OUIL6 Final Evaluation

I have enjoyed the Visual Communication module and I think it has included the largest amount of exposure to processes which were previously unfamiliar to me, which has been challenging but ultimately rewarding. In fact, I think all of the briefs within this module required me to use methods which I either hadn’t used before, hadn’t used to the same extent or hadn’t used for a long time, which meant I didn’t really get bored of the work I was doing throughout the whole duration of the module.My feelings towards my three outcomes for the GIF brief are mixed but I hadn’t done any animation since I was about twelve so it was fun to have a go at it now, from a different perspective and with much more creative experience, in general, under my belt. My favourite of the three was definitely the hand drawn one, although I didn’t plan it particularly well and, as a result, ended up spending much more time on it than I initially intended, and a disproportionate amount to the other two GIFs. I actually found it very hard to think about how a person walks and got very caught up in that particular challenge, which meant that the final result was still in fairly rough pencil drawings. I liked the effect of this though, and that aesthetic seemed to fit nicely with the strange, surreal movements of the character. In a similar sense, the inconsistencies between my drawings in each frame caused the figure to wobble and almost morph as it walked, which again actually ended up working in its favour I think. My digital GIF, whilst a little boring, definitely worked the most effectively as a repeating GIF out of the three. The way the feelers’ movements loop into each other is pretty fluid and although I don’t like it as much, it probably answers the brief a little better than the hand drawn one, which is more of a short animation than a repeating GIF. The 3D GIF was fairly weak I think, although it had potential. I underestimated how difficult it would be to animate a model I had made and the frames were all wobbly because I didn’t have a tripod. I should have planned it better and rented a camera from college, but I had left it a little last minute because the hand drawn GIF had taken up so much time. I think delegating time appropriately is something I need to work on in general.I went into the ‘Acts of Kindness’ Brief expecting to hate having to use illustrator, and whilst it definitely came with its fair share of frustrations, I didn’t actually hate it as much as I thought I would (although I did end up hating the fact that I was spending all day looking at a screen). I found Illustrator to be a useful way to provoke different ways of thinking about image making; in particular, having to think in terms of closed shapes. I ended up happy with the result, at least aesthetically, but I do think that it fails somewhat to represent the idea behind it and perhaps seems a bit lazy conceptually.  I feel the last brief was largely successful, although I wish I had taken it a little further maybe, for instance tried making concrete or just some 3D processes in general, or maybe used photography more (I only used a tiny bit). I know I definitely would have tried out those things if I’d had more time but I didn’t get around to it. I think I need to start doing things when I think of them more often because I often plan to do stuff when I’m feeling particularly inspired, but then a few days later, when I’m not, I just procrastinate and don’t act on those plans. I got really quite interested in Erno Goldfinger, so found researching him to be enjoyable and I think as a result, I’m really happy with a lot of the sketchbook and preliminary work. Also, this might be one of the few projects where I feel like the outcomes are justified and incorporate the various elements of my research and practical work in the right way. I also used acrylic paint a lot, as well as play around with some monoprinting, which are both processes I don’t usually use, so I feel like my research definitely lead me down some specific practical avenues which were well considered.Overall I have think the Visual Communication module has been largely successful and I really enjoyed the fact that using unfamiliar processes and techniques pushed my work into numerous different places and made me think in several drastically different ways whilst I was making work.