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!