A quick test on flash of me having a go at making a face chewing on some tasty millions.




Now, example of things going Nom:



 

I hate advertising. There I said it. Not exactly the most dissenting opinion, but I now have to get my head around it for the current project. What I dislike about it is that it is greedy by nature. It's about getting people to spend their money on things they didn't know they 'needed'. And yes people will say "but look at this ad/campaign, look at the message it's selling/it's art!". Fair enough, but if you want to create a piece of art, why prostitute it to sell things? If you want to tell a story or raise a message, don't whore it off to fill pockets.
And lately everything is worse, when I was young it used to be confined to billboards, T.V. and Radio, but now, its everywhere. They pop up in front of web content, alongside it, above it, below it. The other day, trying to watch a trailer for a new film on youtube, I had to wait for an advert to play first. While it was, another advert popped up in front of the video content.
For FSMs sake, I was moving and advert so that I could watch an advert so that I could watch an advert!
I understand I live in a capitalism based society, and all the benefits it brings, but where is the line going to be drawn?
/rant

Anyway, here's a nice little article I found based on advertising to children in the UK. Handy.



Relevant:



















For the Life Drawing Visualisation project we have to come up with an idea or task for ourselves to create something (three final A1 Pieces) from our imagination, be it a character, environment or anything else, and research it fully. I have chosen to create my own version of a promotional poster/artwork for the film/play 'Little Shop of Horrors'. As you can see, the traditional poster for it is goddamn beautiful:

With more modern ones just being quite... uninspired:

  • Research plants, carnivorous, vines etc
  • Look at octopodes, tentacles etc
  • What people to include? Audrey/Dentist/Seymour 
  • Styles? Traditional fantasy/modern/minimal etc
  • Study figures for any characters involved
  • Study B-movie posters
These are a sweet called "Millions"
Not many people know about them. They don't have a very pretty website.
See.

Our new brief was to choose a type of sweet/confectionary to re-brand along with some fellow Advertising and Illustration Students. After getting to know one another and the formalities we decided on Millions as they have a lot of potential and some good USP (Unique Selling Points)

1) Sharing
2) Variety
3) Customisation
4) Quantity

After settling on the target audience and getting a few early ideas together we have all gone off in our own directions to come up with some early concepts.

Immediately seeing these I could think of an elaborate stop motion using millions of these Millions, the potential for kaleidoscopic and trippy adverts would be amazing, thinking about some of the animations I've seen using sand etc. As it would for something more figurative to sell them. So far I'm thinking along the lines of these.:





So the past few weeks have been a mixture of mini tasks such as idea gathering techniques (speed drawing above), time planning (below) and learning to analyse (below that). The speed drawing was useful as it threw up ideas you might not have even considered and made you put everything down on paper and look at it before you cast it away. For the time planning, it first started off as notes jotted down but then I realised I needed something a little more concrete. I made myself a nice spreadsheet with all the important subjects and deadlines marker on so that I can check off what I need to do as I go along.


The Metaphor task was a case of thinking of all of the components (in a group) that go together to produce a film/animation and then put it together with a visual/physical metaphor with each part of it meaning a part of production/animation etc. Our group chose to go with a rain-forest ecosystem as it gave us a lot to play with and some of the ideas, such as the narrative being a river worked rather well. If I get some free time I intend to ink it up properly and colour it in and label it as a piece of illustration practice work for myself. 


This final bit of nostalgia have been the inspiration for the Zombie stop-motion film piece of work I'm working on. It was a bit of an epiphany like moment when I saw this and parts of the story started to slot together in my head. Hopefully finally sending me down the right path.