time in my life where in one class they made us make a PowerPoint for basically every lesson. Because of this I knew that having a voice over on PowerPoint would not work well. I also knew that it would not make our work look good. Our work needs to flow on its own in one beautiful loop. To get that we needed to create the whole presentation as one flowing film, to do that I had to re-create my film in a new film document then convert everyone's scanned in work from PDF's to JPEG's then insert them and change the speed and way in which they appeared. That all takes a long time. We started working on this presentation on the Wednesday before the final presentation. I really wanted to start earlier but no one was ready to give me their work before 3 in the afternoon that day. This was probably the only time our group felt really uptight and tense. We had a long evening of editing ahead of us. We started working at 3 and gradually throughout the evening went from all 6 of us to only 2 of us, till 9 O'Clock when I was left trying to finalize and save the final cut. WE DID IT. FINISHED!
The voice over
To record the poem I needed a really quiet place where there would be no background noise, this meant Phoebe and I sat on the floor in the disabled toiled reciting my poem. The poem was shorter than the length of the video. Phoebe suggested that I read slower and put way more drama into my voice as I do. The first few try's I tried reading through it as a whole watching the clip as I go to try and time it well and make it last as long as possible. Phoebe then suggested we try and recorded it in sections then drag them around and create spaces in between. This worked perfectly. Another member of our group thought that adding effects to the voice over may be interesting and effective. We tried out all the effects but none of them sounded as good as it did natural.
The poem
A family
By blood or by bond
It didn't matter
It was more about the connection. The truth.
An invisible twine tangled between us
holding and locking together
The secret spell which will encapsulate us
Into a single moment
A kiss or song
A beautiful painting hung on the wall
A family portrait of foreigners yet to be met
us or them
A dream, a dream
A potion, a trick
An embodiment of lust
greed
The things families need
and magic, mostly magic
To tighten the seams,
no tearing but fearing from un-involved beings
cause we,
we are the foreigners in the painting
the people you meet un-expecting
in the cool cool night
Orange, candle light
My main job in the group was to create a short film. This film will be shown at the beginning of our presentation. My initial idea for the film was to have lots of images with some sort of back ground noise. The images would all relate to theme/concept, it would slide through sort of in a similar way to that of family slides on a projector.
I then talked to some tutors about this idea. I told them I wanted to create some suspense and make the audience feel something weird. I did not want to make your average film basically. I was given the idea of sounds. I began thinking of all the sounds I could and made a long list of them. Sometimes less imagery can be more effective then too much imagery and with that in mind I began filming. I had the idea of writing spells and smoke, those were the only images I really wanted in the film. I was going to add some sort of material movement that would be very reflective of the head pieces, however I could not think of any way to display this well and also most Comme videos do not relate directly to what they are trying to sell at all. So with that freedom I stuck to the three simple clips of writing and candles. I did not have a a noise recorder to record the sounds so I just filmed the noises, for example I lit a match then during the editing process I stripped the sound and dragged it under a black screen and deleted the video. This was a very long process to do for every sound. If I were to create this film again I would probably think more about the colours in each shot. I could of done some cool stuff like used filters, this would of added a nice tint to the shots. Considering colour was important for each designers identity in the collections this may have been really effective.
I began the day by finding the font Comme uses which is helvetica bold. I wanted to get some practice making advertisements for Comme. They usually just have an image with their logo printed across it usually at the bottom. I grabbed some images from out concept board and put the logo on them, they turned out really cool. This practice really pushed me into wanting to create these ads even more. I found it so interesting how by just adding a logo it can change the image completely, you see it in a totally different light. The logo makes it look more professional.
One of my practices, if I were to re-create this ad I would make the type red instead of white. (Image authors own)
Part 2
I really enjoy painting and In particular I love portraits. Most of the time the portraits I create are not any particular person just nameless face. I was sitting and painting a face Thursday afternoon just to release the painting impulse from my system. When I took out the painting Friday morning I had a sudden thought, what if I put the Comme logo on this image? So I did exactly that. I then printed it out to show the rest of my group and their reaction was very encouraging. They all loved it and liked the idea. So instead of taking a photograph for the Ad I've decided to make a painting. Instead of just having a random face that does not relate to the whole concept I will paint four to represent each designer and each face will be a different colour. Two of the designers in my group are thinking about taking their final looks and cutting them in half then putting them together with each others pieces. Taking this idea of cutting up and putting together I have decided to cut the face into four sections then taking one part from each painting to create one. This will then represent the idea community and family, the idea of a group of people being one, the since of connection that outcasts in society have to each other. Naturally I did more than one ad. I did this because I had many different ideas of how to lay it out and I also had four paintings to choose form. I think that it is better to have many options and work down till you find the best.
The following images are two of the ad's I made. The last one is the one I decided to go with in the end because my group agreed that they like it best.
The final version of this ad the type is upside down. One of the designers in my group decided she wanted to do some work upside down, thinking of the idea of black magic and being an out cast how the world thinks their views can be unusual or upside down. I wanted this idea to come through from her work into mine.
The second day of our group project we collected favourite images from everyone's personal concept boards they had created. We placed them on a blank document in Photoshop so we could create a layout that would work and display the ideas well.
Throughout the idea we continued discussing ideas and the designers began thinking about their designs, thinking about shapes, volumes, and colour. We made a decision that each designer would have their own colour for their collection as Comme for the last few seasons has been sticking to one colour for their entire collection. I decided that I wanted as a promoter to make the designers happy, In real life my job would be to create something for a designer to help show their ideas with my own ideas to help enhance it. To do this I listened very carefullly to each of the designers and asked them lots of questions and put in my own thougths so I could build this strong mental image of who we were collectively and individually.
First
My first idea came to me as I watched the designers drapping calico on the mannequins to create shapes. I loved the folds and movement of the material so I decided to photocopy thinking i could paint COMME des GARCONS over the top of the photocopy. While photocopying the material I remembered these head pieces that were everywhere on our mood boards. I was suddenly then hit with another idea to place my head on the photocopier and place the fabric above and around my face. I took these images and painted COMME des GARCON in various ways over them, I tried a few methods.
(All images authors own)
Second
The next step i my thought process was taking the images and adding typography through Photoshop. The ones I edited on Photoshop turned out alright, I think that they are cool however they are not final pieces. I think the image is a little basic and that I can come up with something much more conceptual and something that when you look at it you would think COMME. To get to that I need to create a new image, I need to decide what method I want to use and materials and also what I want the image to actually be.
I was very excited when I saw my name on the paper title COMME des GARCONS. I was attracted to Comme initially because of its attitude. I respect the way Comme presents itself as a brand, I like how they are particular about their image and don't care about publicity for the sake of publicity. Comme are after making an impact and a statement they want you to feel something that you would not relate to fashion, and that is exactly why I chose it. I put Prada as a back up.
I was excited when I saw my team, mostly because all the members of my group have reputations for being hard workers and passionate about their work. Those are the kind of qualities I find admirable and desirable for team mates or co-workers.
To kick start our project we were given two quotes. We then dissected these quotes, interpreting them and choosing our favourite aspects, words and phrases. 1. 'There are massive gaps in this essay, it is broken and re-wound, not always knowing and yet searching. Respond, Exchange, Converse. Be a traveler in this novel, Even if only for a while.'
2. 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense the conditions of their lives and their relations with other men.' The Communist Manifesto
We all decided to focus in on the particular word "profane." We began looking at this word in its literal sense 'to treat something sacred with irrelevance or disrespect. So we began thinking about religion and decided this idea was to bland and too obvious and obvious is not very Comme, we did all our work with the brand we are trying to represent in the back of our mind. We began digging into the idea of black magic and witches who are definitely considered outcast from society. We zoomed into this idea of being an out cast from societey. Gypsies and homeless people were what came to mind first. We thought about this idea of not having a home as most people know it to be free. The idea of freedom from society seemed like a very positive and happy thing to us. We decided that our theme would be to do with gypsies and free outcast from society.
We sourced out ideas from many different places and our initial concept board was very overwhelming and crowded. This gave the start of our project a little bit of a slow start because everyone felt as though we were on different pages we needed to solidify our idea. It was there but it was buried in between a whole bunch of other ideas. To solve this problem we took only a few of our favourite images and put them together into a little group concept board.
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Each member of our group has a different role and responsibility for the project. There are two mens wear designers, two womens wear designers, and two promoters.
My personal role is as a promoter. I will create ad's and also a short film. My goal is to create something that represents all the designers as a whole and also to create the atmosphere and feeling of our theme and mood. Also I want to make people uncomfortable and present something that is unexpected. If we can create and present something unexpected I will feel like we were successful and personally be happy about the work.
