Sunday 7 November 2010

PORTFOLIO VISIT: YOLO, How my visit went!


FRIDAY, 5TH NOVEMBER

Visiting Yolo for me was great help personally besides giving me advice on my work.

The studio is run by one man, Martin so the studio space is modest but contemporary, on the day he had also employed a freelancer to help him with some work.

He began looking at my work thinking my Disney Ident especially was good. Though he explained that the rotating spheres would have looked more appropriate if were blended or faded in better with the original footage, which is the main critical aspect my tutor has also touched upon. Calling upon his experience, he explained he had took a design degree at Salford and had never been introduced to 3-D software at degree level and found it quite fascinating I had been using it (even though its most definitely not my strong point). Martin stated that he used Cinema 4-D for his three dimensional projects, admitting Maya confused him.

I showed Martin my Audrey Experience piece and instantly could see the Saul Bass influence which was a good thing, and said Saul Bass sometimes influences his work. He liked the 'drawn' feel of it however he explained as the camera moves along it would look better to include some more shapes (triangles) to give a more Saul Bass feel and to diminish some of the white in the background. He however gave a little laugh as the line carried on on round the mountain at the end, which makes me kind of not want to change it now. Adding to this I also decided to show my making of. This was a great advantage that I wasn't sure of to begin with. My making of includes many of my free hand drawn drawings, which establish where my ideas came from. After Martin saw this he admitted he actually liked my hand drawn designs better than my actual final piece and said that if I had used my hand drawn designs within my video instead that would have given it a much better look. So that is most definitely something to think about for future projects, the advantage of this is all my pieces would carry my signature style, impossible for anyone to copy.

I also showed him my Vogue title sequence. I explained that the timing isn't exactly on the mark at the moment as I hadn't been able to find the project only the rendered video. Martin's response was that he thought that added to the effect, explaining how a fashion piece like this should have a 'raw' effect being a bit quirky and different.
As my Vogue title sequence used a lot of rotating flat imagery he decided to show me a piece of work he had been doing at the time. The client was JD Sports and he had incorporated flat images of people within festive scenes and another piece that contained rotating shoes with quirky little animations which were very good though I am not great at explaining myself. These videos were to be used in store and I thought this is exactly what I want to do and was great finally getting to meet a person that did that. He spoke of how he hoped he would eventually work up to clients such as Topshop.

I quickly showed him my Ted Baker window display explaining my thought process, he thought it was a good idea and said people also associate cakes with parties. My piece was for the autumn selection so my display could also indicate christmas parties are around the corner. I had never thought of that.

I felt quite comfortable at this stage and explained I probably have the worst time among my fellow students in grasping the technical side. He made me feel much better after explaining that it really is all about the idea and you learn the technical stuff later on. He said he was initially graphic design based and has only just began working with animation and 3-D and he was picking it up, you learn along the way he explained. He said anyone can learn software but not anyone can think of great ideas.

By the way he also kept saying he was thinking of beginning to hire people as his workload has become quite heavy, then threw in the question asking when I was due to graduate. I didn't want to look too deeply into that but seemed promising in my head. Hopefully if I keep in some kind of contact with him a job maybe at the end, fingers crossed!!!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment