university project: advanced digital communication

since starting back at university at the end of september, we've been working on a brief called advanced digital communication. it was split into two parts: the first 4 weeks(ish) focusing on motion and interaction work and experimenting, and the second 4 weeks looking at a 'proper' brief - i say proper because i found it extremely difficult to feel like anything from the first half was going anywhere.

during my many battles with motion and after effects, i decided to give up on the program and opt for a more traditional way of creating motion - stopmotion. i felt much more comfortable working in this way and felt that the outcome represented my personality and style more accurately, and while my final piece was perhaps a little unfinished, overall, i'm not too ashamed to show it.

next on the agenda was to look at creating an interactive piece of work. i was a bit fixated of the idea of touch and how we make decisions every day based on things we do and don't touch and for a while i liked the idea of proposing an interactive keyboard with all the keys made of different materials - some nice, some not - and then monitoring how we adapted our language when communicating based on what we did and didn't want to touch. as it sounds, this idea was a little too elaborate to go about producing or simulating, so i left it there.

still focusing on the idea of touch, i noticed how we're often reluctant to interact with fragile things through fear of damaging them, and i wanted to create something that left someone with conflicting desires as they'd want to look at my artefact, however they also wouldn't want to through fear of damaging it. my solution was this interactive book that was made up of illustrations printed onto tracing paper, and it invites you to unpick the many layers of illustrations with pieces of card that are supplied, however to do so means you're at the risk of damaging the book.

onto the main (and more exciting) part of the module now! we were given a choice of two briefs: one based on mima's contemporary jewellery collection and one based on a british film festival. knowing i'm not much of a film fanatic, i opted to tackle the jewellery brief which within it specific making the jewellery accessible to children which was instantly right up my street. i explored the #wearmima facebook page and, much to my surprise, was really taken by some of the jewellery. i also watched videos from the vimeo page and noticed how the jewellery seemed to bring out everybody's inner child as they spoke of fantasy lands and the characters the jewellery could've belonged to, which instantly got me thinking of potential back stories for the pieces.

after creating back stories for four of my favourite pieces, my solution was to put these stories into a promotional booklet that would then be sent out to primary schools to be read by the children in an attempt to spark an interest and curiosity about the jewellery which would then get them into mima visit the jewellery in the flesh. the booklet also invited them to create and draw a back story for a piece of jewellery from the collection that wasn't covered within the booklet, with some optional starter stickers for the younger end of my audience to use if they needed a bit of help getting started. this feature also linked to an app that i designed where children could read about the pieces in the collection, upload their story and view stories others had created in an attempt to create some sort of community and make the kids and their contributions feel valued.

i wanted to include the final artwork for the entire book, however this post was already extremely picture heavy so i decided against it - hope you've enjoyed reading!

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final first year project

so after four hectic weeks of (pretty much) constant working, my final piece has finally been made and presented! i'm really, really pleased with how it turned out and definitely feel it's easily my strongest piece of work from first year.

the project brief was to create a narrative from a source material and create a publication from your newly formed narrative. i chose some poems i wrote as a ten year old about rainforest creatures as my source material, and after piecing together some humorous, nonsensical new narratives i jumped straight into creating an illustrative piece that encapsulated the light-heartedness and innocence that was present within my source material.

my two main themes were day/night and camouflage, with a hidden celebration of all the weird and wonderful creepy crawlies that inhabit the rainforest alongside your typical sloths, snakes and monkeys.

i have another hand-in today and then my final hand-in in two weeks time before attending the end of year exhibition, but then after that i'm free until october! over the summer i plan to get stuck into some new projects that have been floating around in my head recently, so hopefully over the coming months i should have some interesting things to share with you all! thank you to everyone who does follow me, i really appreciate all the lovely comments and tweets i receive!

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