Website Progress

Project 3 (main site)


Phase 2 Project

Project 2

Brad Candullo

http://www.bcandullo.com/

Brad Candullo is a freelance website developer and designer living in New York. He also does many other digital forms of advertising such as logos, fliers, and flash games. Candullo's websites have a heavy focus on functionality relating to the source material. His clients range from large corporations to other freelance artists like himself. His websites reflect the scale and the function of the client. For example, his website for Atlantis Centers, a program for children with SIB, is very simple and professional, with information clearly accessible.

http://www.atlantiscenters.com/

However a website he designed for an independent jewelry designer is less traditional and more creative, and still relatively easy to navigate. Since it was created using Flash, the website also features music and a level of interactivity. The pages of the notebook on the home page turn when pulled or when the appropriate link is clicked below.

Site no longer available.

His sites reflect very well the intentions and needs of his clientele. However there is nothing truly innovative about his work. This is not necessarily a negative thing in the world of website design- after all, commercial websites must be designed to accommodate as many different people as they can, and there are many templates that have become standard. It may also be that the type of clients Candullo has received have not wanted anything groundbreaking from him either. His home site hints at the potential for more creativity than has been demanded of him in the top logo. In fact, it has a unique way of presenting his resume, with a top link that redirects down to a contact/resume form that exists at the bottom of every page. Overall Canullo's work is very solid, however I believe he has the potential to create more groundbreaking things than he has given the chance.

Sources:

http://www.bcandullo.com/

http://www.atlantiscenters.com/

Website Background Concept

It's an idea, though it's a little bleak and that upper left corner definitely needs some work.

Richard Wright

Still from Heliocentrum (1995)

Richard Wright is a British animator and media artist who has worked at both London Metropolitan University and at the National Film and Television School. His works are mainly animations created by splicing together and animating different still images as well as footage from different sources.

One such film, called simply "10,000 Copyrighted Images," is made up of a series of 10,000 images pulled from a search engine. The images flash by far too quickly to get more that the barest idea of what any of them contain, yet, as Wright points out, they are all considered instances of theft.


10,000 Copyrighted Images from Richard Wright on Vimeo.

 It is a clear comment on the strange plight of digital art in an art world that still plays by rules made for paintings on canvas.

Another of Wright's short films, Heliocentrum, described as "Political documentary meets baroque rave video," is a series of animated images familiar to the era of Louis XIV accompanied by frenzied baroque-style music and voiceover narration in the form of a series of quotes from the king himself. The movement style Wright chose for the piece is at first disconcerting, herky-jerky and false-looking, until it dawns that much of the movement is actually giving the impression of a puppeteer just off screen, pulling on strings and sliding things around: the sort of limited animation technology that existed in the time of Louis XIV. This is very apparent in one of the first shots of falling, rotating baroque images- they quiver and jerk in a manner very similar to a hanging mobile. Wright also mixes the traditional images with more modern animation, such as portraits being grainy and distorted like television screens with bad reception. By the end, the music intensifies and becomes foreboding, and a reading of an angry letter from the archbishop to the king plays over footage from the Poll Tax Riots in 1990.


Heliocentrum from Richard Wright on Vimeo.

In the film there is a clear parallel drawn between past and present failures, and the meshing of the two via animation is very interestingly handled.

Richard Wright effectively uses his animations as a way to convey his ideas to the viewer, however at times they may exist only for meaning- I couldn't really stand to watch more than a few seconds of "10,000 Copyrighted Images," though the message was quite clear at the start. Even in his more polished works the meaning is not particularly original. In Heliocentrum it was not surprising to me that  he would compare the failings of King Louis with the failings of the British government in 1990, though I know little about the history of either. It's just the kind of thing that has been done many times before. His meshings of images and motions and music are pretty to look at, but they are not really groundbreaking. If he created something with a less contrived meaning I might derive much more from it that I do any of his works with the meanings handed to me.

Visit his Vimeo profile to view more of his films.

References
http://eyebeam.org/people/richard-wright
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_artist/w/r_wright
http://vimeo.com/futurenatural

Word Art Cuttlefish

Original

Edited

Redesigned Logo

Everything looks better with more cat in it.

Original

Edited

Project Two Progress

Here's what I've got so far. Not ver much, unfortunately, but at least my face is fairly terrifying. I'm not really sure what direction I should go with it so suggestions would be appreciated.

Musical Line Drawing

Traces

Line art.

Signature.

Self-Portraits

I tried to pick photos that showed aspects of my personality. Haha. Well.

Line Art Scans

Brima (from Mute)

Signature

The Dream

Photo Editing

Before

After

Before

After

Eden

I'm not satisfied with it, but I think I reached the limit of my ability here. 12 different images used.

What

I don't even...

Chinatown Edit

Joseph Farbrook

Joseph Farbrook is an American multi-media artist who creates animation combined with real-life objects and virtual reality machinima. He is currently a professor at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute. Farbrook's work focuses on the effects that technology and virtual reality have on the way humans think. Many of his projects are surreal twists on everyday objects, for example a coffee grinder.

Medium Grind (2008)

View it

This work likely represents the idea of a person waking up in the morning to his coffee and turning on his TV to see news of carnage around the world. Most of Farbrook's works suggest similar ideas. Many are much more warped and surreal, as in the case of "Simuclara."

Screenshot from Simuclara (2004)

View it

The work explores the ways that video games and virtual reality distort our ideas of reality, showing us familiar objects like houses and cows but warping them over with unnerving images and suggestions. 

"Oftentimes, playing a long session with a videogame, especially a first-person-shooter, can make one feel that there will be danger lurking around every corner. Sudden movements trigger an emotional rise and an adrenaline surge. The activity of the videogame temporarily leaks into reality." - Farbrook

I find Farbrook's work both unpleasant and fascinating. He is not afraid to make his viewers somewhat uncomfortable with both the images and the ideas he presents to them. They often have a don't-want-to-look-but-can't-look-away quality to them. I think this makes his messages very effective. I can't find very many things to critique from what I've seen of his work. What I might critique is that at times his work treads too far into the manipulative side without giving sufficient emotional payoff.

Sources:

http://rhizome.org/profiles/farbrook/

http://farbrook.net/

Covers

I write a lot. I participate in NaNoWriMo every year, a writing challenge that requires you to write a 50,000 novel in 30 days. For the last few years the NaNoWriMo site has offered a free proof copy of your novel if you win. I've made covers digitally for these books (with a little help from my friends). Part of the reason I'm taking this class is to try and get better at it, as you will see.

NaNoWriMo 2009: The Prince of Cats

The book is dark, with cats displayed in a metaphorically evil light, so I tried to make the cover look a little bit unsettling. That's a picture of my own cat, altered in iPhoto to be black and white with high contrast. Thinking back I'm not sure why I picked this picture- she's not in the best pose.

NaNoWriMo 2010: The Monoceros' Trial

I asked a friend to draw me a cover concept, and she came up with this picture and scanned it.

Another friend who was good with photoshop colored it, cropped it to my dimensions, and added the background.

Finally, I added the words in Seashore.

NaNoWriMo 2011: Mute

The parrot is free domain art- I added the squiggle in Seashore. The font I had to search for, though I can't remember the name. I kind of wanted it to look like a battered old nature book. It's not quite final.

And yes, I have hard copies of these (aside from Mute, which I haven't finished editing yet). Both of these were taken when I first got them in the mail; you can see the excitement.

I'm a real author! (Kinda.)

Animations

Last year I got the trial version of Flash and played around a bit with animating. Most of these are loops/walk cycles since I was experimenting with animal motion. A lot of them look a bit weird because Flash kept moving parts of frames forward when it compressed them. Quite strange. But since my trial has long since expired they're the only versions I have.

Gorilla Walk Cycle (back legs aren't meant to belong to a gorilla)

Bat Wing Flick

Rat Rear

Bird Walk

Line Wiggle

Dragon

Dad

Scans

First, my hand.

A few household items.

I brought some friends along to scan.

Scanner + water + flighty axolotl = strange images

And finally some of my creature sketches for my sci-fi/fantasy novels.

From Mute.

From Bleak.

From The Monoceros' Trial.

From Bleak.

From The Monoceros' Trial.