Essay Feedback - going forward

• put titles in italics, reference the year published/said
• remember to either put a space between paragraphs or indent
• use of quotes to start paragraphs is effective, find some that sum up the paragraph and start with them and then break them down
• explore the psychology of audience mentality more - why do people require a sense of safety (its probably Freudian)
• Introduce scholars don't just put their name, could be anyone
• work harder to integrate the quotes into the body of the text - like a pie - everything is mixed in, cant just plonk all the cherries on top can you?
• ITALICS FOR MOVIE TITLES TOO
• reference specific comic books, dont assume the reader knows (they aren't a nerd loser like you)
• link case studies more directly to themes and context, direct connections to provide synergy throughout the essay
• try to stay away from opinions, form counter arguments more often to display an impartial evaluation
• make the case studies flow into each other in some way so the chapter feels cohesive, not just one after another
• link case studies together in accordance with how they link to the themes present in chapter 2
• delve into the psychology more, storytelling as a human preoccupation, why?
• The Hero's Journey - Joseph Campbell
• assess changing media, how people respond to films - youtube reviews, rotten tomatoes, news sites dedicated to pop culture, hard to escape and form your own opinions

Inferno Squad & digital tests

Looking into character in Star Wars has been enjoyable as this module progresses because it's something I’ve been building into the fabric of my brain since I could walk. The universe is something I’m familiar with on a level that reaches a brand of stupid, why does anyone need to know every pilot appearing in every shot of a New Hope?
Nobody, but it has been helpful for once.
These aren't really meant for anything but I wanted to see how to visually communicate a villain as a protagonist, as in the game Battlefront 2, you play as agents of the devilish Galactic Empire, rather than the usual brave rebel heroes. I think this is a really interesting and different idea narratively, and as my project is about the emergence of different and interesting narrative ideas, I’m fully into it.

I won’t actually play the game because who has time for THAT in third year BUT I have taken time to read some of the supporting materials (books, comics) to get a grip on these reverse heroes. Again i really enjoyed combining the hand drawn with the block digital for these, even if they are just sort of tests.

Hellboy(s and girls)

I’ve been trying to conjoin the two disparate aspects of my work for a long time now, but I feel with this module I’m starting to understand how. I do a lot of analogue character work but they always feel unfinished to me. And last year I started doing digital work based around shape, colour and text, but again I always feel like they’re missing something.
SO
I spent the summer trying to understand the direction I want to be going in with these two methods seperately, so I could mash them up together with a better effect. And I’m happy!

Block colour is something I enjoy interpreting, more so than tone and texture as I find myself overcomplicating things. So experimenting with these shape based illustrations that also have a hand drawn element has been exciting to finally realise. I achieved a thing that I said i would!

Into the Woods with Joseph Campbell

Into the Woods by John Yorke is a book I first found during 504 last year, thanks to Teresa lending me a copy for research into my Shakespeare ‘about the author’ project (thank you!). It focuses on how stories work and why we feel the need to tell them. The basis of my ideas for Shakespeare last year was centred around how at the time, his plays were written for the common folk who couldn’t read or afford education, so went to the theatre for entertainment, much as common people flock to the cinema today. This explains why they are full to bursting with sex and violence, like the blockbusters of today, they were made to connect with the masses. But in the context of modern academia, they are viewed on a heightened pedestal as if they are reserved only for the highly educated, and can't be understood by common people. (I’m not saying Shakespeare isn't genius because it is, but I think it's genius lies in how it can speak to the human soul in everyone who reads it, rather than as some elitist high concept outsider’s assessment of the human race)

Anyway, these ideas started feeling relevant again as I’m looking at cinema and the reasons for which films are made today.
Also, Joseph Campbell is mentioned throughout books on story structure and narrative themes, so I went to the source and started reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The main idea is to connect these theories and examples to the current examples I have started looking at, in the superhero movie, star wars franchise etc. I find it really interesting that although Campbell’s writing predates literally all of the examples I’m using, his critiques still apply directly to characters and plots that he never even would have heard of. It’s a good indicator that story is universal, not only cross cultural but without regard to the constraints of time, either.

Neil Gaiman's recent Norse Mythology book has also been helpful in understanding the legacy of a story and how it can last across generations.

Development - EXCALIBUR

Following the focus of some advice discussed in my tutorials, I'm keeping with the idea of universal characters, identifiable by their archetypes but differing in their specifics.

I thought a good place to start thinking about this was with the concept of Excalibur, the weapon of the hero. Lightsabers, magic swords, staffs, lucky pistols and demon fists are just a few examples of the way these weapons reoccur constantly through storytelling.

Loosely drawing these from memory was a great exercise in getting back to sketchbook mentality, killing your darlings and focusing on producing ideas rather than being hung up on clean refinement.

Timelines & archetypes

Character timelines - archetypes
Characters are universal for a reason. There is a reason we all feel some connection when Frodo sits reading his book, looking beyond the Shire. Or when Harry sits under the stairs thinking of leaving his miserable life with the Dursleys behind. Or when Luke Skywalker looks out at the twin suns of Tatooine wishing to escape his dusty farming life for adventure.
Some characters are built to relate to us in this way, no matter where you are in life you always have some form of dream of change, it's something at the core of the human brain, and film has a direct line to this. Like a big mining tunnel. Of emotion.
Anyway.
In a similar vein, these characters, because of their universality (is that a word, spell check isn't tripping me up on it so I think it is) become iconic because each of us feels a certain sense of ownership over them. All fans of Batman have their favourite actor, each Star Wars fan a favourite character.
As a simple way of exploring this idea of legacy and iconicity (that one can't be a word surely, I’m unstoppable) I started making these rudimentary time maps to start illustrating how different characters have evolved drastically different ways over the years.

Changing Direction - tutorial notes

Changing direction - more focus on film and lack of originality there

After talking to Rachel in my tutorial I found that I really want to focus on film for this project. Film and film culture has always been something that has informed all of my work in other modules, but I’ve never really utilised it in this module before. I don’t know why, because I’m constantly thinking and talking about film, so I may as well put it to good use.

The main driver behind the tutorial was the lack of originality in films, and how people have come to accept certain tropes and archetypes in modern cinema. How is it that some films come out to critical adoration and make no money at all, and some come out to middling/bored critical response and make hundreds of millions without fail.

I think there must be some sort of link between what the human brain desires in entertainment/escapism, and how movies respond to that. Some films actively seem to go against this to make us question things about ourselves, and some of them hold our hands through every scene to make sure we have a lovely nice time and tell all our friends to buy tickets as well.
I want to understand why these decisions are made and how they can affect an audience.

Notes from Presentations

COP3 Presentation - gentrification, class affecting the arts, working class background artist

Now that the end of the course is looming (I won’t accept reality don’t make me) I want to use CoP to explore themes I’ve been considering since the beginning of the course. It’s probably poetic.
Towards the end of last year I started moving my ideas more away from politics and towards societal research. Politics has been a driving force behind a lot of my context of practice work so far on the course, and I feel that while I have had interesting projects before, I have to be honest with my work at this stage.
POLITICS IS HARD.
And not hard to write about specifically, just a very taxing topic. And I realise that it has to be a taxing topic as it is a very important part of how the world works and how we respond to it. But after a certain point it becomes a bit overbearing and difficult to stay motivated on, as the political climate recently is incredibly bleak.
SO
This year I want to use this module to get away from that and explore things I enjoy without all the extra stress of analysing the political climate as I go, as towards the end of last year it became a bit of a slog.
I’ve started to look at the differing levels of society and how each one approaches the arts. Coming from a working class background to an illustration degree is something a lot of people I went to school with and grew up around don’t really seem to understand, and I conversely want to understand why. Why does illustration sometimes seem reserved for people from successful backgrounds drawing nice typography and smiley faces for use on lovely mugs and pillows and things. Why shouldn’t more people from different backgrounds be encouraged to come onto courses like ours and make weird stuff? I want to start to find out why certain people expect certain things.

COP 6 IS REAL

COP3 Presentation - gentrification, class affecting the arts, working class background artist

Now that the end of the course is looming (I won’t accept reality don’t make me) I want to use CoP to explore themes I’ve been considering since the beginning of the course. It’s probably poetic.
Towards the end of last year I started moving my ideas more away from politics and towards societal research. Politics has been a driving force behind a lot of my context of practice work so far on the course, and I feel that while I have had interesting projects before, I have to be honest with my work at this stage.
POLITICS IS HARD.
And not hard to write about specifically, just a very taxing topic. And I realise that it has to be a taxing topic as it is a very important part of how the world works and how we respond to it. But after a certain point it becomes a bit overbearing and difficult to stay motivated on, as the political climate recently is incredibly bleak.
SO
This year I want to use this module to get away from that and explore things I enjoy without all the extra stress of analysing the political climate as I go, as towards the end of last year it became a bit of a slog.
I’ve started to look at the differing levels of society and how each one approaches the arts. Coming from a working class background to an illustration degree is something a lot of people I went to school with and grew up around don’t really seem to understand, and I conversely want to understand why. Why does illustration sometimes seem reserved for people from successful backgrounds drawing nice typography and smiley faces for use on lovely mugs and pillows and things. Why shouldn’t more people from different backgrounds be encouraged to come onto courses like ours and make weird stuff? I want to start to find out why certain people expect certain things.

End of Module Evaluation

COP3 research proposal

Final Essay Issuu post

Visual evaluation of synthesis

My evaluation of synthesis for the last study task

Trying to link essay and journal

As my project has moved on, I've moved away from directly political illustration and satire and moved into a quite cynical visual assessment of the impact of visual communication on society (in an effort to make my journal coherent next to my essay)

The theories I've been using in my essay mostly all predate social media, but speak of a society in a unified sense that was theoretical in the 20th century, but is commonplace today with the prevalence of Twitter, Instagram and hundreds of conflicting news outlets all contained in our pockets. To reflect this, I've utilised the visual tests in my journal as a way of interpreting the messages of these theories into a modern context.

The obsession with ones virtual self, finding our perfect self by curating ourselves so only the best parts are left, are not new ideals that came with social media, for hundreds of years the upper echelons of society have presented edited versions of themselves to the outside world, the only difference is that now everyone is given that sense of self importance and the ability to be as outlandish or as mysterious as they like.

I've tried to be playfully morbid (if thats a sound thing to do, or even a thing at all) with these images to represent the duality of this element of our society - the flaws are evident and even still it prevails and we all use it willingly anyway, so I suppose it wins. But thats no reason to not make some fun of it.

Social Media riot gear

In keeping with the ideas of subverting icons and logos I started to further develop some ideas I had early on in the year with mashing up war/riot equipment with social media imagery, to communicate the combative relationships that they encourage in terms of competition (likes, followers, retweets etc). I think these are probably some of the strongest images in my journal and the ones I would like to develop further in a project in the future.

Icons + symbols bastardisation

In relation to the theories I've been reading up on about the connection between grunge music and postmodern art, a theme I've come across a lot is bastardisation.
The art of taking existing imagery/sound and basically shredding it and subverting the meaning to make a statement or more often, a mockery. Seeing as I'm awful at collage, I decided to have a go at some digital mock ups.

I'm enjoying working like this as it allows me to play with multiple ideas and interpretations without having to repeat whole drawings or scans. Digital is really helping me find my feet with this journal, as I was really struggling to come up with ideas purely on paper to fill it with.

Nirvana and the Origin of the smiley face

One of the images I've chosen to analyse in my essay is the iconic logo of Nirvana, the addled smiley face that appears everywhere on t shirts, jumpers, badges, bags and any other product that it'll fit on.

I'm trying to understand why certain icons are adopted by the mainstream and why their original meaning is of no relevance to the general audience that just likes the look of it.

I looked at other famous smiley faces, ranging from the classic 1960s one

To the bloodstained omen from Alan Moore's Watchmen:


Each of these faces has its origins in the fact that a human brain is designed to recognise familiar human faces in any place it can, so this simple arrangement of circles and lines can immediately be communicated somehow as a person. But each one stands for a different ideal, and a different generation.
The Watchmen smiley with its bloodstain is meant to resemble the metaphorical Doomsday Clock, with the blood acting as a hand on the clock being positioned to 5 to midnight, representing the looming nuclear threat prevalent in the book. This is to represent the paranoia of the post-nuclear western world, that felt that World War 3 could break out at any time while the world was trying to recover as a whole from WW2.
Conversely, the Nirvana smiley is a parody of the duality of capitalism; the smiley face can be found everywhere from children's picture books to the underside of mind altering pills. The fact that consumerism dictates that everything is everywhere for everyone means that integrity is lost, and anything can be taken and done with however the user chooses. Ironically, the Nirvana smiley has been consumed by this ideal, as in a world without Kurt Cobain the symbol has become little more than a H&M brand that's guaranteed to sell to 13-17 year old middle class teens who want to feel like they're rebelling. The context of the anarchic origins of the image have been lost, and there are people who think Nirvana is an actual clothing brand. I'm trying to understand in my essay the effect that this sort of cultural ignorance has on how we as a society not only produce, but consume art.

Essay changes + focusing

After having a proper analysis of my essay draft feedback and talking the direction through, I feel that due to the theories I have been looking up, the books I've been reading and the essence of my question, I need to direct my focus in terms of the journal and the essay, in the direction of an analysis of society and social media. I think the strongest parts of the essay are those that talk about the impact of social media on peoples mental states and how we perceive each other in an age where everything is connected and immediately available.

Further journal exploration, Black panthers

Now that 504 has been handed in I've felt more comfortable dedicating time to my journal again. I've been moving forward heavily with digital work in Responsive recently so I've carried that over into COP as well, as that digitised, minimal aesthetic sort of sums up the type of visual communication I'm trying to analyse in my essay; short sweet easy to grasp images that strike a certain chord with the right audience and communicate an idea clearly. I began by researching black panther art from the 1960s, as it's a movement I find interesting as it was a group of people pissed off with years of abuse and couldn't see a peaceful resolution. While I don't agree with the violence side of things, I can understand the feeling of desperation and giving up on tirelessly trying the same method for years and years. I've started to replicate the stark imagery of the posters used in this time, using block contrasting colours and dense shapes.
The desperate violent approach to the situation of Civil Rights is fascinating to me as it is just so no nonsense and so radical that it's clear why it wasn't accepted, as it was too extreme for those peacefully protesting, and if anything it just further aggravated those people trying to keep black people down at the time. But simultaneously there's a sort of idealistic, cinematic element to how  they acted, going all guns blazing against the society that had once kept them as slaves. Even today there is a lot of anger and repressed rage concerning the whole issue, which has improved since the 1960s, but obviously is nowhere near perfect, as police officers can kill innocent black teenagers and not even lose their job, let alone be brought before the law. There's a sort of accepted ideology in society that we're all civilised and above fighting in the street (civilised warfare is separate from humanity, focused on strategic plans and mechanical weapons), but its easy to sympathise with the extreme views of the black panthers on some level, as how could they see a solution to hundreds of years of being repressed without some sort of explosive emancipation? The way the media works today is that fearmongering garners more hits, more comments etc, so the situation is constantly presented as dystopian and hopeless, and this sort of representation is dangerous in the way that it makes people feel hopeless, and when people are cornered, they fight to get out.


Keeping with this imagery and the sense of having had enough of the way things are, my own visual explorations are based on representing the people as powerful and iconic.

Moving forward / early journal work

I feel like I've finally made an actual start in my journal over the holiday, I haven't done as much as I'd like but hopefully I'm starting to get the hang of it. I've been using quite violent imagery to represent the turbulence of the political landscape over the last few weeks. I've been trying to balance this political side with the historical element I initially wanted to take this project in, but I don't feel like the historical element is as relevant to what I want to talk about. I think the best thing to do is keep trying things out in the journal to figure out what specific direction to take the essay in. I'm having difficulty focusing between going in a direction concerning history, politics or society. While I think there are links between all these things, they will bog the essay down if I try to assess all of them at once so really I need to choose one to properly pursue.