David Carson and Legibility

Today in class, a PowerPoint was given on typography and instantly I recognised one of the first photographs by David Carson. Last year in history of graphic design course, we had to pick a graphic artist and for our final assignment we had to mimic their work. I was instantly attracted to Carson’s work because it was very unusual and I couldn’t get past the fact that a lot of his work was illegible. I loved how he rejects the traditional rules of design when dealing with page layouts, use of text and images. To me this concept was foreign to me because all the way through school we were always taught the importance of legibility. After researching Carson’s work I learned that it doesn’t always matter if text is legible. David’s titles are often spread across a whole page, or erratically across images, or in expressive sequences. Carson emerged into the graphic design industry by having his text in irregular shapes, making it hard for viewers to decipher his work by slicing away parts of the letters. David loves to play with text columns to make them the width of the page and eliminate gutters between columns.

I found his work to be very inspiration and very fun to mimic because I was allowed to break away from traditional rules that we were taught in school. I made a series of posters representing his work. I noticed that most of the time Carson’s work has connections between the title and the image. I got the inspiration to make the “criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer” poster by relating the text and the image. I came across one of his previous works titled “Hanging on Carmine Street”, where the text was “hung” on the page and is both upsides down and spaced out. I decided to follow this format, so I picked a quote of his and then I decided to make the text look as if it had been painted through with white paint. The text is shown to have a degree of illegibility from the strokes through the words.

Another thing I learned and applied to my work was inspired by a two different pieces of his work. I came across where on the left page was a quote by C.G Jung. The first and last letter of each word is not capitalized but the size o the text had been increased. I took this method of his and used another quote by David and mimicked his technique. On the right page, there was an image representing the quote he had used. I made an image that corresponded with Carson’s quote by imitating another poster by him, which was very similar to the one you had in the PowerPoint with all the words layered on top of each other. The poster shows a bunch of words repeated continuously in a given area until it became illegible and clustered. Then on top of the clutter of text with white text Carson brilliantly wrote the quote on top. I imitated this concept by repeating the word “commercial” until almost becoming illegible, layering on top of a toilet. Then on top of the clutter of text I added the word “commercials” in white text to make the concept clearer.

Click for larger file of this one...

I know his concept of legibility doesn’t necessarily fit into all projects, but whenever I get a chance I use Carson’s work for inspiration because I really like the idea of not always following rules. With not having rules to follow, I often find I can produce a better piece of art because I am not confined to different guidelines and rules and having to opportunity to just go with it.

What got me into film?

When I was in grade four, my aunt and four cousins had moved into our house for a year and this particular year for Christmas my parents had gotten me a black and white Toys ‘R’ Us video camera. I spent all Christmas day playing around with it, and I eventually had come to the conclusion that I was going to invite each family member into my bedroom, one by one, and film them having an interview with me. For the last eleven years, each Christmas a video has been created and aired for the whole family right after Christmas dinner.

In my family, the Christmas video helps to unite and bring us together and has becomes a part of Christmas that we all look forward to each year. The video is broken down into two or sometime three segments. The first part is some kind of Christmas re-enactment of a popular culture reference. For example, one year we acted out “Twas the Night before Christmas”. Another year I compiled eight years of film and created a “Best of the Years” segment, where it began with a slide show of pictures of us revolving around Christmas throughout the years. After the slide show, I compiled funny answers to questions, or simply just contrasting how we started off with a black and white camera to a state of art camera. The second segment of the Christmas video is an interview portion, where questions are asked reflecting the past year, and what they wanted for Christmas this year. The last portion of the video is somewhat a new tradition over the past few years, where everyone is given a line from a song and I splice it all together to make our own version of the song. For example, last year we sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and another year we sang The 12 Day’s of Christmas.

One year my cousin Ryan was living in Whistler and did not come home for Christmas that year. We all decided that we would help bring Christmas to him, so we filmed the Christmas video two weeks early just so we could mail it to him to watch on Christmas. This year’s theme was we all had to dress up and pretend to be someone else in the family, and then our typical interview process. Even though Ryan was not with us that Christmas, the video made him feel as if he was and he did not get to miss out on everyone’s favourite part of Christmas.

Every year, the Christmas video has only improved from the years before, and each year everyone is trying to out do their last year’s performance. Throughout the years our technology has moved from the simple black and white Toys ‘R’ Us video camera, to an updated Toys ‘R’ Us colour camera, then this huge video camera my dad owned that I had to have attached to a VCR at all times in order to record. Then finally when I was in high school I bought myself a video camera that had the capabilities to attach to a computer and I could edit the Christmas video. This is when our Christmas videos were finally taken to the next level and anything became possible to recreate and have this professional finished look. After the video has been filmed, and Christmas dinner has been eaten; all seventeen of us pile into the family room to spend the next forty-five minutes sharing this time together as a family. This has become a yearly tradition like I said for the last eleven years and for my family, we look forward to the Christmas video over what Christmas presents we will be receiving that year. All it took was receiving a black and white video camera for Christmas one year to inspire my interest in filming and editing. This is one tradition that I don’t ever see disappearing within my family.


We Wish You a Merry Christmas from Leah Fendley

Deluxe: Class Field Trip

On Tuesday, March 17th 2009 our class went to Toronto to visit Deluxe, the video and audio production house. I was surprised to find out that they have produced a lot of big budget movies and television shows such as: The Saw series, and Pan’s Labyrinth. Our class was taken on a tour of the building and our tour began in the board room where they just explained everything to us before taking us on the tour.

The room I found the most interesting on the tour was the Foley room. I never really knew this was a job or this is how they conducted this part of the audio soundtrack. I truthfully did not know that production studio’s had a whole room assigned just for doing these everyday sounds that were not useable from shooting. To many this room would of looked very junky but to a Foley artist they probably know where everything is within the clutter and know how to make sound effects with even the weirdest techniques to produce a sound of something they cannot record within this particular room.

One thing I found very interesting was when the guys were explaining how good Foley artists when recording walking sound effects often can record both feet at the same time, with different shoes. For example, they explained how on one foot might be a male’s loafer where on the shoe the same guy might be wearing ladies heal. This to me was insane to considering someone walking on the spot doing different tempos depending on the person they were recording for, and being able to do this not just focusing on one shoe at a time, but TWO…this idea was crazy and amazing at the same time. When the guys were explaining the Foley room, it made me think how cool it would be just to watch a Foley artist working. One of the guys of the tour talked about how Foley artists come up with interesting ways to produce different sound effects that are not always the natural sound, but sound exactly the same. I think this room would be really cool to watch in action and see how the Foley artist comes up with ideas and deals with problems that arise.

Finally, one thing I learned from going to Deluxe studio is how much work really goes into producing a film and we were only witnessing the audio portion of a film. I really never put much thought into how many steps were involved in the production of a movie. This to me was a huge eye opener to be able witness this and get a first hand perspective on the behind of the scene of the production of a movie. Overall, I really liked this field trip and I found it very valuable to have attended. We got a first hand experience of the behind the scenes work and I got to see how much work is put in to a video. During the board meeting the guys described how being prepared ahead of time can make this process a lot smoother and easier. They discussed how they are currently working on a project where the person wants to add in a logo at the beginning of the film. I did not understand at first why that would be such a big deal, but after he discussed it and showed us everything involved in this process; I started to realize how important it is to know exactly everything you need and want done during production and not to cut and costs.

http://www.bydeluxe.com/

Time-Lapse Photography

A Year in the Life of the World - Duke and Battersby

I know we didn’t technically watch the video A Year in the Life of the World, but while looking at Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke’s website we briefly watched this project as a work in progress video proposal. I found this video to be very exciting since I have always been very interested in time-lapse photography. Last year in film, my group was doing a documentary on a McMaster run event and during one of the interview’s with a participant we decided to use time-lapse photography. We used this footage of just people passing outside the student center to show the amount of traffic as B-roll footage during the interview.

This idea of time-lapse photography is very inspiring to me, and when I saw this proposal I thought it was a really cool project. Not only did I think this was a cool movie idea, but I also really liked this type of proposal. It was very clear as to what they were going to do, and having visuals as examples of how the installations would appear made the whole idea come together nicely and clear. This gives the audience a better understanding of what Battersby and Duke are trying to propose, whereas a written proposal does not always get the same results. You may think you are clearly explaining you idea within your written proposal, but it doesn’t always come across to the audience as clear. Having a visual proposal allows the viewer to see exactly what you are trying to propose.

Within this particular video, Battersby and Duke are collecting 200 time-lapses from all around the world using different webcams. The time-lapses are showing the changes to the landscapes over the span of a year. The interesting thing about time-lapses is the amount of change that can be visually shown over a span of a couple hours and shrunken into only a matter of seconds. The viewer is forced to see things that you may have no picked up on in real time. One example is daytime shifting to night-time. Normally if the viewer were to be watching a clip, they would notice the day shifting to night-time. However, with time-lapses, the viewer notices this transformation of time automatically as if this was being highlighted for the viewer to notice.

I also found their technique of how they are going to present the final version to be innovated. They are going to have all the 200 videos being projected onto a dome, representing the earth. In order to show a new map of the earth but instead the time-lapses will be projected onto the part of the earth they are from. This idea is very inventive and different, but very cool at the same time. This video has made me think of expanding my traditional ways of thinking and in the future I hope to be able to be this creative when presenting different multimedia projects of my own.

To watch the video, go to http://www.dukeandbattersby.com/m-flvplayer.html and click on A Year in the Life of the World.