Tuesday 28/1/20 - Midpoint Evaluation

So far, this project has proved to be my favourite both in topic and in terms of my creativity and ideas generation. This is because I am able to cover topics and issues I feel really passionate about, it makes my work feel more personal compared to the last two projects. It is also because I have always had an interest in art related to propaganda, specifically those meant to undermine or mimic it but with a more moral intent. One artist in particular who I’ve always admired for this is Banksy, I love the style of his work and how he goes about doing it, especially because of the message behind it. Another reason this project really appeals to me is due to the workshops that have allowed me to learn new skills that I want to make us of in the rest of this project and the final project.

Throughout this project I have been constantly writing down my ideas and trying to make concepts and designs of them. In-between different assignments and tasks I made blog posts to show my thoughts. I felt a strong need to have a representation of what I wanted to achieve by the end of this. It also shows the development of my ideas over time and how I changed them.

My ideas have changed a fair amount since the start of the project. Originally, I wanted to create posters with the intent to have them vandalised, to see how people react and what they would do to vandalise them. I wanted to give people masks to wear at random in the university and take photos of them blended in with the public. I developed these ideas into ones that I feel are better and focus even more on the topics I feel passionate about. Thanks to the planning and ideas generation I’ve done I now have a strong idea of where I want to go with this project and what I am doing for the final posters. It has also allowed me to think about the final project and start planning for it.

This project started by looking at recreating fairytales and creating fake news articles. The fairytales were a really fun but creative start. I came up with the idea to rebrand three little pigs to a dark story of communist Russia and the Soviet Union. I had fun with this but still kept serious themes and ideas related to the project. I did the same with my fake news article that claimed climate change didn't exist, going as far to poke fun at common arguments against climate change.

We then moved onto the coppafeel and breast cancer awareness campaign, what really motivated me for this was that these weren't just for practice in making posters and advertisements. These had the chance to actually be used by coppafeel. I used this as the chance to get practice with poster idea generation using influences from different advertisements and the pre-existing posters from coppafeel. In the end I was happy with what I made, they had plenty of room for improvement but were a good effort considering the skills I have and the tools I had access to.

Next was the workshop on foley and creating our sandwich boards. Foley really interested me as a subject because it's something I could use in future work and the final project. The workshop gave me a chance to learn what goes into foley and skills for future reference. Whilst the video I made from this workshop wasn't amazing, I had experience which I want to use in the final project.

The sandwich boards gave me an opportunity to create my first poster concept. I went through multiple ideas and designs but in the end I made something that I felt relatively pleased with. It was scruffy but that was a stylistic choice, because I didn't have enough time to create a very professional and clean look I went for something more homemade and chaotic. Though I would have put more detail into it if I was going to use it for the final poster. This also gave me a chance to think about typography and font choice, I went with more modern fonts because I felt they best fit my ideas. I want my work to be clear and simple, not too fanciful.

The final workshop before moving onto the posters was one that helped us with designing the graphics, typography and placement for our posters. This was something that really helped me because I had to work with set prompts and still managed to create coherent posters despite some of the weirder combinations. It gave me good insight into what I'd be creating.