Final Major Project (FMP) | Research Part 1

So this is where the idea stemmed from...a christmas card.

From this I started looking into what people believe in. I went to where I always go when starting a new project, my music library.

'Reason To Believe', although pretty bleak in subject matter, is in my head a real positive song. Bruce Springsteen puts into writing some depressing scenarios in the song, form love tuned sour to death. And at the end of every story he says

"still at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe"

I think after the sadness of whats happened to the people in the song, they still find some reason to believe that maybe their lover might come back, or a loved one will come back to life shows determination. Whats intriguing though, is what there believing in.

I also went back to a book I read 2 years ago based around songs from Springsteen...

Tennessee Jones looks (just like Springsteen) into the curiosity of why people believe in things. Although, Jones focuses in on one story which related to beliefs and looks at it from a child's perspective.

Whilst rummaging through the family collection of book, I found a really small bible which was given to my dad in 1971, yes, thats the same year a Neil Diamond song reached number 4 in the charts.

It even tells you what to read when dealing with situations.

As well as looking at beliefs, I was also going down the path of animating a poem and was reading a book (also found in the family collection) called 'There's an Awful Lot of Weirdos in my Neighbourhood"

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jEX9NwAACAAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks

I was hoping I'd find either a good poem or inspiration for a story which I could animate...neither happened, although the book is very entertaining!

Lastly, I watched an animation called 'Playing for Keeps' by Dyan Hayes who is a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

After watching it I read an interesting interview with Dylan on the website 'Cartoon Brew' where he talked about his inspiration for the short. One bit in particular made me think about my research and where i was going with it,

'I was also reading about a lot about various mythologies, specifically, how life, death, spirits and the afterworld are perceived by cultures in New Guinea and Haiti, the world of Vodou, and a little bit of Japanese folklore to top it off.'

After this, I started to expand my research to include mythology and legends...

Photoshop Painting

I watched the video above, and got inspired to mess around with the painting tools in photoshop...its actually very relaxing.

Anyway, I did this. You may remember it from the last post...

I'm going to carry on messing with the paint ...

My blinds don't work in my bedroom, so the moonlight comes through and shines on everything.

While My Final Major Project Gently Weeps

For some reason I like books on artists songs, and how they came about. I have two on 'The Beatles', and it takes you through every song and tells you what the song is about or how it was created. 
One example would be how Paul McCartney got inspiration for the song 'Eight Days A Week' from a conversation with a taxi man on his way back home.
I thought I might get some inspiration on how to get a light bulb moment from looking through the book (for the eighth time)

"George was reading the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, and decided to apply its principles of chance to his songwriting...he picked a novel off the shelf with the intention of writing a song based on the first two words that he came across. The words were 'gently weeps'" 

I thought this was quite a nice idea, and reminded me of an exercise in the first year of my coarse where we wrote down 12 different places, 12 different characters and 12 different scenarios (I think it was that anyway)  

Whilst it was still Christmas there were loads of games around the house...one of which was my grandmas called 'scramble'.

The game has a load of different sayings and well known sentences which have been chopped up. The aim of the game is to find the other half of the saying or sentence you have. It was funny, because as my grandma is very old, so is the game, and as a result quite a few of the sayings and sentences were really out dated and i didn't know what they ment...or maybe I am just stupid. 
So what I did was grab three and randomly put them into some arrangement...these were the results...

 























I've had no luck so far as to what I can do with these, but it was a nice exercise.But still, the final major project is gently weeping...

Merry Christmas Beetle Game

On Christmas day we played loads of games (instead of watching television) and like every year, we played beetle. The aim of the game is to be the first person to draw a beetle...its a bit harder and more complicated than that thought (click on the images to see the rules)

I thought I'd post these just because some of the drawings are nice and also funny. Some are rude too, due to people drinking.

Lastly...I'm the red one (I don't know why only mine's in red) my artistic skill are very prominent as you can see.

Lets Commence

Woody Guthrie's New Years Rulin's (1942)

Its 2012, time to begin the last semester of my final year...

7 Things of 2011

I've picked seven things from 2011 which stood out to me, they have all done something which I feel have been, or still are, relevant to me....Plus there the funniest to read about in my diary from last year.

Sunday 13th February 

Monday 18th April

Tuesday 26th April



Tuesday 31st May

Monday 13th June

Tuesday 28th June

Tuesday 4th October