old illustration

Evaluation

When we were first briefed on Visual Language, I felt excited and motivated by the amount of ideas that sprung to mind. However, I think I let myself down by not putting all of these in to action much sooner. I spent much of the Christmas holidays deliberating over how I could use my chosen theme of taxidermy to produce something visually pleasing, interesting and different to work I have done before. Once back at college I solidified my ideas a little more by experimenting with collage and illustration, and decided to make an animation rather than a book. I chose to illustrate it because I personally prefer hand-drawn animation and enjoy doing it. However, creating over one hundred images took a lot longer than expected and as the exhibition and deadline approached, I decided I would still put the images I had together as an animation, but would also bind them in to a flipbook to have something a little more substantial than a 20 second long animation.

I was originally interested in using taxidermy as a theme so I could document individual taxidermists’ work, and find out a bit more about why and how people get in to the profession. However, I realised early on in the brief that the best way to do so would be photography and text, and neither of these appeal to me. I am definitely not a photographer and illustration just didn’t seem to be the right method to use. So instead I decided I wanted to make something less serious, and create an animation that was fairly comical but also dark. The visual story of a half-woman/half-fox creature whose own face evolves in to scissors and chops the top of her head off, then gets stuffed and stitched make the idea of taxidermy more relatable to a human and shows how vulnerable an animal can actually be.

I encountered a few problems when preparing my image sequence to be bound as a flipbook. Firstly, I had to edit each photo individually because the paper I had used to illustrate on to was slightly off-white, and therefore would have printed a strange colour on to white paper. After much repetitive playing around with levels on Photoshop and re-sizing images so they would sit on the same place on each page, I had my finished images. I have now learnt that I should never use the guillotine in college for anything I need to be completely straight, as I used the studio one to cut my pages down to size (using the crop marks I had set on InDesign) and they ended up all slightly different sizes. Fortunately I was able to even them all out in the Vernon Street print room, and the binding process was very simple and went smoothly.

Despite having my book and animation ideas sorted, I was still unsure as to what I wanted for my wall piece. I didn’t want to use any images similar to those in my animation and so decided to do something completely different, but still sticking to the theme of taxidermy. Plus, I felt I had concentrated the vast majority of my time on my flipbook and animation, that the wall piece and postcard became more of an afterthought. I’m disappointed I didn’t leave myself enough time to use a drop in session and screen print my taxidermied lady illustration, but I printed it out in the professional print room on matt A2 paper instead. I chose to use the same image for my postcard to make it more like how it is in an art gallery as I also thought from reading the brief that the postcards were to be sold.

I have some regrets about how I tackled this brief. Firstly, I wish I had documented more of my processes through photography to show the making of the flipbook in action e.g. me sitting at the light box drawing each one. I feel this gives you more of an insight in to how I made my pieces, and makes a blog more interesting to look through. Once again, I should have thought more about the time we had to complete the brief and planned around this. I should have used my time off at Christmas more wisely if I wanted to produce the standard of work I feel I am capable of. Although I am pleased with how everything came together in the end.

My flipbook is just as I wished it would be and functions pretty well. Despite not having done in time for the exhibition, I have since given it to people to trial and have had good feedback. Maybe next time I would consider a slightly less weighty paper and see if it could flip slightly easier. This brief has reminded me of what I really enjoy, which is animating. Next time I would like to try making even more detailed flipbooks of different shapes and sizes, with different binds. I’m glad I had a couple of days in the Vernon Street print room at the beginning of this brief too, as it has taught me more of what is available for me to use in the future, and how to do so through making mock up books. I am also glad that I had the opportunity to use InDesign, even if only briefly. I have been to tutorials on the programme before, but never really had to the chance to apply it to any of my work. Paul Price was extremely helpful and taught me how to fit my images to each page and prepare them for print. This is a skill I feel will be useful in the future.

The biggest thing Visual Language has shown me is that I am capable of visualising an idea and making it a reality. I often have a head filled with ideas and don’t follow them through because I underestimate myself a lot. I am definitely not completely satisfied with all my outcomes of this brief, as I’m still trying to learn the best way to utilize my time and make the best of myself. But I am very happy with my flipbook, which was what I focused on the most.

Binding my Book

After laying out each page using a template on InDesign, I then printed them out on plain A4 paper (the front and back cover printed on brown paper). Because I couldn't use any of the facilities in Vernon Street until a couple of days before the deadline, I began cutting my pages down in groups of 10 at a time, using the college guillotine (which was a very bad idea as it was extremely blunt). The next day I went to Vernon Street in the morning and began to bind my book. I used a perfect bind, as this was the simplest way to bind a chunky flip book like mine. I did this by:

1. lining up the pages at the side where they will be bind, placing them between two pieces of card, and clamping them in a big metal press.

2. Use a tool to make small incisions every few millimeters all the way along the edge. (This is to ensure the glue gets to all the pages, as they were not 100% in line with each other).

3. Put a thin layer of glue along the binding edge and leave to dry. Then repeat this 3 times.

4. Once dry, I took the glued pages out of the press and glued one side of my front and back cover and stuck on.

5. Finally, I chose black material to measure and then glue around the bind, to keep it in place and hide the edge.

Right at the end, I used one of the guillotines to chop along the other 3 sides to make the book perfectly straight. It flips surprisingly well and am very pleased with the way it has turned out.

Postcard

I decided to use my wall piece as my postcard image too, like in a gallery when you can purchase postcards of artwork you have seen and liked. It was simple enough to fit on to an A5 size canvas in Photoshop, but I didn't want to stretch the image and was left with white bands at the top and bottom of the image. I decided to fill them black to frame the piece and make it very slightly different from my big piece.

Making an Intro

When I put my series of images together at 6 frames per second on Quicktime, it was only 16 seconds long (which was expected because it was made to be a flip book) and I wanted it to just be a couple of seconds longer. Plus I realised it went in to the animation way too quickly. It needed a short intro, with just the name of the piece. So I printed out the words 'Foxy Lady' in Helvetica Neue Light, and traced over it a few times, and added fox eyes in the 'o's to blink as it played. I'm going to bind this introduction in to my flipbook too, as a few opening pages to introduce it.

Choosing a Size

I have made a flip book before, but that was on my BTEC course and was done very unprofessionally. Therefore I'm struggling with knowing what would be a good size to make it. I went and spoke to Neil in Vernon street about what kind of size and he said what everyone else has said: it has to be comfortable to hold and flip. I feel like I want someone to just tell me a size to make it all easier. But I think I'm going to make it 148mm x 105mm, as just judging from a looking at a piece of paper that size it looks like it could work. It's also a similar size to other flip books I've seen and tried. I'm going to Japanese stitch it so the binding shouldn't interfere with the front page.

Adding Music in Quicktime

After making my image sequence in to a Quicktime movie, I still needed to add some music to it. This was easy enough to do, as I could also capture the exact part of the song I wanted by opening it in Quicktime and moving the cursors at the bottom and saving it as a new file. I then just copied it and added it to the movie. Simple. Quicktime really saved me on this project, as I needed to put it all together really last minute and upload it to the show reel.

Using Quicktime

Considering I left putting the animation together until the very last minute, I decided to use Quicktime to select a image sequence. I had a problem though, because they have to be numbered in the correct order to be put together and as I added my intro afterwards, I had to re-number all the image from 1- 115. It was a really laborious process, but once done the animation was done in a couple of seconds.

When it comes to uploading my animation I may have to try and export it using Final Cut, because it is a wierd portrait size and you can add black bars down the side in Final Cut to make it the correct size to upload.