Main aims this week - Create different visual languages tests for ‘Ken’
Create 5 tests in your sketchbook, only reference and submit 3 onto your personal blog)

Listen to Ken’s voice again
Print out prologue visual style references.
1 Consider coffee cup stains, old letters, handwriting of older people, wallpaper,
lots of different wallpaper textures, that rip when Ken finishes speaking.

2 Other approach, concrete poetry meets Sam Winston, the whole animation coming together like a tea cup, text behaves like liquid floating (5 pages), letters act like liquid, moving across the page.
(Remember to scan in old ref work from previous sketchbooks)

3 Lists, bus timetables, routes, road markings

4 Use lettering to say age: letterpress type styles, diff ‘ttttTTTt’’s for Tea.

5 Think about letterpress type smearing and repeating onto old wrapping paper.
This can screw up when ken stops speaking. Imagine rolling ink onto the screen then white out text directly onto glass, camera facing up.

Which the colours reflect, melancholy, loneliness, fading, weather bleached, aged, neglected, functional?

Create a colour palette, manilla envelope, off white, old cyan blue, cold dark grey, light grey, yellowing/nicotine yellow, anaglypta texture, old poppy seed sepia, weather bleached

What the colours are not; vibrant, loud, modern, exciting, charismatic
Lettering styles? Get Typography encyclopaedia from library.

Write a 2 sentence brief to have in your mind whilst selecting the visual language.


Thursday 15th Jan
Review of working processes.

During today’s task, I wanted to capture the essence of repetition in a pictorial form. Considering a printed format and the Exposition, I chose two distinctive styles of lettering for the rough sketches. For Ken’s voice I envisaged the lettering as wooden letter blocks, static, old fashioned, slow to move. To depict my voice I have used handwriting (this might change), but the overall effect created on the layouts is contrast. Key words such as ‘half’ and ‘a drink, a drink!’ are more prominent in the poster layout and I have started to show a panel with the words repeated and highlight the quote by Hymes, Becker and Bollinger that they “all suggest that repetition is at the heart not only of how a particular discourse is created but how discourse itself is created.” Other layouts show loops linking the repeated words, there are other methods to do this such as colour change or same text overlapping, or a key. More experiments can be developed.

All of the conversation appears on the layout, Ken’s voice is in caps, larger and dominates, my text is alongside Ken’s but of secondary importance. Two words are deliberately misspelled to indicate intonation of voice, they are ‘tea’ becoming ‘TEeAa’ and ‘half’ becomes ‘HAAALF’ this is a very important point at which, Ken’s voice elongates the word, falters and fades. The poster layout is helping me to prepare before the animation phase.

Following this preparatory work, I began letterpress tests in the print department at the University of Derby. Using brown wrapping paper as a warm base and wooden type with opaque white etching ink I began to experiment with a few key words.
The first stage included photographing the print studio and location. Sorting through the letters into alphabetical order, I also set a few words loosely in the type case, ‘DRINK’ whilst having access to the poster layout as a guide. The first word ‘TEEAAa’ appears as if printed by itself, I deliberately show the letter block turning over and allow the letters to fall with the pattern of intonation form the discourse. ‘Yeah’ appears as untreated letter blocks, then one by one the white ink appears in order of pronunciation, as if the letters are switched on. This method is effective and I have reflected and acted upon the positive 3d aspects of previous work and the need to ensure the work does not appear to flat. ‘A Drink, a Drink!’ appears as white letters onto the brown wrapping paper as gradually increasing letters. The emphasis on ‘i’ in the sequence denotes syllable stress.

Repetition of this word is shown by overlapping elements and also with some letters mirroring their ‘partners’. Other ‘tea’ experiments include extending the letter t’s descender and printing a range of different fonts and repeating the letter t. This did not appear to look very effective, experimental or express intonation in a convincing manner.

A particularly successful test includes the use of my hand and roller of ink being applied onto an ‘&’ in the phrase ‘one & a half’. I will continue to explore other interactive elements within the work, particularly where the process is key to the outcomes.

Phase two of the letterpress experiments involved the use of black intaglio block printing ink onto textured (aged and tea stained) wallpaper.

I discovered that the intaglio ink printed more effectively than the white etching ink (despite adding French chalk to aid the consistency) . Using the wallpaper as a base created a rougher texture, quite aged but more staging will probably be needed for the final animation. My mood board looks more interesting than what I have produced so far (due to image area appearing sparse (lettering only). I need to look at the work and listen to the audio again. An effective test was ripping the wallpaper to reveal brown paper, this can signal an abrupt glottal stop at the end of a sentence. Wallpaper can also be a useful format to stage further clues to the zeitgeist for example the wallpaper could be supported with picture frames, photographs, flying ducks, light switches and clocks. The actual choice of wallpaper can change and rip or fade to reflect different eras. The colour palette mentioned in my previous weeks review needs to be explored and applied.

Creating a large letter T using the full width of the roller appeared to be visually effective and addresses one of the areas of scale that I did not fully resolve in the last body of work.