Today we had a workshop with DR. ME, a studio based in Manchester. I had not heard of the studio as their work is not something I look for in a studio. However, having said this I very much enjoyed the workshop and meeting Eddie and Ryan.
At the beginning of the workshop Eddie and Ryan explained that they were paired together randomly at university and planned to do this with our groups. I was paired with Anna Sergison. Anna's work is not closely linked to mine so I was confident that we would have a wide breadth of ideas.
The brief was titled A Day in the Life of DR ME. Eddie and Ryan explained in their opening talk that they were usually asked to produce more than one project in a day so they gave us 3 briefs to complete from 11.30 until 4pm. These briefs were;
- A Vinyl cover for Evain Christ's remix of Duga-3.
- A poster for Odonis Odonis.
- A self directed piece of artwork.
Anna and I set out timescales in order to ensure that all of the work was completed to the deadline. We gave ourselves between 11:30 and 1pm to complete the Vinyl then half an hour for lunch, 1:30 - 2:30 to complete the poster then 2:30 - 4pm to complete the self directed piece. I feel that these timescales were as realistic as could be in the short amount of time we were given to complete the briefs.
The Vinyl Cover
Brief:
Create a vinyl cover from the e-mail below.
"We're gonna be releasing a limited edition 12" of a mix Evian Christ made last year called duga-3...
http://www.dummymag.com/mixes/dummy-mix-130-evian-christ
We were discussing artwork concepts and Josh wondered if there was any way you could graphically represent the 10hz tapping sound that makes up the duga-3 transmission?
Important to mention right now is that we don't have a lot of time to do this, as this release is intended for record store day and thet have super tight deadlines, so we need thus by the end of today?
Dimensions 12" x 12"
The first thing that Anna and myself did was listen to the song to get a feel for the music. The artist was not someone I was familiar with which is a good thing in my eyes. I think that producing artwork for an artist that you like is a hard task whereas producing artwork for someone you do not know is slightly easier.
The song was quite repetitive and trance-like. We also wanted to look further into the background of the artist and the meaning behind the song.
The Duga-3 was an old Russian transmitter.
Wikipedia research:
Anna and I looked into the Duga-3 briefly in order to have some understanding of what the song was written about.
Duga-3 Russian:
Дуга-3 (NATO reporting name
Steel Yard) was a
Soviet over-the-horizon (OTH) radar system used as part of the Soviet
ABMearly-warning network. The system operated from July 1976 to December 1989. Two Duga-3 radars were deployed, one near
Chernobyl and
Chernihiv, the other in eastern
Siberia.
The Duga-3 systems were extremely powerful, over 10
MW in some cases, and broadcast in the
shortwave radio bands. They appeared without warning, sounding like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise at 10 Hz,
[1] which led to it being nicknamed the
Russian Woodpecker. The random frequency hops disrupted legitimate broadcast,
amateur radio, commercial aviation communications, utility transmissions, and resulted in thousands of complaints by many countries worldwide. The signal became such a nuisance that some receivers such as amateur radios and televisions actually began including 'Woodpecker Blankers' in their design.
__
We picked out several key words from the paragraph:
- Short-wave radio bands
- The Russian Woodpecker
- Repetitive pattern
- A nuisance
- The steel yard
- Soviet mind control
- Russia
- 20th Century
- Woodpecker
- 10hz
Both Anna and myself discussed the words we had picked out and decided to focus on the woodpecker. We discussed a few ideas and came up with the idea of showing a woodpecker pecking as the main feature on the vinyl cover. We wanted to show the movement with a flick-book concept but did not have enough time to do this and also we were concerned that the flick book did not fit the brief. We then thought that the best way to showcase the movement was to use a holographic paper which a person could interact with, this idea was obviously not realistic so we had to come up with a new way to show the movement. This took us a long time which really ate into our time to come up with something graphically pleasing with a meaning behind it. Anna chose to draw out the woodpecker in an animation style that we could manipulate on the computer to show movement. I decided to work on the background of the cover. We thought that the best background would include the duga-3 so I experimented with an illustration of the grid system and then used photoshop to manipulate images of the duga-3.
We scanned in the drawing of the woodpecker and manipulated it on ilLustrator to create the sense of movement. We then added it to the corner of the vinyl cover with the layered background.
Overall I was happy with the concept of the cover but not with the final outcome. I think that as a team we could have worked better together and more input from Anna would have been better for the outcome. I do however think that our ideas were very interesting and we could have produced something very impressive had we had more time.
Final Vinyl
__
Poster Design
The Brief:
Create a poster from the e-mail below.
Hey new poster please.
ODONIS ODONIS
+ Guests
Weds 18th April
Kraak Gallery
www.ticketline.co.uk
www.seetickets.com
www.wegottickets.com
Piccadilly Records
Oh! please have Saint Coltrane as support.
Dimensions A3 (297 X 420mm)
As we had taken such a long time to complete the first brief we did not have a lot of time to completed this section. Both Anna and myself decided to work on our own ideas and produced two individual poster designs. These designs were simply type based without any background so I decided to play around on photoshop and created a background similar to the one used on the ODONIS ODONIS website.
I used photographs to make up the colourful background of my poster.
INSERT IMAGE OF POSTER.
__
Self Directed art piece:
Eddie and Ryan told us about a project they had set up for themselves called 365 days of collage. This is a self driected project that they had come up with as a challenge. The last brief was to produce to piece of self directed artwork.
The Brief:
Create a piece of work EACH to no brief and for no reason other than the process of creativity and artistic freedom. The only rules are it must be 2D physical object and must be 23 x 16 cm. Be brave.
I wanted my piece to be specific to myself and my views as I do not like to produce anything without a purpose. I brainstormed all of the things that matter to me and the most important was Organ Donation. I feel very strongly about Organ Donation and feel that it should not be voluntary. I wanted to come up with a poster that would have been for the NHS to promote organ donation. I used one of my favourite illustrators, Anthony Peters as inspiration for the poster and I was very happy with the outcome and would like to extend it into a brief.
Overall the day was quite successful and also a nice break from other work. I will not be contacting DR ME as I do not think it is something that I would enjoy or benefit from.
