Artist Research: Constellations

My focus for space was on Constellations. Although seemingly not that important, my idea was to concentrate on using Constellations as a way of presentation and for looking at layout styles, as they're simplistic but effective at presenting information.

An example is above, a project from Second Story, a company who at a event for Engineers created a way of allowing them to rank the most important topics to be discussed, by using an interactive mind map that allowed their names to appear on the info-graphic and be presented out onto touch screens.

This way of presenting data in a way that wasn't as boring as usual was something that I wanted to focus on. By using constellations, something that I initially researched in space, it was a way of combining the two together and creating something that was visually stunning to look at and also a way of getting the company to interact with one another, as this was a way of talking. The work was hugely influential on me because of the style of doing this; if I were to re-create this idea I would use after effects to generate points that would move around, similar as shown in the video.

Artist Research: Linkin Park

Waiting For The End is a 2010 music video by Linkin Park for their 4th album, A Thousand Suns. The video is an experimentation of composting, animation, 3-D tracking and design by a company called Ghost Town Media.

Screen Shot Stills

The video is created using a layered effect by putting the clips through several times into software, to get the broken look and the "burst" effect from the video. The blue-hue toned colour is then placed over the top finally. Sytheneyes is used to attach objects to the band members, particularly the 3-D enhancements and geometric lines.

I selected the video because of the special effects used, they remind me of constellations especially in the way the geometric lines pan out across the band members; I wanted to re-create this for my own work, possibly looking at doing something similar for photographs or a map of myself, looking at Grayson Perry for inspiration. 

Similarly, Gabriel from itsknowone, created and collaborated with Ghost Town to create the SFX for their concerts for the A Thousand Suns Tour, and the video. Although they don't align with the music, I like the broken effect from them and the repeated use of overlapped videos. Gabriel has also worked alongside Marvel for the Captain America videos.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/29303105/Linkin-Park-A-Thousand-Suns-2010-Tour

http://itsknowone.com/70843/6061899/selects/captain-america-winter-soldier-feature-film

http://www.motionserved.com/gallery/925204/linkin-park-waiting-for-the-end

Artist Research: Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry - Map of Days

On my focus of maps, I chose to approach this in a more emotional point of view than the literal sense of the word map. By doing so, I looked at Grayson Perry, an English artist known mostly for ceramics. For a programme titled "Grayson Perry: Who Are You?", Perry met up with individuals across the country and decpited a self portrait of them; using ceramics, tapestry and painting to portray them - the idea was the "portraits" were not meant to be taken as just a drawing of themselves, but more of their personailties and traits.

His work is something that I've been inspired by, particularly his response to the map and how he creates his own interpretation of it - I would like to do something similar, maybe reflecting my life or including people in my life that branches off; I want to experiment with graphic styles or do something that requires a lot of time and effort, as usually I'm quite quick on Photoshop. I'd also like to possibly delve into making it interactive, or printing it off into a huge scale.

The Channel 4 Programme showed many examples of how Perry reflects a much more personal response to the work; his Map Of Days is a self portrait which shows street names coming off and important landmarks about his life, he writes traits about himself and the attention to detail is remarkable, shown below.