Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category

Long time no speak

Monday, December 8th, 2008

So it has been over a month since my last post… That is mainly to do with the fact that my dissertation has been taking up all my time and I haven’t been able to even think about anything else. My draft is now handed in and I am awaiting feedback, this means I can move onto other things in the meantime.

This blog is going to take a little turn in terms of the subject matter from now on. Although it is entitled The Future of Digital Media, I will be concentrating mostly on my studio work, which only happens to be vaguely related. The relationship is that I plan my comedy show to turn viral, and in my opinion, the future of digital media, specifically music, lies in word of mouth and viral advertising. Simple.

My studio project is progressing nicely. The scriptwriters are moving along with the script (although not quite as quickly as planned) and more aspects of the planning process are falling into place. I have had some interest from a couple of actors but would like a few more options before I meet them all. The poster has only been up for a week so hopefully a couple more people will get in touch.

I think I have come up with a name for the show. ‘Work Mates’ is nice and simple, relevant, and easy to remember. I have been playing around with a few logo designs and things and I have almost settled on one of them.

Logos

Logos

Some website designs are also coming together, although the availability of Work Mates related domain names are limited. The best option is work-mates.org I think.

Next things on the list are to get some photos shot for mocking up some scenes and building my first set of design-boards ready for my end of term presentation. I also need these for temporary website images until the cast is finalised.

Various pages of the website need working on and storyboards for the first episode need to be drawn…all before Tuesday/Wednesday of next week. I think I’ve got my work cut out!

I will be keeping this updated on a much more regular basis from now. More finalised ideas and designs will follow as well as other developments in the project…maybe even some script excerpts!

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Progress at last

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Quite a lot has gone on since I last posted. I wrote and handed in my dissertation proposal, I doodled a lot and spilt ideas into my sketchbook, went through several more concepts, and then finally landed on something that I think could be pretty unique.

For a while I had this urge to produce some big illustrations based directly on information. LastFM have an API that I thought I could use to gather user details and produce some pretty complex diagrams on, based on their interactions with each other and music recommendations. However, I soon discovered that it was really only designed to be used for applications, and therefore I could only gather information on individuals, rather than groups of people. That was the end of that idea.

Following this I stayed with the ‘Information Visualisation’ theme and began thinking back to a piece of work that I completed last year. I attempted to illustrate a song, in quite an abstract form, where I created graphics based on the lyrics, the story behind the song, and also peoples’ opinions and emotions relating to the music. What if I take this concept and almost turn it on it’s head? What if I create illustrative diagrams based directly on the notation of an album – assigning a coordinate to each note in a song and plotting these on some sort of graph? This would surely create some very interesting visuals and maybe some correlation would be seen between the complexity of the diagrams and the mood/tempo/style of each song…but again, this idea didn’t last long…

The idea that I have decided to run with is off on a complete tangent from my dissertation subject, only linking by a thread…but I’m getting quite excited about it…

I am going to create an artistic viral comedy series. There will be no set and no props, it will be shot entirely on green-screen, and each episode will only be approximately 5 minutes long. The sets will be still images inserted behind the actors and the props will be superimposed onto the characters. In my head this looks good, however some testing will have to be conducted to determine the final ‘look’.

I am drafting in all sorts of help in terms of script writers and actors and I will become a project manager/editor, but also have input into all the other aspects of filming such as storyboarding and music production.

Better get going!

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