Making of Glorophyll Glue Commercial

We had a group project about making a commercial for a glue called "Glorophyll". We are planning to make a stop motion video for it. We know its going to be very hard since none of us hav really done anything about videos, but we're still gonna try our best and not let our ideas go to waste. So there are my friends working hard on the character design and background searching. Hannah (left, ya I know you can't see her face, she can't be bothered by the camera) had put all our ideas together and storyboarded

Cute little cry over her fallen petal from her flower and the cute little boy was worried and wondered what happened

Okay, so basically here its just about the girl giving the boy the flower expects him to fix it ...

and yes he did! So the girl's happy again

and oops! they gt stuck when the boy gives the flower back and they are stuck forever.

That's our Glue Commercial "Glorophyll Sticks Forever". This commercial is meant to target teenagers and crafty people (people that is most likely to use a glue). So the commercial is more to cute and also we are thinking of making it green and earthly because this glue is eco friendly.

Look the characters we designed together. Its so fun doing the character design, we laughed at each other's drawings, big head, weird body shapes, weird accessories (that was just me, i gave the boy a huge cap and ugly flower pins for the girls and no! I'm not going to show them its embarrassing!). These are the final designs.

                        

I'm going to digitise all the drawings using photoshop and my bamboo pen. Can't wait to get the whole video done! Got to start learning how to use iMovie!

Audrey Kawasaki - My Design HERO!

Japan art styles are my favourite just like manga comics, the curvy lines of a human body shape, the hair strokes that waves lightly in the air as if it is real. Art nouveau which was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, where they have a strong outline and flat or gradient colour filled in. Now Audrey Kawasaki which is one of my favourite artist has combined these two art styles together and formed her very own style.

The themes in Audrey Kawasaki’s work are contradictions within themselves. Her work is both innocent and erotic. Each subject is attractive yet disturbing. She paints on wood panels and it brings an unexpected warmth to the enigmatic subject. The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually eosteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them. These mysterious young women captivate with the direct stare of their bedroom eyes.

Audrey mostly paints on wood panel with oil and graphite, at times mixed media. The colour she uses are always muted which gives out the sensation of erotic and melancholy. She had several exhibitions and shows and the most recent show is named “Tangled”. These are part of the paintings shown in the show.

“All the girls I paint, is one girl. She is on my mind always, and nothing will make me stray away from that.” Audrey stated at her tumblr. She is persistent at what she is doing, the girls in her mind is still a mystery yet to be found. Recently, Audrey had been working with few artists -- Andrew Hem, Joao Ruas, and she deeply admire their talents.

GeGeGe no Kitaro

Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters, 1972

by Richard Longhi

Audrey is Japanese, so she grew up watching comics and one of her favourites is “GeGeGe no Kitaro”. It is an anime where we can see she is deeply influenced by her child hood, as you can see the wild imaginative creatures and strokes of the hair lines is reflected in her paintings.
She has always had a fascination with yokai (monster in Japanese), Japanese folklore creatures, demons,spirits, monsters etc. She thinks some are mischiveous, some sre evil and some are good natured.

She is fond of an illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters, 1972 and we can see how is she influenced by that. For instance, the monster illustrated are from the "Night Parade".

Every girl has their girly side, and when Audrey Kawasaki got in contact with felts and plushy, she developed a new hobby. She started making felt plushy, the ones she just started making were very simple and cute.

Then, she started to apply her painting skills onto the doll making, she painted the head and the hand and sew other parts together. Something interesting about this doll is that thy have no actually bodies, its as if mushrooms has human faces. This is also why I love her, i can see no limits in her creativity and her imagination.

This is what her working area looks like, simple and ordered. Everything is packed together in one place, she has everything around her while she works. Follow her now on twitter! =]


Bibliography:
http://www.audrey-kawasaki.com/info.php?p=bio
http://andkawa.tumblr.com/
http://baibai-matane.live.journal.com/84401.html
http://baibai-matane.livejournal.com/81158.html
http://i-seldom-do.journal.com/160812.html
http://i-seldom-do.journal.com/158846.html£cutid1

The Book of Nymph

A book cover design inspired by Audrey Kawasaki. The girl in Audrey Kawasaki's paintings is really suitable to be in a book cover about nymphs. I have studied her paintings and painted this digitally. I imitated the expressions and of one of her painting "As I fall" and the body shape of another painting "asai 1". I gave the background a very oceanic and mermaid-like feel as nymphs are popular to be on water and looks like mermaids in the ocean. I enjoyed painting the nymph although it is absolutely impossible to be compared with Audrey's original work but I have tried my best and have learnt a lot through the painting. This book is targeted at those both genders and for those whom are curious and interested in this kind of genre. The whole picture is mysterious to draw audiences attention to get curious about the contents inside.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and its is proposed by Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce's idea distinguish between three type of signs which are, "Icon" , "Index" , "Symbol".

Icon is something that looks like what it is representing. For example, what can you see in this sign? Yes, it is a fire exit sign that's because it is well known already. But, just looking at this sign, it could be some one running away from something, it could be a race, an exit of something, an outdoor running field or something.

When something else is added to the picture, the whole meaning changes and its completely different. The sign at the left changes the meaning of the picture, giving more information to this sign. The fire that represents fire is telling you that the person is running away from the fire.

But since the "fire" icon could represent something else maybe sound noise or some other stuff you could think of. So, the letter "Fire Exit" made the whole picture make sense and is telling what it is meant to tell.

Index is referred to their objects of any similarity relation. There is a cause link between the sign and object. In this category smoke is an index of fire, as smoke is caused by fire. In the picture below you can see smoke and you will automatically linked it to "fire".

Symbol is an arbitrary sign in which the signifier has neither a direct (iconic) nor an indexical relationship to the signified, but rather represent it through convention. They usually have no logical connection. 

Signs are dependent on contexts, ideas can be directly brought into mind without being directly experience. Meanings can be expressed in various ways through a variety of sign system music, gestures, pictures etc.

Bibliography:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgxTKUP_WI

Viral go Viral!

Turn commercials into virus! Let the spread among themselves, may they grow wider and wider until everyone is affected! It is a brilliant thing to do to have the commercials to spread by themselves rather than the designer spreading it themselves. In this digital era, commercial are made as so called viral. They are videos that people will share amongst themselves and the discuss together. These are some of the viral videos.

Viral videos are what people are sharing and talking about rather people are simply watching. The Unruly Media that compiles a chart of Viral videos and this is the top ten viral videos that they have compiled.

Ethics

Design itself is ethics. It is all about what is the right thing to do. Our lives is all made as an argument about how we should live our lives. The word is contradiction within itself for our attention. Deciding where and how to employ the art of design is an ethical issue. Designers need to be both technically right and compellingly wise. Wisdom is about evaluating and choosing between competing principles. To be wise is to be aware, and awareness is the passage to action. We study ethics in order to improve our live, and therefore its principle concern is the nature of human well-being.

To prepare yourself for the multitude of ethical considerations you can start by examining your own stance as a designer, your own values, who you are designing for and what kind of values are you trying to embed in your design solutions and why?

The core about ethics is to ask yourself questions, "do you think it creates a better world?", "who is this for?", "Why?", "How?", "Is someone's good someone else's bad?". It is also about the moral of being a designer, the value you hold in within, the message you are trying to tell someone, is it something positive or negative? or what effects comes next.

Bibliography:
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/polut/Yhteiskunnalliset/lisatieto_ethics_primer.html