Collaboration

What defines collaboration?

Working together to achieve a goal. It is a process where two or more people or organisations work together to achieve a shared goal. For example, an intreeging endeavour that is creative in nature, by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership. Teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources.

Proposal

Title of your Project:Fine Art/GDNM & Anthropomorphism

Field of Study | Describe your chosen subject area and your particular themes:Fine Art and New Media combinations. Digital editing Photography Stop motionPainting Illustration Painting and drawing Comics Mosaics Printmaking and imaging Fiber art Calligraphy Photography Sculpture Conceptual art Dance Theatre Film Architecture Games

Design Focus/Question/Problem/Proposition | Identify your design focus/question/problem/proposition:Can you construct a collaborative outcome involving art and new media and combining, drawing, movement capture, digital editing. We need to focus on each others skills and interests. My collaborative partner is a fine artist so I will need to explore there favourite artists and inspirational works. Equally, they will have to explore my interests within GDNM, branding, photography, digital editing and so on.

Context | What is the wider social, cultural, historical, economic context for your project:Fine Art, dance, new media, animation, sport.

Rationale | Why is the project important to you and to Graphic Design: New Media:I am interested in all aspects of this proposed collaboration. Artists include the likes of, Ralph Steadman (a personal favourite of my collaborative partner), Roy Lichenstein, Andy Warhol, and comic artists such as Jim Lee and Michael Turner. Also some of the collabarative works by Helickar and Lewis.

Methods | Describe how you are planning to carry out your project:Meetings and discussions, either in person or in contact via social media such as, Facebook, email, text messaging. We will need to establish what each others field of work is and our fields of interest within design. Research into each others own work and the work of others in the same field. From this we will develop an artefact or perhaps several artefacts.Explore fine art areas Explore your interests in GDNM Explore each others interests Overlapping of ideasCombine skillsDrawing/paintingPhotographingEditingPrototypes/artefactsDevelopmentFinal outcome(s).

Skills Evidence | Describe the practical and theoretical skills necessary to carry out the project:Research and understanding of collaboration. A knowledge of each others field of work and works that are related. We can also display the following skills:Drawing and fine art skillsAnimation Vector artPhotographyDigital editingKnowledge of appropriate software.

Predicted Resolutions | Describe what you are working towards producing:A series of posters that combine both new media and fine art skills – each poster will have an image, half of the image hand drawn and the other have vector illustrated.

Another artefact would be to create a stop frame animation of a dancer for example. Each frame will be hand drawn then photographed and edited using new media.

Bibliography | Use the Harvard Method to compile your references:cargocollective.com/smog

Comic Art Community. Michael Turner http://comicartcommunity.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=148

Ralph Steadman. (2004). Ralph Steadman.http://www.ralphsteadman.com/

Roy Lichenstein Foundation. Roy Lichenstein.http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/

The Warhol. (2011). Andy Warhol.http://www.warhol.org/

Joshua Davis Studios. Joshua Davis.http://www.joshuadavis.com/

http://www.uebele.com/en/aktuell.html

If You Could Collaborate. http://www.ifyoucould.co.uk/collaborate

Smog.http://cargocollective.com/smog

Collaboration

Research

After an initial meeting and exchanging a few emails I began by researching some of my collaborate partners’ favourite artists. These included, Ralph Steadman, Roy Lichenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Lee and Micheal Turner.

Ralph Steadman:Steadman is renowned for his political and social caricatures, cartoons and picture books. Some of his best known works are illustrations in the book Alice in Wondwerland, I Leonardo.

Andy Warhol:

Jim Lee:

After a bit more thinking we noticed that the charactors in the Alice in Wonderland story were anthropomorphic in nature. This presented us with a few ideas relating to human movement, such as dance.

Anthropomorphism:This is any attribution of human charactoristics to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, spirits or deities. “As a literacy device, anthropomorphism is strongly associated with art and storytelling where it has ancient roots. Most cultures possess a long-standing fable tradition with anthropomorphism animals as characters that can stand as commonly recognised types of human behaviour”. (Wikipedia, 2011).

We then looked for some more examples of anthropomorphism for inspiration:

Collaboration

We then hit a bit of a wall with the idea of creating a dance animation. We began looking further into human movement and thought about different sports including the London 2012 Olympics. This then gave us the idea of creating an animation using the London 2012 logo. It would be made to come alive into an anthropomorphic character and perform movements of the various sports that make up the Olympics games. The animation would be a stop frame. My collab partner would draw the animation whilst I used my photography skills to take each frame and then we would together edit it.

7 Basic Human Movements:SquatLungePushPullBendTwistGait (walking)

Below are the first sketched and right are the first digital experiments to see if the logo could be made into something anthropomorphic without changing manipulating it too much. At this stage we chose to represent only a handfull of the events, these were running, long jump, cycling, diving and weightlifting.

It then dawned on me that we may have copyright issues with using the logo as part of our experiments. However, since the animation would be hand drawn and not an exact copy of the logo we decided to go ahead and make the animation. There was no harm intended so we didn’t see why there should be a problem at this stage and we weren’t even sure if it would work let alone be worth uploading to a video hosting website.

Below are some screenshots of the animation:

www.vimeo.com/35003446

Collaboration

DevelopmentFollowing on from the animation we had a re-think of ideas, below is what we came up with.

1. Going allong similar lines as the current idea but changing it slightly – instead of the logo breaking up we could show a selection of flags moving in the movement of each sport that we have chosen to represent. Another way of showing this concept could be using little charactors that we design from scratch.

2. A collage of the movements within the games. Something like that shown below but our own interpretation.

3. The words ‘London 2012′ break up and form little anthropomorphic letters representing different sports.

The ideas could be combined to create our own promotional material for London 2012.

Continueing to look at human movement:I already had some knowledge on human anotomy so I thought we would look at motor units and motor patterns.

“Motor unit recruitment is the progressive activation of a muscle by successive recruitment of contractile units (motor units) to accomplish increasing gradations of contractile strength. A motor unit consists of one motor neuron and all of the muscle fibers it contracts. All muscles consist of a number of motor units and the fibers belonging to a motor unit are dispersed and intermingle amongst fibers of other units. The muscle fibers belonging to one motor unit can be spread throughout part, or most of the entire muscle, depending on the number of fibers and size of the muscle. When a motor neuron is activated, all of the muscle fibers innervated by the motor neuron are stimulated and contract. The activation of one motor neuron will result in a weak but distributed muscle contraction. The activation of more motor neurons will result in more muscle fibers being activated, and therefore a stronger muscle contraction. Motor unit recruitment is a measure of how many motor neurons are activated in a particular muscle, and therefore is a measure of how many muscle fibers of that muscle are activated. The higher the recruitment the stronger the muscle contraction will be. Motor units are generally recruited in order of smallest to largest (fewest fibers to most fibers) as contraction increases.” (Wikipedia, 2012).

“Central pattern generators (CPGs) are neural networks that produce rhythmic patterned outputs without sensory feedback. CPGs have been shown to produce rhythmic outputs resembling normal “rhythmic motor pattern production” even in isolation from motor and sensory feedback from limbs and other muscle targets. To be classified as a rhythmic generator, a CPG requires: 1. “two or more processes that interact such that each process sequentially increases and decreases, and 2. that, as a result of this interaction, the system repeatedly returns to its starting condition.” (Wikipedia, 2011).

Pictogram IdeaSince our animation is anthropomorphic and relates to human movement, being anthropomorphic in it’s nature, we came up with the idea of having a try at re-designing the pictograms for the London 2012 games. There would be a hand drawn version and a digitally illustrated version. I began to look at existing pictogram examples whilst my partner researched the previous and current Olympic pictograms for inspiration. It would have been nice to design the logo ourselves rather than use the existing one in our animation. However we were a little short of time at this stage and it was looking unlikely.

Pictured right are some the Atlanta pictograms designed by Malcolm Grear:

Some of the London 2012 Pictograms designed by SomeOne are pictured below:

Below are examples from Munich (top row), Moscow, Tokyo, Mexico, Athens, Barcelona, Sydney and, finally, the Beijing pictograms:

Collaboration

Pictogram DevelopmentMy collab partner began sketching the first ideas:

Colour pallette

The first sketch to the right was inspired by the rings of the Olympic logo.

We looked at previous Olympic emblems and wanted to know if there was a meaning behind the rings in the recent logo design. The logo is made up of 5 interlocking rings, coloured blue, yellow, black, green and red. They were originally designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The emblem was supposed to represent the world congress of 1914. The ring colours and white background are those that appeared on all the national flags of the world at that time.

Below are some of the past emblems.

After deciding which sketched idea to go with we created a colour pallette using the colours from the Olympic rings. The pink was taken from our animation and was used on our first digital drawing of the pictograms, pictured below. The circles were filled as we felt that this created a stronger visual, we were influenced from our animation and existing pictograms. The nature of pictograms is a silhouette like figure.

The colours will be chosen from the colour pallette of the Olympic rings and will be blue, white and red as the games are being hosted in London and these are the colours of the flag of Great Britain.

Collaboration