Assignment 3: U C What I C

This assignment sounded simple enough – use 8 photos to tell a story without the use of any words. The story can contain a twist, or not, and photo manipulation is allowed. It all sounded incredibly easy – after all, how much time would one need to just take 8 photographs?

More ignorant words have never been spoken.

But more on that later. The very moment I read the assignment outline, I knew, I just knew, that I had to do a ghost-related story. In the spirit of classic Asian horror movies, the (often foolhardy) protagonist would be minding his or her own business, thinking that they were all alone in the room, but of course, it wouldn’t be a horror movie if there wasn’t a ghost standing behind you watching your every move.

Even if you’re answering nature’s call.

Man, that’s some dedication.

So I quickly developed a storyboard, starting with a shot of what would appear to be a deserted and dark corridor (and it makes one wonder just what it is about such corridors that draws movie characters to it like moths to a flame)

And then came the difficult part of this assignment – actually getting the photos taken. Much easier said than done, really. My friend and I spent close to 3 hours in this single room just taking photos over and over again, trying to get the camera angle to look right, and also because I’m a horrible actor, as can be seen in the photos below of me trying to look startled/disturbed and failing spectacularly.

We finally managed to get 8 shots taken, and I set about to editing them to set the mood. I immediately changed all the photos to black and white, and adjusted the colour balance to create a very dark, crisp sort of atmosphere. As for the photos themselves, we tried as much as possible to follow the Rule of Thirds so as to create a more visually pleasing photo, but on occasion we decided to forego the rule for the sake of dramatic impact.

No, that hand in the last photograph isn’t photoshopped, it really is that long, partially also due to the camera angle.

Once again, a very enjoyable assignment to do. This assignment taught me how to analyze photographs taken in sequence, and how to put them together to form a coherent story. A picture speaks a thousand words, and these thousand words can differ for each member of the audience. It’s the onus of us, the creators, to ensure that everyone reads the same story.

Assignment 2: Abstraction

The second assignment, Abstraction, was primarily centred on the abstraction process and the creation of a pictogram to be put up around NUS. Pictograms are simple images that convey a singular message – for example, no smoking, no playing of ball games. I started to think about the kinds of pictograms that could be put up around school, and was quite abruptly reminded of a couple incidents in the past. In those incidents, we were going about doing our own things as was normal, but upon reaching a flight of staircases, we would find it blocked by people who were sitting on the stairs, talking to one another.

In NUS, not all staircases are wide and are able to accommodate more than 2 people trying to use it side-by-side. And here these people were taking up most of the space of a staircase, and not because they desperately needed the space in any shape or form. They were simply sitting there, on the stairs, blocking the way and being a huge pain in the rear.

I’m sure pretty much everyone has seen that scene from “300”, the one where Leonidas yells “This is Sparta!” and kicks the other guy down a pit. I was so immensely tickled by the idea of merging this idea along with the ice cream idea that I immediately based my pictogram on the combined version.

And yes, that photograph actually contains 2 of me, it was edited using Photoshop.

This was the initial degree of abstraction that I did for this assignment.

However, my fellow students and tutor said that the final pictogram was a tad confusing because it was trying to convey 2 messages at the same time – do not sit on stairs, and be warned: someone may kick you off the stairs. They advised me to simplify it even further such that the pictogram would ultimately be conveying a singular, clear message. And this is the result – a slightly retouched degree of abstraction.

And here we have the final version of the pictogram.

A fun assignment to do, on the overall, although I’m a little disgruntled that I didn’t quite get to use the pictogram of one guy kicking the other down the stairs. This assignment taught me that regardless of how simple a pictogram may seem, so long as it conveys more than a singular message, it is not in its simplest form yet. The assignment also taught me how to better identify critical elements of a picture so that even after simplifying the picture, audiences are still able to identify key elements.

Assignment 1: My, Myself and I

Me, Myself and I. The first ever assignment of NM2208, requiring us to manipulate objects to change the typography of our names so as to represent a particular personality, habit, quirk or trait. The assignment sounds deceptively simple, but when it came down to actually doing it, it turned out to be much harder than expected. The first thing that needed to be done was to jot down a list of words and short phrases that people tended to associate me with.

The results came in: Sleepy and videogame lover.

I’m not sure if that’s a good sign.

In any case, I drew 2 quick sketches based on the word ‘Sleepy’.

The first is simply a sketch of my bed, which is practically my own little kingdom. I love my bed as much as a man can love an inanimate object without being sent to seek psychological help. However, I quickly realized that this probably wasn’t a sketch I could utilize, as there really wasn’t much in terms of objects for me to manipulate.

The second one is a sketch of the letters of my first name (A, L, V, I, N) sleeping in class, something that I’m (shamefully) famous for. And yes, the letter N is missing, because I didn’t plan this sketch properly and ran out of space. A perfect example of a poor design layout – good thing this is just a preliminary sketch and good thing this is the first assignment, eh? I quite liked this sketch, but decided to play around with other sketches to see what I could come up with.

And so the third sketch came into existence:

This sketch was done based on the fact that I was (and still am) an avid gamer. The letters in my name for this sketch are made using Tetris blocks, a sword, a torch, a boomerang and a snake – various objects that can be found in games. I was quite attached to this idea, but friends claimed that it wasn’t obvious that this sketch was meant to reflect my enjoyment for videogames, so this sketch was ultimately abandoned.

The 4^th and final sketch came from a personal observation that I was a person who often got lost in his own thoughts and tended to analyze certain things too deeply (“think too much”, as some of my friends would say). Hence the sketch – a literal representation of “reflection”.

We were then to choose one out of the 4 sketches to further develop into 2 roughs – I ended up choosing the reflections idea as I felt like it was the closest in representation of my true character. I refined the idea behind the design a bit, and finally came up with the 2 roughs as shown below, one in white and the other in black.

The black version of the design ended up appealing to me far more than the white version (no form of racism intended here), and that was ultimately the design that I chose to develop into the final prototype. I began playing around with the opacity of the reflected “Alvin”, trying to get it to most closely emulate an actual reflection as possible. However, here was where I stumbled into what would become the most trying question for this assignment.

Basically, I had 2 choices:

1.       I could keep the opacity of the reflection really low, such that it looked realistic, but at the expense of visibility for viewers looking at the design for the first time.

2.     

  Or I could increase the opacity of the reflection, such that it looked far more artificial, but greatly improving visibility.

This was a dilemma that I found intimidating – in either situation, it seemed that I would be undermining the very principles of visual communication. It was clear that I needed to find a balance between the 2, but as people always say, talk is cheap.

Finally, after versions upon versions of the same design, I ended up with this:

It seemed like a fairly reasonable balance between realism and visibility for audiences.

The refined story behind this design – I am a person who tends to put up false fronts and masks in front of other people, so as to hide my true feelings . As a result, the actual name itself is flipped, indicating the Alvin persona I display to the world isn’t an accurate depiction of my true character, and its scratchiness/sketchiness is indicative of how incomplete and inadequate this false persona actually is. My true persona in this case is the reflection in the surface. However, its fading opacity shows that the more I hide behind this false persona, the closer I come to losing my true self.

Some final thoughts on this assignment - I chose to go with black and white so as to keep things elegantly simple. Also, some may say that this design may not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, namely, object manipulation. However, in this case, the object in question is the name itself, representative of the side that is being shown to the world around me. 

This assignment got me used to making full use of my Wacom tablet to draw. Initially, using the tablet felt strange and unwieldy, but repeated usage and an undying determination finally allowed me to reach a level of competency such that it almost felt like the tablet had become a part of my body.