Kirsten Lepore

When looking up certain show reels and agencies I have come across the American animator Kirsten Lepore after seeing some of her work when I visited Banksy's Dismaland earlier last year. The pieces she produces are all intricate and mostly containing stop motion or physically drawn animation. She has recently been well known for the first ever stop motion film version of 'Adventuretime' and prides herself on her adaptive nature when it comes to creating props and scenes for animation.
She is very much to me an animator of inspiration with her physical elements that she looks into and constantly collects through the aspects of her work developments. Her style is pretty varied but always falls back on her physical creativity which is also a skill I base my work ethic on to begin with, with the development and creation of my ideas.
The first work I came across of the animator was her work named 'Bottle' in which was a stop motion of a character made of a variety of materials travelling around a beach etc. The piece was played on loop as a film in the Dismaland cinema that I visited when the attraction was open.


The things that I liked about the piece was the intricacies of the stop motion involved and the fact that there is a build up of emotion between the characters despite the fact that they don't possess any facial features that represent certain emotions for this. I have researched into this further and found the Making Of for this stop motion also quite quirky and interesting to see how she developed the animation as a whole.

Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale & The Rose Animation

I've come across this film produced by Aquarius Films, a film company based in Australia. This piece is a collaboration of the children's story 'The Nightingale & The Rose' by Oscar Wilde. It explores the spoken text beautiful with delicate links to the work. It reminds me of the style I wanted to capture with the RAF animation for the Connections brief. The style of the animation is something that I really like, the way in which it is colourful and withholds certain characteristics, and quite illustrative is something I really like. I watched the whole film on the plane to New York and it was so

inspirational, definitely a well thought out visual piece. Alike my RAF project, the narrative of the written story very much predicts the overall images that is shown on screen, which is a nice way of making these things synchronise together as a collaborative piece. Artist Del Kathryn Barton collaborated with animators and the producers of Aquarius to produce the piece and I really like how her style of her usual illustrations is captured in this piece. I like how our Discussion Forums on Style have been linked to this, as despite being given a brief to produce an animation for the story, the illustrator has been able to keep her original style.

Interactive Illustration Animation Book

By Virgilio Viloresi & Virginia Marci

When browsing through a very inspirational site: thisiscolossal.com I was able to come across this effective use of a serrated material to manipulate the eye into thinking that an image is moving, therefore being quite a primary way of animating something, which I personally love. I like the physical element behind the technique, and the fact that it allows us to question what animation truly is, and such manipulation is a good example of this, the artists manipulate the viewer's eye into the thought that there is movement. I also believe it's a quite refreshing edge to have to a book, and an exciting installation when filmed too.
The illustrations themselves retain a gothic sort of style, which I believe adds to the overall ambience that this technique helps to develop, an almost edgy, black and white jerky TV sort of feel is something I get from the technique, and I think this works beautifully as a book and with the physical aspects that this then presents to the viewer.
As a film, as the camera views the images as they progress, I think the editing of the video to have the sound effects to add to the animation definitely produces again, that television effect, with the stark piano sounds and creaking noises etc. I can image such a prospect being produced into a larger scale piece, not just a book but a large installation with a similar material usage but all double the size, allowing a completely different experience, something that could maybe viewed in a cinema type of set up?

Whitewall Art Gallery Chester

Outside of the Whitewall, Chester

Whitewall Gallery Visit
Over reading week, I've visited the Whitewall Art Gallery in Chester, where they have a range of art forms, in a nice space around the city centre. I liked the various forms of colour and media that are shown within the gallery and within the alternate pieces.
 The actual layout of the art gallery was well kept I think, with the more surreal art together whereas the landscape and urban paintings and pieces were on the parallel side of the gallery. I loved the aspect of movement that was within the composition of the pieces in the gallery, although each piece had it's own energy there were a few that really appealed to me, as looking at them, they seemed to show movement within a stationary form, something I was pretty interested with as I could imagine the piece animating before my eyes, and this was pretty successfully thought out by the artist in showing an aspect of movement.

My Favourite Artwork
Paul Kenton

London- Paul Kenton

One of my favourite artists that featured within the exhibit was Paul Kenton, an artist originally from Derby who likes to capture movements and energies of certain people and places through his art work, he particularly enjoys visiting cities as these reflect a lot of movement and colours that reflect the energy that can be contained within his work.
Paul Kenton uses an aspect of paints, inks and varnishes to add streaks of what seems to be movement and light, something that appealed to me as I think it beautifully shows the energy and movement of each of his pieces to reflect the city he has captured within the piece.

There is also the aspect of dark outlines that are then enhanced by small aspects of colour, something I think is a very successful aspect of enhancing the movement and energy. Personally I can see these urban landscapes being animated especially the New York piece that I viewed within the Whitehall Exhibit. The New York piece really enhances the energy that New York represents and I think this is one of my favourite pieces that I saw within the gallery, especially after having visited New York myself, it really gave an insight into the energy that needed to be captured in the aspect of Times Square and the reflections and track lines he has shown.

New York Piece By Paul Kenton

Tom Butler

Paris, Tom Butler

 An additional artist I found appealing was Tom Butler, who uses a mixture between collage and paintwork media, particularly this piece of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which I found was a beautiful autumnal blend of colours and successfully effective use of collage with paint. Alike to Kenton, Butler captures an energetic feel to the city particularly with the text and colourful element that the collage pieces represents.

Hattie Newman Lecture

Hattie Newman is a set designer who solely uses paper to produce intricate structures for a variety of creative formats and clients.
As a guest speaker, she spoke about her personal favourite projects as well as things she disliked or finds daunting as well as the change in the industry that she worked in. Being a very physical artist with all her pieces, it came as a question to her of how she keeps her original style, and how she could be competing with digital techniques that could capture the style in half the time.

Newman spoke about how maps have become a very popular form of media and things that are often asked for, and she spoke of the sheer scale of her pieces, that have to be photographed professionally by an array of photographers.
Although her technique is a more expensive one for the client, with the physical material costs as well as the weeks or days it takes to construct the sets, she said how she doesn't personally feel like she has to compete with the more digital aspects as she knows that most clients like the raw aspect of her designs and therefore wouldn't want that.
 Additionally to this she spoke of how the aspect of CGI is a smooth and too polished version of what she does, and the imperfections and the physical work is shown within the pieces and becomes the quality of the piece.

Personally I think the pieces she produces are absolutely stunning, and would make beautiful animations, although she studied Illustration as a degree, she spoke of how you can branch out into alternate creative forms, and how she's worked and collaborated with different roles in the industry, such as animators and photographers around the country, further showing the importance of collaborations, especially in her role with photographers to ensure that they capture her pieces in the best possible way to present.

Series of Paper Dresses. Pencil Sharpener Dress.

The neat, clean-cut set up of the design is also thought through as she spoke of how she has to study photographs of the buildings to ensure the right structure is applied. She also spoke of the difference between Advertising Clients and general creative clients, and how she prefers the creative clients and personal projects, as for these she has more freedom, whereas the advertising is a strict approach to design, and doesn't allow much freedom to make decisions for the client, or work exclusively with the client to produce a certain piece.

She gets challenges with every piece she has to do, such as her speaking about having to produce a series of paper dresses which she was pretty confident about until she actually attempted to make the pieces, but with many trial and errors finally was able to work with the client and photographers to produce the series.
 In addition to an example of how her physical elements can be exaggerated with the paper is an installation that she produced for Canon, she produced a 'world city' where there were landmarks for cities across the world in one city, such as the Eiffel Tower etc.

Canon Installation

Bruno Maag Lecture

"Typography Technician"
We've had a talk from the Swiss Typographer Bruno Maag, who went extensively into his personal career and his processes he undertakes when producing typography for a client. He is well known for his variety of client pieces and has successfully set up his own business Dalton Maag which works with clients worldwide. Example clients of his he gave within his lecture, but some examples include:  Lush cosmetics, Amazon, Puma, Intel, Oxfam, Samsung, BMW, BT and Burberry.

Example work for LUSH Cosmetics company.

As someone who describes himself as a typography technician, Maag says he favours black and white elements rather than the colourful implications of other designs such as graphic and motion design. He implied that he is "not an artist, I am a designer" developing his thoughts that he designs for the money, for the client, and for the portfolio overall.

Sketchbook work Dalton Maag for Rio 2016

He spoke about the transition between physically producing typefaces for aspects such as New York Newspapers, to producing digital aspects for online merchandise as well as using digital formats to print onto products. He joked about the fact that his training was very different from the training that he gives his interns and new colleagues today, as when he started out in the business as working for Monotype in England, he had to draw a precise line all week till it was perfect, and if the measurements were off by 1mm physically, he'd have to try again for a new week, slowly and strictly training their precision. He described that such precision CAN be taught, and says that now for his own training scheme within his business of Dalton Maag, he trains his employees with physical as well as digital elements, to strictly inform them of the precision needed. They begin with calligraphy, which then evolves to painting typography and restricting the size of such font to 10pt to ensure the trainees are able to produce a font that will successfully be shrunk down or enlarged and still convey the same language and understanding to the reader.

Final Rio Olympics 2016 Typeface by Dalton Maag

He analysed the fact that you have to be able to understand that the client you could work for may not be a national format, they may need alternate designs to tackle alternate countries and civilisations. Maag gave an example of working on a piece where he produced an arabic variation of the font he produced, and brought it back to the client who enjoyed the font, but thought it was the wrong way round, however, it was the client who hadn't correctly facilitated the different culture and how they read right to left rather than left to right, so they had to redesign the whole campaign. He used this as an example to show that you need to be more precise and thoughtful within new nationalities, to make sure that the mood of the font isn't lost by school boy errors in design.
 The mood is also something he described that I can fully understand, the fact is that they need a certain mood and font is how they do that in certain instances, and I feel this is something that can also be applied when producing Motion Design, because of the fact that you need to be thoughtful in the type you select in order for it to produce a certain mood or feeling that you want producing.