cezimbra-nuclear

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Data Space - Consolidated Reflection

Data Space was about data art, about organizing and separating items by class, all over the class. The outcome should be an edited video about the data organizing experience we had, all students together gathered an arrange of items from their houses, and brought it to school so we could categorize them by all sorts of classes, like color, size, material, etc. 

Me and my group we organized the items by color, in a beautiful gradient arrangement, and then everyone together organized the items by size, material and then by letter, all was filmed and should’ve been put in a video. Data art was something that I wasn’t aware until then, by researching I found out about lots of new artists that transforms data collecting and organizing into art.

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Time Designed - Consolidated Reflection

This project was a rather confusing one, it was pretty hard to understand the purpose of this one, but it was a new thing to learn and explore, wich is always good in some way. The project consisted in making a 2 letter image sequence video, that could relate the 2 letters by the residual image one leaves when the frames change rapidly. That implies that we need to develop a new conception of typography that holds accountable the image permanence to another typefaces. I did loads of sketches in my project book, to explore the typeface interaction and we did some workshops on how to work with indesingn, that helped a lot, then we had a presentation that was just about the principles of animation and that image permanence idea, I did as told to make the video with the custom softawe, and the results are rather nice, i chose the letters MM, wich was challenging to relate the same letter in a creative way, and by dealing with negative space and type relation i ended up with some interesting results

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Luxury Goods - Consolidated Reflection

Luxury goods is a project that explores the meaning of luxury, and was definetly, the best project to me. The goal was 4 art directed posters with the theme of luxury, and me and my group we had a great time exploring this concept. We started by discussing the meaning of the word and what makes something be luxurious, was it being expensive? being high quality? what items can we relate to luxury? How could we subervse the meaning of luxury? How can we make a luxury item that looks funny? Our definition of luxury landed in three main references: Apple, Jewelry, and high fashion. And how could we portray these contexts in a way that defies the meaning of the word? we could portray an item that is somehow stupid when portrayed in the luxurious context, like food, we thought of cookies, or strawberries, but we couldnt make it aesthetically appealing food, so we went with more ugly food, like popcorn, or biscoito de polvilho, bellpeppers, cucumbers. We then made lots of sketches of scenes we could make, various settings like, popcorn in a ring, the bellpepper used like a phone, biscoitos de polvilho as earings and in a necklace, carrot lipstick, between other ideas. So now we needed assets.

My peers went to the “farmers market”, the street fairs we have, to buy some fruits and vegetables, some we had already planned on buying, and some weren’t. I worked on making the assets for our photo shoots, I painted popcorns and a Jackfruit, the biscoitos de polvilho, and bellpeppers, in various colors, to meet the requirements for any setting we needed. I found some chains in the classroom and had the idea to make the jackfruit, the “jaca” as a clutch bag.

To insert the food in the luxury context in a funny way, we researched how brands make advertisement for their products and tried to replicate it with our assets in the photo studio, learning how to photograph products, and the lighting, settings and all, was very interesting. We then went to buy a pretty box for our popcorn ring pictures, and the results of this one were great, very professional, as well as the bellpepper iPhone ones. Then we got into the fashion shoot with the jaca bag, that was my favorite part. Dora was surprisingly in the perfect outfit, with some acessories, she’d be perfect for the shoot, and thats what happened, we tried different lights and backgorunds, and as we progressed, we really liked the pictures, but as we kept going with the shoot and new ideas, the pictures only got better, we ended up with some great pictures, even with our friend Bob, that went to help. Thinking in this modelling way was new to me, and we as a group had lots of creative ideas for poses and settings. 

After that, in the editing part, I had this fun slogan idea for the popcorn ring “when will you ask her what’s popping?” as if it was a proposing ring, as for the fashion shoot poster, I had a hard time thinking of advertising ideas, I made it in a meme format, to reinforce the joke context, i guess, then I thought of making this meme format more commercial, by changing typeface, and position, didn’t like it, it wasn’t very suiting to the poster, in the end I found it best to edit the colors and leave it like this. 

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Hollywood Bling - Consolidated Reflection

Hollywood Bling was a great project about animation and rotoscoping, we had one week to learn animation and work on this collaborative music video with pinapple studios, a hip hop music label. At first it seemed too much to deal with, it was aproximately 8 seconds of video with 12 frames each, wich means 90 - 100 drawings, but that compared to what animators do daily is nothing, I did some research on animators I really like, like for instance Jaime R. and Felix Colgrave and in the back of my head I was thinking of “what of me can i put into animation?”. I looked into my sketchbook pages to find some element that I could use, and got insterested in animating a bat I drew some days before.

 I also considered making the animations manually, by printing, let’s say, 2 frames per page, and drawing over them, but that would take too much more work, I would also need a light table and also scanning and digitally organizing the drawings would take too much time, so I decided to open the frames in procreate and use the software’s animation tool. It was easy but I could only draw directly over the image, so I couldnt make many mistakes, cause then I wouldnt be able to erase them. My idea for the animation was to make lots of particles, sparks and floating things, like stars and hearts, and then I had some more ideas, like freezing a frame in place, so the singer in the video would keep moving and one frame of her body would stay still, so I could add something on top of it. That’s what became the blinking crying eye on the left of the screen. 

Overall I think even with the time being, I had a good performance, animation is something I’m very interested in, and I’d love to have more animation-based projects in the future.

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Type and Language - Consolidated Reflection

The Type and Language project was to analyse the grids of posters and with that grid, make three posters with a typeface and subject provided by the tutors. I wasn’t aware of the concept of grids and the whole architecture to graphic design and type, this project experience lead me to understand the allignment-based relationships of the elements on canvas and I chose one from Muir Mcneill, I really like halftone patterns and I loved the poster’s gradient. 

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Alternative Stories - Consolidated reflection

The Alternative Stories was one of my favorites to do, again because it consisted of drawing and I love drawing. The projects consists in making a zine with a narrative given by the tutors in an A3 paper, We had to choose one of the available short stories, and I chose the one called Snake Rattles, it is about a man that used to work as a lineman for a small telephone company driving through the roads of west texas, and his relation to the wild rattlesnakes, He would kill them and bring their rattles to his sons when he got home. That is something that was kept as a heartwarming memory after the father died, the snake rattle, as a memento. I wanted to have a more abstract approach to the narrative, since it is not a linear story, the main things I wanted to get clearly were the ambient the father was in, the main symbol that was the snake, and something to set the story in the adult son’s life. I first wanted to make a linear representation, a more literal story, but after some thought my wills changed, I then proceeded to make some sketches of how to symbolize this ideas, and thought that something symmetrical would be nice, after some testing I chose the best illustrations that could respresent the most and diagrammed, I then test printed and solved some issues regarding image placement, sizing and color. I think I should print it in an already yellow/ocre paper, since all the pages have this color as background, I dont think I will end up doing this at the final outcome mainly because I didnt manage my time very well, but Ideally that would be the proper result. I thought of a very simple cover that I really liked, a one-point perspective of a road at the sunset, that’s what i’d see when i think of the “Wichita Lineman” lyrics “searchin’ in the sun for another overload” , and all the time I was reapeting in my head “rattlesnake rattle” and found out that the word rattlesnake, if placed twice side by side, there is a “snake rattles” in between, like rattleSNAKERATTLESnake, that was a nice wordplay that became the title. 

I am satisfied with the result, but in an ideal world, I would make more drawings, maybe 6 instead of 3, so that it would be a more richer narrative to understand as an outsider.

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Research Frameworks - Consolidated Reflection

Research Framewors was a project that consisted in exploring a theme with research, associating text, image, video, starting from a quote provided by the tutors. The quote I chose was “There is no beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion” meaning that all beauty need equal parts strangeness, I chose it because the discussion of beauty and the way I see beauty are subjects I’m very interested in, even in my own personal practice. 

I started by linking articial beauty and the way it is build, I went from the standard “weird” body modifications, like extreme tattooing, piercing, cosmetic implants, for instance the famous “cat lady’ that modified her face to look like a cat, or a feline of sorts, then I went to the other side of the spectrum, the people that modified their bodies to fit the “beauty standard”, but in an naturally unreacheable place, like the girl that modified her body until she looks like a barbie. That made me think “where does body mod come from?”, that made me look into cultural body modification, like the neck ellongating tribes, and the tribes that pierce their bodies in a ritualistic way, and the history of beauty, “beauty was fat, now beauty is thin?”. 

The path I was following was leading me to think of beauty in a new way, beauty as something artificial, made by hand, beauty was also makeup, beauty is also fashion, beauty is also performance, beauty is so many things. Beauty is gender-ruled, and that was something important, the most weirdest beauty (therefore the most beautiful beauty) is the beauty that defies the gender roles, that abdicates from what a man or a woman is and should be, breaking the limits of where the beauty of your person starts and ends, that was very important to me. Also, ugly is beautiful, being ugly can be beautiful, because being ugly can be strange. 

I had a very enlightning journey, now I needed an outcome that represented this idea of strange beauty, and the best media I could come with was sculpture, sculpture is something live, something that exists in the same space as the viewer, that has its own “life” of sorts. In my sculpture I would make beauty, it didnt need to be the most strange, but it needs to be strange enough, so it can be proportionally beautiful.

[cezimbra-nuclear]

Observe - Consolidated Reflection

The Observe project was one of my favorites, and one of the easiest to me, in a practical matter, the projects consists in observational drawing with some narrative features, I haven’t done the drawings in the correct order, I made each drawing in its appropriate moment, that is what makes moke sense to me. Drawing is easy, it is the thing I’m best with, but this project challenged me to look more into my everyday encounters, and how to portray them in a way that suits best the feeling for the moment. Most of my drawings weren’t made in the proper situation, due to pandemic reasons, I didn’t want to go out and expose myself in the streets by talking to people, so most people in the drawings are people from the internet, and that gives me a window to imagination in the observation settings, since it is a limited point of view. I would have a better performance if we didn’t have this covid issue, but given the situation i think i’ve had a good experience, even if not all drawings were possible.