OUIL504 end of module evaluation

 I have really enjoyed this module, I feel it has taught me a lot of valuable skills and made me consider aspects of creative practise that I had never thought of before, like animating my illustrations. Narrative work is something I am really interested in, being able to take important information from a mass amount of text; diluting it down into something understandable and then communicating that information visually is a very useful and important skill that I want to keep progressing with, as it is an essential part of some illustration practises. I feel that I have done that with this project; George Orwell’s books are very dense and have many complex underlying themes, I managed to pick out what I wanted to communicate – like the sense of oppression, and the convey it in my prints and animation. This was largely due to the initial tasks where we worked with motifs to explore the tangible and intangible themes. Although I didn’t use any of my motifs in my final pieces, it helped a lot to experiment with materials when you only have a limited subject matter, but also made me think about the different ways I could communicate one motif, like a windmill – this process of working became very useful when coming up with imagery for studio brief 1 and 2 when I didn’t want it to look too literal.

Animation was something I had never worked with before, or ever thought I would, I think I preferred drawn and stop motion animation to a completely digital method because I love the handmade aesthetic of those processes, but I ended up making my final animation on After Effects because it was much easier to link all the parts together. But I feel I still managed to keep the handmade feel because most the elements like the smoke, figures, some background, were handmade stencils that had been scanned in. I was really pleased with how my moving brief turned out, I feel like I got the aesthetic of it just how I had originally wanted, I had kept it very textual and to a limited colour palette which had a big impact on the atmosphere of the piece which I think did depict a bleak, gritty, Orwellian landscape. The finished piece did run slightly faster than I had planned, and I did have to cut out two elements I had initially wanted to include, but I don’t think that makes it any less recognisable as related to Orwell.

I had a lot more trouble with my printed pictures; I was a bit lost with what I wanted to show and how I was going to do it. I started off with etching but it didn’t make sense to be doing it, as it was so different to all the work I had been doing in my visual journal, and mono printing seemed a lot more relevant. It took a while to properly understand the process in order to know what I wanted out of it. I found the experimental nature of it an advantage in the sense that it was very quick to make prints and you could add many different stencils, textures, mix colours and still be pleased with the outcome. But I found it more difficult when trying to create final prints because it was very hard to determine how prints would turn out which got frustrating. I was pleased with my final prints, although I think the ones that contain strong structures were more successful as they came out very bold and imposing which is what I wanted. I’m glad I chose mono print though, it gave me a lot of problems but I feel I managed to get through them and create a set of professional looking prints.

I feel my visual journal was the most lacking within this project, once I had started developing ideas for studio brief 1 and 2, the work in my journal decreased a lot as I felt it was no longer needed. I know that it would have helped my project even more if I had been continually drawing and developing imagery I was using alongside the prints and animation, but I feel that the work I did in it at the beginning really influenced my final pieces, so it was definitely a necessity.

My strengths in this project have been taking my original intangible themes and finding a way to communicate them, I feel I have worked a lot on trying to get the right aesthetic – especially in moving pictures. I feel my colour scheme in both briefs helped this a lot, I have had trouble finding the right colours in past briefs but I think I got it right for this subject.

I feel I fell behind slightly on my contextual references for both briefs, for moving pictures I did quite a bit at the beginning and although that didn’t carry on any further, it really did influence how my final sequence turned out. Especially the use of a rolling background in ‘The great escape’ by Alex Produkt and Kathleen Weldon, which inspired my rolling background of factories. For printed pictures I felt a bit lost for what to look at, as my final prints aren’t typical mono prints as they have more block colour than faded texture. Although I set up a Pinterest for mono printing, I felt my development mostly came out of experimenting in the print room.

I feel I have learnt a lot from this project about using different processes, working from literature, and creating a finished product that fits into a contextual environment. I am pleased with my results and felt I actually managed my time pretty well as there wasn’t a massive rush to finish everything at the end. I wasn’t expecting to like animation, but I definitely want to do more of it in future projects.