Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on animating my print. The graphic was finished and sent off for printing last week but I am yet to see it. Apparently it looks pretty good though.

The animation caused a few problems though because when I first started doing it I did not count on animating it, so the care that I took when composing the first half was not as great as it could have been. I brought the file into After Effects and I presumed that I could simply add the music in and tell the graphic to scroll along for the duration of the track and the music would match up to the wave form perfectly....but it didn't, not for the first half anyway. So, I had to spend a lot of time getting it all to fit together by chopping the track up and slowing and speeding sections up so that the audio mapped onto the visual. Because of this the track sounds funny to me, but I think to someone who has not heard it before it will sound fine.

I did it this way because it would have taken far too long to stretch out the first half of the graphic, plus, if i did that then the graphic in the animation would be different to the printed one.

The animation wasn't too bad after that, I kept it simple by doing things like making certain things appear at certain times and using a couple of expressions to move the graphics about to the music.

As of yet I haven't had chance to see the entire thing because I am unable to preview it as a whole in After Effects, however I will be rendering it out tomorrow so hopefully I will be happy with it.

Apart from that all I have to do now ready for the hand-in is prepare my sketchbook and finish a couple of things for other projects.

Overall I am pretty pleased with this project, the outcome is similar to my initial vision and it creates a good effect. I am very glad that I had time to animate it because I feel it adds another dimension to the project.

Not posted in a while because i have been very busy finishing other projects and things. This project however is about half finished which is good. The bit that's done needs tweaking but i am pretty happy with it. At the moment i am re-constructing it in Illustrator because the Photoshop file got too large and i need to keep the file size as low as possible. we have got a booking for the print room in the first week back after Easter so i need to have it finished by then. i am also going to change some of the colours because the pinks and some reds don't quite fit in, that's also a lot easier in Illustrator which is another reason why I am moving away from Photoshop.

My graphic is well on it's way now, i have quite a few vectors created and i have started composing them all along a time line. The mid-term reviews are later this week so I need to make a fair bit of progress before then. Hopefully the first two minutes of the song will be illustrated and i will be happy that they represent the song. At this point it is unlikely that I will be able to get it printed up but hopefully after the Easter break I will do.

Last Thursday I managed to get the group to listen to all the section of the song and write down what it made them think about. Most of the results were good and quite interesting....some followed a similar theme which is reasonably accurate in terms of what the book is talking about at the point in time where the song appears....this is good because it means that the music is getting across what the band intended.

I have typed up the results so they can be easily referenced and now all I need to do is get on with drawing it all...not long left now!

At the end of last week I managed to prepare the sample clips for the group to listen to and get the questionnaire sorted. I was all ready for Thursday morning because that is when most people are in the studio but then everyone got ill this week from the flu that was going round Berlin. This was pretty disappointing as I really need the groups input to make it work. It will have to wait until this Thursday now.
Today I have been trying to find interpretations of the song that people have written to give me ideas of imagery, it's proven harder than i thought though. I did however find a few along with the narrative that the album is based on. The lead singer wrote it about his friend who was comatose for a period of time and then killed himself. It is pretty hard to understand but it should help.
I have also decided how big i want the print to be and prepared my work area in Photoshop.

I haven't done an awful lot on this project for a while except get the OK from my tutors so I can go ahead and get going. The reason I haven't done much because I have been in Berlin at the Transmediale Festival for about 5 days and I had quite a lot on last weekend. This afternoon I will be preparing the sample clips for the group to hopefully listen to tomorrow. I also need to type up the questionnaire for the group to fill in while listening to the music.

On Thursday we were shown a couple of videos which sparked a few more ideas and I think I more or less have a solid idea for this project now. The videos that we were shown were about a series of event triggering more events and so on. One of them was a car advert from a few year ago where car parts were used to create a trail of triggers which somehow all either knocked, pushed or pulled different parts in a massive sequence. The other was from the 80s where a couple of artists did more or less exactly the same thing but instead of using car parts they used every day objects and chemicals.

This started me off thinking about chain reactions, the knock-on-effect and progression through time. As I was already heading in the direction of a project with something to do with music my mind immediately linked this directly with progressive rock music which I am a fan of.

I began thinking about telling the story of a song. A prog rock song which has several different parts and would be quite interesting to design to. I would take the lyrics too and use influences from them. I could either do an animation or maybe a site which is themed around the song and what it is about.

Some of the bands I like are: The Mars Volta, Tool, Pink Floyd and Porcupine Tree.

After a long train journey and a lot of thinking this idea changed into something that I am looking forward to getting stuck into.....

My idea is to create a large piece of graphic work inspired and influenced by a progressive rock song (probably one by The Mars Volta). I will splint the track into it's separate parts and draw up a small questionnaire. I will play the group each section and ask them to answer the questions; These will be "Write down " - an Emotion, a Colour, a Scene and an Object. And they can write down as many as they want for each section of the song that I play them.

I will use this along with the lyrics and my opinions of the song to create works in pencil, pen, 3D, 2D, Vector and photo and combine them to form my piece. My piece will also be in the shape of the wave form of the piece of music and I will include a timeline at the bottom of the piece.
When it's complete it should be viewable along to the music in a rolling animation.

- I may also build a container to mount the work on which includes speakers and a cheap MP3 player so that the viewers can hear the music.

Here are my thoughts so far....

Permanent Flux(Continuous Change)
- Growth - Development
- Construction
- Plants/Trees/Life
- Knowledge - Technology/Electronics
- Research
- Science - Disease - Mitosis/Meiosis (Cell Division)
- Adaptation/Survival of the fittest
- Cure
- Seasons - Spring - Life/Growth
- Summer - Survival - Sun
- Autumn - Death - Rain
- Winter - Nothing - Snow

- Music - Style/Culture change - Fashion - Punk
- Emo
- Metal/Mosher
- Decades have their own genre - 50s = Big band
- 60s = Rock and roll
- 70s = Psychodelic
- 80s = Cheese
- 90s = Pop

- Taste - Fashion - Decoration
- Interests - Fads
- What's 'In'
- Craze


- Flux Music Festival
- Flux the album by Qizmet
- e-Flux the Contemporary Visual Art Festival

IDEA - web site - rock culture - trends/fashion/gossip etc - magazine site maybe - several containing sites on past cultures themed on the era

So the new brief is Permanent Flux. Absolutely no ideas at the moment but it's ok because I don't think we've even had it an hour yet. Need to start looking at change...Interesting change. This term I really need to get stuck in, I feel really up for making something awesome that I'm really interested in just like without the Play project last year.

But first things first...Plenty of research and hard thinking. This can be taken in any direction and I like the fact that it's so open to interpretation.