Another Storycorps story... John and Joe

This animation isn't technically something I would ever try to emulate myself, and it definitely wouldn't have been the style I would have picked for such a sad story, but somehow it works. I think maybe it's because it doesn't overpower the voice of John Sr. His story is at the forefront, which is how animation like this is supposed to work. So although it's a bit cartoony, you could say it's not as stylistically sophisticated as some of the other animations I look at e.g. the modern love ones, it works because it has heart.

What a nice idea! (Storycorps)

A while ago I heard about this and thought it was a really lovely and amazing idea to get people communicating more with each other and actually listening to each other's stories. Everyone loves hearing a good story and other recent projects such as Humans of New York have proved this. People are interested in each other's daily lives, their stories of love or loss and hardship because it makes us feel more human ourselves. I personally am addicted to reading the Modern Love Column, and it's not because I'm a soppy romantic (almost as many of the stories are about lost/failed love, familial love or friendship, as there are stories of true love conquering all). In a technological age where everything is fast-paced and abbreviated, it seems people still feel the pull of a well-told story.
Storycorps is an online archive of such stories, told and recorded by everyday people. They've created an app that allows you to record your conversation and upload it straight to the storycorps archive, and have come up with a set of questions to help those of us who don't know where to start. What's more, they've even started animating some of the stories as well!

Throwback Tuesday! Selfridges

This time last year I had just been interning with Selfridges' VM department, and helping them create their Christmas displays. I think this was a good experience for me in terms of showing me what I'm really interested in. I came into the process a little too late I think, and missed the creative designing part, which would have made me feel more involved. Spray-painting the trees gold and doing the actual crafting of pieces for the window displays was really lovely as it reminded me of stage design work I'd done in the past, but as with most voluntary jobs there were dull tasks. I didn't get to help at all with the main window displays, as they probably weren't sure of my capabilities, which did leave me stringing up fairy lights and 'fluffing' fake Christmas trees in the store, occasionally on my own. Personally I find working in a large company less rewarding than for a small team, but it might have taken me longer to realise this had I not tried volunteering for Selfridges.

Saturday Club Workshops

I'm currently planning 2 workshop sessions for MMU's Saturday Art Club in the new year. I volunteered with NADSC last academic year and over the summer. It's a nationwide initiative run by the Sorrell Foundation, which seeks to inspire creativity in young people. Last summer they had stalls at both weeks of New Designers and there are Saturday Clubs all over the country now. It's doing really well and seems to be growing from strength to strength so I'm always so happy to be involved in volunteering or running the workshops.

The workshops I'm involved in during January are based on a 4 week programme of papercraft. I'm planning one workshop based on a similar activity session I ran last year, which encourages the SatClubbers to create their own storyboards, shadow puppets and scenery for a shadow puppet theatre. Two weeks later they'll be creating artist books (concertinas, pop-up and pocket books) with me, after having been inspired by Special Collections the previous weekend.
More news on this in the New Year.

Jazz site

Over the summer I did some assisting work for film maker, Antony Barkworth-Knight on the Manchester Jazz Festival and he's just made a lovely little site talking about the project and who was involved. My first professional animation job has some official accreditation, and hopefully this will lead to some future festivals being interested in showing the film!

The Evolution: Seeds and Streams site

 

 

 

Origami Penguins

I've recently worked two days with Antony Barkworth-Knight on his latest project for the Manchester based band, Go Go Penguin. We're creating some visuals for the band's tour which will be projected behind them on stage. This is Antony's project so he's running the show and doing all the film work, but he's had me in studio creating various origami paper shapes for the content. 
These visuals correspond to the music video he made for Go Go Penguin's new album, so they have a cohesive look for the tour. Although, he's gone for more variety in the paper constructions he's had me making, and I've been developing geometric and organic structures rather than following traditional origami techniques of creating recognisable shapes such as animals. 
I've been experimenting with a variety of folds, modular pattern making, different types of paper and using scored lines and slices to create 3D paper models. 
I'm reliving the Paper Structures module in Art Foundation and it's been rather lovely to spend two days remembering all those techniques and inventing new ones. 

This video is the work Antony did for Go Go Penguin's new album and the premise upon which we've been working for the new tour visuals.

Artists Assemble!

YES!!! The Turner Prize has been won this year by a group who do not necessarily conform to the traditional notion of being artists, but have made arts part of the community. Lovely to see so much going on in terms of the social benefits of art lately and finding more and more people are using creative thinking to tackle community issues. They are not separate entities at all. Art does have the power to change things!
And all under the age of 30, making them the youngest winners of the Turner Prize ever. How wonderful. And for a project in my local area. I'm liking it even more.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/07/turner-prize-2015-assemble-win-by-ignoring-art-market

"Oh GOSH, Wellcome to London!"

(Apologies for my title... I'm just a sucker for puns.)

So, I went to London on Friday to conduct an interview with Isobel, the Arts Coordinator at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), in order to ask her a few questions about the programme she runs and her Hands On animation project from a few years ago. It was a brief little interview, but she was very helpful in answering all my questions about the role of arts therapy in GOSH, and her thoughts about visual aids in explaining complex concepts to young children. I learnt some really cool things about how they tackle the complexity of explaining conditions to kids, and how they're always developing new ways to approach the care they provide.

Because of the brevity of my interview, I had some time to explore London and The British Museum. Isobel mentioned the work The Wellcome Trust does in bringing together the arts and sciences, and interestingly enough there was an exhibition curated by them in the museum. The main artwork featured a gallery-length installation of two pieces of material, into which were sewn every drug/pill/capsule taken by a man and a woman in their lifetimes. The piece was called Cradle to Grave by Pharmaecopia, and was an interesting representation of the 'average person's' use of the NHS system. Seeing it in a visual format rather than numerically or written really made the amount of drugs consumed rather surprising, it was much more than I would have anticipated.

 

The Doodle Evolution

I'm submitting an alternative presentation for my dissertation, which will consist of a spoken essay that has animated accompaniments (an animated essay?). For my topic I've been researching the effects of illustration and animation on learning, and this has led to further research into how children learn through the act of drawing. I'm currently reading a great little book called "Artful Scribbles", which analyses how children's psychology, communication and visual skills all develop simultaneously through the act of 'scribbling' or 'doodling'. I've discussed this in previous blog posts, but the basic trajectory is that a child begins with scribbling and develops their motor function skills through a process of meandering lines, to near-perfect circles, to 'tadpole men', to characterised figures (with some other stops in between).

This process is similar in every child, in the same way that communication skills develop similarly in toddlers, and it made me think of how evolution is often portrayed in a similar way; through a series of milestones to represent the constant process. I decided to animate the evolution of children's doodles to accompany my essay.

On a practical note, I made this animation without the use of pegbars and cameras, and chose instead to go with standard A4 paper over a lightbox (to aline properly I just use the edge of the lightbox as a set square guide). I then bulk scanned the sheets using our uni printers, which saves hours overall and gives a really clean, flat finish. No messing around with camera settings or alignment, and every scan is numbered so as long as they're all in order and the right way round then this saves so much time and faff. Future studio goals now include a printer like this.

 

"Crowding out the Arts" - the EBacc

So, there's been a shift in the education system in Britain since September in the form of a compulsory EBacc for secondary school students (consisting of core subjects English, Maths, Science, a language and history or geography). Noting the distinct lack of an art or design subject anywhere in that list? Yup, me too. What a disgrace!
What's even more of a disgrace is what Nicky Morgan (education secretary) said on the subject:

“if you wanted to do something, or even if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs”, but that “we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth – that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths)”.

How wonderful to see that in 2015 our govt. are finally stepping away from the one-size-fits-all approach to education! Oh wait...

What's even more of a travesty is how woefully uneducated our 'education secretary' seems to be on the growth of the Arts Sector throughout the most recent recession, something you can find out through the direct.gov website, if you could be bothered to educate yourself...

Key findings include:

• GVA (gross value added) of the Creative Industries was £71.4 billion in 2012 and accounted for 5.2 per cent of the UK Economy.
• GVA of the Creative Industries has increased by 15.6 per cent since 2008, compared with an increase of 5.4 per cent for the UK Economy as a whole.
• GVA of the Creative Industries increased by 9.4 per cent between 2011 and 2012, higher than for any of the other main UK industry sectors.
• The Creative Industries accounted for 1.68 million jobs in 2012, 5.6 per cent of the total number of jobs in the UK.
• Employment in the Creative Industries increased by 8.6 per cent between 2011 and 2012 a much higher rate than for the UK Economy as a whole (0.7%).
• The value of services exported by the Creative Industries was £15.5 billion in 2011, 8.0 per cent of total UK service exports.
• Between 2009 and 2011 the value of service exports from the Creative Industries increased by 16.1 per cent. This compares with an increase of 11.5 per cent for total UK service exports. 

Having just been involved in a Design Academy programme that drove forward the idea that 'design thinking' or 'creative thinking' or 'lateral thinking', whatever you want to call it, is possibly the most sought after commodity employers are now looking for in their potential employees industry-wide; I think it's a crying shame that our schooling system is not making room for the development of these skills. Especially as, during said programme, I was taught that my skills were not limited to aesthetic design, but actually that I could use them to target social issues (something I'm sure is not included as part of the 'Creative Industries' per se mentioned in the govt. stats above).  I am in no way arguing that the Arts are more beneficial than the Sciences or Humanities, but rather that denying they have any worth at all in the working world is ignorant.

The biggest, most lucrative companies in the world such as Google and Apple have specialists and technicians yes, but they also hire whole departments of designers, because their companies are run on innovation and they have been smart enough to realise the worth of such people and skills. It's argued that the best ideas and innovations come from subject cross-divides. How can that ever happen if everyone is brought up learning the exact same skills?  

If you want even more reasons why an arts-deficient education system is set to fail our youth then Philip Pullman has some wonderful things to say about educating human beings rather than robots in this article from The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/20/philip-pullman-barbarian-arts-education-english-baccalaureate

Basically I'd just like to say, "Fuck off Nicky Morgan, and go do your homework." Rant over.  

The Bobs

YSP are playing host to an exhibition by Bob and Roberta Smith at the moment, which is a response to their National Arts Education Archive (I might need to check both of these things out!). Bob and Roberta Smith is a campaign artist who delves largely into social and political issues using typography and protest posters as the main form. The messages are simple and clear and I just thought that these works in particular are so closely linked to my essay about learning through illustration and animation.