a day in the life (Kookmin University)

Whilst studying at Kookmin University last year, we were asked by our professor to take a vid camera and shoot something, so I decided to shoot my (pretty much) daily routine of going to the snack bar at Kookmin. I haven’t really edited this as it was made just for a bit of fun and some of the camera work is a bit shaky! It will also give you a little look at some of the Kookmin Campus

Music by Fly lo

Taxonomy Final video link

Well Vimeo is still being weird so I’ve added the final video I handed in, to Youtube.

As I mentioned before, the actual final piece will be a Flash Container, but the video will give you a rough idea how it will work.

It’s also quite long, as there are quite a lot of tees and  I had to try and give enough time to show the information, but at least there is a bit of music to keep you entertained

Links to artists etc

Another part of the Taxonomy work was to find the actual details and give a brief synopsis of the individual Tees. Some of these proved difficult as a lot of the Tees are Limited Editions and no longer available.

Here’s a few links to some of the companies/artists etc, where some of the information was collected from:

Tortoise Tees

BAPE (Although none of my Tees will be on here anymore)

Solitary Arts

FUTURA

D-Styles

Gunkhole

The Glitch Mob

Evan Hecox

Geoff McFetridge

Addict Ltd Edition Tees

Addict Spring Summer 08 Catalogue

SHEONE

STUDIO TERM 1

For the first tem of my 2nd year, I was lucky enough to study at Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea, after winning a place on a British Council funded exchange trip. We had to make an illustrated application to say why we should be picked, as many people were applying.

I was lucky enough to be picked and what an experience it was, life changing in fact.

Anyway, back on track, so as we were away for this term, we missed the Invisible Architecture brief.

However, whilst at Kookmin, we were fortunate enough to be asked to put a foreign students exhibition on. So I handed in this work and images from my actual show, which include illustrations, that were Silk Screen (one of the subjects I took at Kookmin) printed by myself and a stop frame animation piece I made, which shows the process of me making a large illustration for my Exhibition.

This has already been blogged on my Seoul blog:

Exhibition Explanation and pics

stop frame video

There are more entries to add on the Seoul blog (not work related, just about my time there and places/days out), so if you find the blog interesting, please check back in the forthcoming months as I will be updating soon.

taxonomy/folksonomy cont

My plans had to change as far as how I would make my final piece. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, it was not possible to try and learn how to build this exactly how I had planned in Flash. Some things I could work out, as I have some knowledge of AS3, but generally i don’t make timeline based animations etc in Flash, so I’m unsure of the syntax etc to try and find tutorials for my plans. Although I do plan on making this over the summer in my own time, as I feel it would be a good way to learn. I also have all the assets together, so all the prep work is done.

So I decided to to make a film based in After Effects, as it is something I have just been teaching myself recently.

So I used my plan for the Flash interface and took it into After Effects, to basically show how the interface would work.

I also thought that it might be a good idea to add music to the video, so I cam up with the idea of making it sound like somebody looking for different stations on a radio, so when certain sections of tees were showing, I would have corresponding music playing, eg. Sage Francis/SFR section – song would be House of Bees by Sage Francis and SFR Records signed artist b. dolan. For the sections that didn’t have any music that would correspond, I decided to make some songs myself.

Unfortunately due to random restrictions over mp3′s and wordpress, even though the files contain no samples and are my own songs, it won’t let me upload on this server, so I will add to my soundclick page later and put up direct links.

Here are the boards I made to explain the process:

Taxonomy cont.

After all the pics were taken, I had the small matter of cutting out each individual tee, then adding it to its own layer in photoshop, so I did this over the course of a week or so. I also had the task of taking photos of each individual tee and cutting them out from their backgrounds to put on a generic background, so everything would have a uniformed look. This took a while too!

uncropped

cropped

Taxonomy/Folksonomy Preparation 2

So we decided on a Bank Holiday Monday, we tried the friday before but had problems.

So for the weekend, my house was covered in piles of sorted out tees. Monday came and Tim kindly picked me up, so we set off to his yard. Luckily, the weather was holding off, so we set about setting up. The wood was a little distance away from where we parked and unfortunately, the had been logging the week before, using a pretty big tractor to move logs about, so our path to the set up area was not exactly flat!

We found an old barrow in the lockup, so we transported the tees to the location in that, one of us pulling and the other making sure the barrow didn’t tip up on the assault course (path to the Christmas Tree wood). We cut the washing line up into sections and Tim scaled one of the trees, tied the line and did the same on the other side. We did this with three lines, as there were a lot of tees!

So I passed the tees in the right sections, telling Tim where to hang them.

We did this three times as it was not possible to hang all the tees at once, with me taking photos once the tees were hung.

Oh, I forgot to mention, we were also helped out by Lewis Tree Surgeon’s guard goose, George (See pics)

The rain held off, although it made us rush a little bit more than we would have liked, but that’s the good old English weather for you.

Here’s some pics of the day:

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Taxonomy/Folksonomy Preparation

I decided I would try and make some sort of Flash interface that people would be able to click on certain tees and they would then link to other tees, showing details (image) and text based explanations.

After thinking about how I should approach showing my tees, I came up with the idea of having them all on a washing line, but rather than just using a normal garden washing line i wanted to do something a bit different. So after chatting with one of my friends, we came up with the idea of taking them to his work. Tim is a tree surgeon and at his work yard, they have a Christmas Tree wood. So the next time Tim was at the yard, I asked him to look for suitable places, measuring me the distance between trees and sending some photos.

The place he picked was perfect, the setting and distance between trees. So we organised a day to go and set up.

In the meantime, I had to iron and sort out all my tees in to catagories and when that is around 80 tees, it’s no small feat hahaha

So the catagories I came up with are:

Scratch Tees, Mars Volta/ORL Productions, SFR Records, Addict, BAPE, Michael Lau/Kubrick, Street Artists/Designers, Post-Rock/Jazz etc, Skate, Beats, Alfie, Miscellaneous and Futura/Surrender.

Taxonomy/Folksonomy Brief Intro

So, the final brief for studio was a piece based on Taxonomy/Folksonomy.

For those that don’t know what this means, check here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy (as much as I don’t like to use wiki’s, it will give you a brief idea)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

So my initial ideas were, to try and make some kind of interface that I could add music samples into an orderly system for using in live performances. As my band makes improvised music, I felt that this might be quite helpful. However, I thought this might be a bit of a stretch in the time I had, so I didn’t go with this idea.

Another Idea I had was to do some sort of animated music family tree, but this has been covered already (although the name of the program escapes me).

So then I had another two ideas. I’m an avid collector of many things, these include music, mainly on cd and vinyl, so I thought about doing that, but as my collections are quite vast to say the least, it would maybe take me a term just to organise them, never mind make something! One of the other things I collect are T-Shirts (Tees). Mainly from certain clothing labels, artists or certain music genres. So I thought about maybe making some system to show the relationships between certain sets of tees.

The next idea was to make a typographical piece based on short text memories from my time studying at Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea. This stemmed from a text message from an artist friend, Puy Soden, who also travelled to Kookmin with me. The text contained maybe 40 short little phrases based on our time there that would be significant to us and bring back some good memories. I decided to expand on this idea and made a list of some of these things.

After speaking to my tutor Anneke, she suggested maybe doing something with some of the exchanges I have with some of my korean friends, showing how words and sentence structures get muddled up by my friends, due to the differences in Hanguk and English sentence structures. I did like this idea, but on reflection, I felt that it might be a little insensitive to some of my friends as it is something that Korean people are generally quite shy about, I know how how they feel as I feel the same sometimes when speaking Hanguk.

So I decided to go with the Taxonomy of Tees idea.

Now just the small matter of getting them altogether and figuring something out.

YCN/Ted Baker Brief Part 3

Here’s a video we shot of the setup, to give you an idea of how it worked:

Unfortunately it’s on Youtube for the moment is Vimeo is being Babo(Stupid) at the moment

and here’s a digital mockup of the final shop window, Image and Video: