To earn my living, I have spent most of my weekends since 1990 as a DJ, as well as a record producer. I have an archive of DJ mixes available, most of which were done with my KIng Unique partner Matt "Watkins" Thomas.
The latest set was a solo number recorded live at Exit club in Lithuania on 17/02/07 and part 1 and part 2 can be downloaded for anyone who like a bit of that kinda thing.
I did try to add the embed the movie, but it is soo big for my blog page, and loooks bad, but you can get it in the link above.
This is pretty fancy. i suppose we'll get taste of this when we get the iPhone, but in a few years, i think these things could be everywhere, in airports, train stations, anywhere information is needed.
This Blog has much of the recent TV idents, all of which can be downloaded and viewed. BBC2 here in the UK have just unveiled their latest ones. Inspiring stuff!
The BBC has also recently shown a custom 1970's ident to relaunch it's fantastic time-travel cop show "Life On Mars", watch here
Meanwhile Channel 4's long line of inspiring idents continues with this rocks one. 4 Creative is their in house communications company - check out there site here.
I'm not at all sure I agree with the thinking behind this visual essay, but I like the use of motion graphics to get their point across. I would like to really work on Typography for my second year, with a view to making adding motion after I get good at the static type part. Hopefully this is a sensible foundation to build on.
This Assignment i really enjoyed, and thought I got a lot out of it. In spite of this, I feel that my final presentation wasn't too good, but there are reasons for that which I will go into later.
I initially did loads of research on all the people on my list of 27. That in turn really got me into using the blog more. I also really discovered a lot about the subjects, and found a lot of inspiration, many of the sources were new to me. This was a pleasant surprise. I especially was interested in Hi-Res!, Saul Bass, Barnbrook, Spike Jonze, Kyle Cooper but decided to focus on Michel Gondry. I just found his work to be most exciting, so I just went with my gut instinct and researched his work. I also chose to review one of his music videos for my critical studies essay. This was a piece I had loved for years, and I really wanted a chance to find out more, so I combined these two assignments to delve deeper into it:
I worked very hard on my essay, and found that really stretched my brain, especially as I'd not written one since 1988. Then I got stuck into setting up the presentation, which was essentially a Keynote that had to be done with Flash according to the brief. I spent a lot of time doing paperwork for my last Flash brief "26 Clicks', and had basically realised last time that I had set myself a task which was never going to happen quickly with no knowledge of Flash. This time I set out to make something really basic and actually get it finished. I still wnated it to look good, and this was still quite a lot to get my head around in a short space of time.
I found from here on in that I pretty much forgot about the presentation and spent all my time on the Flash job. I learned a lot, and once I got started I really wanted to finish it to my satisfaction. Ultimately this never happened, but i got it mostly there. On the day of the presentation I was still fiddling with it just before the deadline, and there were still things wrong with it. The presentation was very straight-forward, so I decided to try and experiment more. I set about doing a simple animation idea for the intro as a bit of an homage to Gondry, using kids fridge magnet letters spelling out the title of the brief and Michel Gondry. I also wanted it to sync in time to music, which I'd heard off a lot of people wasn't a good thing to do in Flash as it just doesn't keep time properly. I found ourt that this is indeed the case, even though i'd gone to great lengths to make it really simple.
On the day of the presentation I'd not rehearsed what I was going to say, and I have also been a terrible public speaker all my life, so when the time came I was a bit stressed, and didn't really coem across all that well. I was still happy with what I'd done despite this, and I now really want to get my flash skills in place, so I can intuitively use flash and be as creative as I'd like to be sooner rather than later. I am currently working my way though a hands on training manual for Flash 6, then later want to look at "Flash To The Core", the hands on training for Flash 8, and the Moock actionscript book.
