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I Started this process with scanning my work in to produce a online documentation.

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Reflect and Construct: Process and Portfolio

CONTEXT

In order to promote and present themselves and their work, Illustrator Animators construct visual narratives around a sense of self to communicate with potential collaborators, clients or buyers. These documents might showcase practice and process in numerous ways; as edited sequences in the form of portfolios or showreels, Archival or experiential spaces in the form of websites and diarised collections in the form of blogs or social media platforms like Instagram.

BRIEF 

To conclude the collection of briefs for IA4003 Research, Recording and Presentation, we will bring together the documentation and presentation skills from Materialise, the use of narrative pacing and engagement with audience from Storytelling and the skills of editing and sequencing images to create meaning from Everyday Connections, in order to construct a sequential visual narrative that tell the story of the work you have produced this year. Your portfolio. This portfolio will consist of a 20 page digital PDF produced with Adobe InDesign using a provided template. It will be populated with thoughtfully documented, sequenced and captioned images that describe the content, processes and contexts of the work you have produced this year on the IABA course at Kingston School of Art. Your story.

This brief will be suported with three seminar sessions and conclude with a crit at the end of which you will be given formative feedback with a grade for this module. 

Day one – Briefng and research activity.

Day two – Introduction to InDesign with Nina Carter and provision of PDF template. A photography space will be set up for the documentation of your work.

Day three – Introduction to captions and submission via BOX and portfolio show-and-tell.

Crit – The crit for this brief will be held over two days. Your PDF portfolio must be submitted via BOX before 10am on Thursday 28th March and adhear to the following;

Your portfolio must include captioned examples of work from all three studio modules and present images that communicate aspects of your practice through content, process and context. 

Your portfolio must be below 5MB file size. 

Your portfolio must be a PDF that opens in Acrobat or Preview (no folders, powerpoints or blogs) 

You file MUST be named in the following manner: surname.initial.level4.pdf for example: molloy.p.level4.pdf

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this activity challenged me, I had to use images I wouldn't normally select however it worked out for the best. I learnt that the more images you gather the easier it will be for you to find better connections

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Reflect and Construct: Everyday Connections

CONTEXT

In our everyday lives we are constantly making connections between different things. These connections can be entertaining and often intriguing, but they also become a key tool in helping us to understand, describe and navigate the world around us. Over time we individually develop the way in which we observe our everyday surroundings. One thing may catch your eye but go unnoticed by others. Through this brief, we’ll begin to think about the way we see the world and how we can communicate our personal view using observational photography as a tool to create a short sequences of images.

BRIEF

Through sequences of 5 photographs, we are going to create visual journeys, narratives or puzzles where the viewer is challenged to find the connections between one image and the next. There are so many ways in which one image could connect to the next. Naturally, we may first think about visual connections like colour, shape, form, size and material, but there are also interesting connections to be found in literal, emotional and historical connections such as location, purpose, association and language. How can we produce sequences of photographs that feel like our personal point of view, when we are using objects and locations that may be recognisable to us all? Try to find connections, objects and locations that work next to each other in interesting and unexpected ways. This brief does not involve drawing or collage, but we can approach photography in the same way we would any other work. Thinking about content, composition, colours, texture, 02 of 02 tone, shadow, framing. We’ll begin by exploring the environment around us, taking photographs of whatever catches our eye. For the next session you must take at least 50 photographs. Edit the digital shots and print out 25 of the most interesting ones to bring in with you. During this first session we will begin the editing process away from the screen. Being able to move images around quickly and test how they work in different sequences helps to keep the editing process spontaneous and instinctive. Use this process of editing to inform your ideas, you will need to shoot new images regularly and assess the results, each time becoming more focused in what you want to shoot and why. For the following week you must bring in 25 more photographs. During this second session we will explore three strategies for editing and sequencing images; typology, chronology and continuity. This brief will conlude on the final session with an exhibition presentation of your final selected sequence of 5 photographs. You will have to consider how your 5 images sit next to each other? What effect do they create as a whole? How are they likely to be read by a viewer, when seen for the first time?

OUTPUTS FOR ASSESSMENT

 • Documentation of mutiple iterations of your photographic sequences

 • Well documented evidence of your research, process and presentation to be presented on your blog using illustration, photograpy, text, video and sound. 

CONTINUATION

 Continue to explore visual sequences through editing found and constructed images. Use this process to assist when developing narrative and sequential design work in the future

[keevaroisinharkin]

Recap

How to start a story.

How to shorter parts.

Character arc.

Ask questions/ not tell the answers.

Develop voice e.g. 1st or 3rd person.

Strip back text so it is the essential.

be Curious, what if?

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Notes

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

1st Person (would not work otherwise

Rhetorical questions.

About an Obsession

Anxious, hears a noice of the heart constantly

when confesses to murder the sentences get shorter and there is repetition

Bullet In The Brain by Tobias Wolf

3rd Person

used repetition ‘didn't remember’

captivating and compelling

The End of Firpo in the World by George Saunders

Hard to understand

Nieve

Lack of sentence structure/ punctuation (maybe this is to show the stream of conscious of the character

3rd Person, closer to the character this way

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Talks about society at the time

Positive points always have a contradiction.

Shows the reader her life not tells.

Starts and Finishes completely different.

1st Person, almost diary like, bring the audience closer to the character

notes: experiment withe points of view, not all characters need names (if it is a short story

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Story Task

Exercise: an hour to plan a story (2 x A4 sides)

Point of View needs to be taken under serious consideration for what is best for the story.

something must drastically change in ‘ A tale of the unexpected’

could be Magical realism

character needs to develop

initial ideas:

continue a story of the paper and the guillotine.

Guillotine is compelling and wants to cut people with the blade

[keevaroisinharkin]

Bullet in the Brain By, Tobias Wolff.

 Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper.  He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders – a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers.  The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred.

“Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said.  She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”

Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous cry baby in front of him.

“Damned unfair,” he said.  “Tragic, really.  If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”

She stood her ground.

 “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said.  “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”

“Unforgivable,” Anders said.  “Heaven will take note.”

She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing.  Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction.  And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank.  Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door.  One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck.  The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving.  The other man had a sawed-off shotgun.

 “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat.  Got it?”

The tellers nodded.

“Oh, bravo, “Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him.  “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.”

She looked at him with drowning eyes. The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees.  He handed up the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard’s wrists up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades.  Then he took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter.  He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor.

“Buzz him in,” his partner said.  The man with the shotgun opened the gate and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a hefty bag. When he came to the empty position he looked over at the man with the pistol, who said,

“Whose slot is that?”

Anders watched the teller.  She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she’d been talking to.  He nodded.

“Mine,” she said.

“Then get your ugly ass in gear and fill that bag.”

“There you go,” Anders said to the woman in front of him.  “Justice is done.”

“Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you talk?”

“No,” Anders said.

“Then shut your trap.”

“Did you hear that?” Anders said.  “’Bright boy.’ Right out of ‘The Killers’.”

“Please be quiet,” the woman said.

“Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders.  He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut.  “You think I’m playing games?”

“No,” Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had to fight back the titters.  He did this by making himself stare into the man’s eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask:  pale blue, and raw red-rimmed.  The man’s left eyelid kept twitching.  He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol.

“You like me, bright boy?” he said.  “You want to suck my dick?”

“No,” Anders said.

“Then stop looking at me.”

Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-top shoes.

“Not down there.  Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling. Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages.  The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice.  Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work.  It was even worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity.  

The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again – a certain

rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backward glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns.  The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa – portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack.  To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched.  If there’d been a bubble coming out of his  mouth, it would have said,

“Hubba hubba.”

“What’s so funny, bright boy?”

“Nothing.”

“You think I’m comical?  You think I’m some kind of clown?”

“No.”

“You think you can fuck with me?”

“No.”

“Fuck with me again, you’re history.  Capiche?”

Anders burst our laughing.  He covered his mouth with both hands and said,

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche – oh, God, capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.

The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus  callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus.  But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions.  Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar patter, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it.  

Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”

It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember.  He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him – her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and “Let’s hide Mr. Mole!”  

Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth.  He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways.  He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will – not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?”

None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.” He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek.  Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds.  He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book.  He did not remember the pleasure of

giving respect.

Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car in to a tree, of having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter.  He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.

This is what he remembered.  Heat.  A baseball field.  Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighbourhood gather for a pickup game.  He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders:  an oppression, like the heat. Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi.  

Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again.  He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play.  

“Shortstop,” the boy says.  “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask.  The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar.  But that isn’t it, not at all – it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music.  He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt.  In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.  That can’t be helped.  

But for now Anders can still make time.  Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

[keevaroisinharkin]

Story telling: Session 2. Notes

It is important that the story starts with a spark

Careless creators but ruthless editors? is this the key to good story telling.

Pull the reader in.

Shorter sentences, setting the tone for the rest of the piece.

Choreography where the readers will look

Exercise: write a beginning to a stroy. your character is a mundane everyday person. Scene is something that is/has/happening to change the characters life.

‘ I got out of bed, made breakfast, the usual routine i went to collect the milk from the front door. it was =n’t there. how odd? the milk man is always on time, never misses a day. i thought it will be best if a tock a look outside, maybe he was broke down, delayed. there was a mist starting to apear

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Character

find something in the room and write about it.

i chose: a cutoff piece of paper on the floor.

Though it had purpose, until facing the guillotine. waiting patiently. will it or wont it be worth the wait, will it make the final cut. Trim, Trim. Each time closer to the cut. This slice of the blade was the one. Now a divided piece of fibre, falling to the ground. Trim,Trim. more fibres fall. unattached, untouched, unwanted left of the floor to be forgotten about.

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100 word story, set task.

my journey to find myself started a long time ago...far too long ago. It started with a backpacking trip, a classic tool to self discovery. It started all well and good but now its much more of a nightmare. Stranded, no money, no way to get home, but walk as far as I can.

I have been trying to get home for days now, two whole days have past and still no luck. i though of maybe hitch hiking however the thought of a potential murderer was putting me off the idea completely... maybe this was my path to self discovery after all, along , skint and starving. my minds clearer i now know who i miss and what i miss showing me what important to me.

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initial notes

Jane will be leading Friday session for the next 4 weeks.

We will be pushing our thinking and ideas.

Story telling is seen as a ritual

Story telling is different ways of looking at the works.

look at: Anton Checkov, the play write

Shot story's are what we will be looking at this Friday sessions.

make your work have meaning

add Interrogation with the reader.

an idea that something destroyed is something new.

TAKE RISKS

to use the 3 years at Kingston to experiment story telling as we may never have the opportunity again.