Key developments

The main things that I developed in this project was my digital drawing skills, use of After Effects and animation skills. However I feel I have spent more time doing digital drawing than the other areas, so for that reason I feel I could have improved my animation and After Effects skills had given more time. However, my digital drawing skills tie into animation as I did all of the animation drawing digitally and my drawings can be further animated.

After doing my guitar illustrations I decided to draw some other instruments and while digitally drawing a Saxophone I decided to keep the drawing as just outlines/linework and play around with changing the line colours on different coloured background. I especially like the ones with the black backgrounds as the Saxophone's look neon/lit up. However my favourite would probably be the yellow background and red and blue Saxophone's overlapping as it reminds me of a Jazz poster, similar to the work of Craig Frazier.

I also decided to make some simple Gifs/Animation. I thought my Saxophone illustration that I did would make a good gif by changing colours, making it look like it's a flashing/neon light. I also played around in After Effects by making small gifs of a couple of bands on the label to practice getting used to After Effects and to practice getting used to making simple gifs. I would like to develop these further and create some animation over some film/video for the project.

Also working on my digital skills on Photoshop, I decided to make some poster designs inspired by photographs of musicians on Fiction Records. I decided to do a drawing of Crystal Castles and The Cure. I wanted them to look illustrative enough to look like a poster design/print, but not too abstract so they look like the musicians they are meant to be.

To complete this project I need to further explore my animation skills, maybe by turning my drawings into gifs and maybe even overlapping my drawings over film we've come up with. However we are projecting our clips of film onto a textiles piece so some of these animations might be difficult to show up, so I'd have to try and explore this or think of an alternative way to contribute my work.

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History of Fiction Records

This year is Fiction Records' 40th anniversary. Fiction Records is a record label that was founded by Chris Parry and owned by Universal Music Group. Chris Parry is the co-founder of Radio X and the manager of The Cure, and with the help of music publisher Fiction Songs Ltd they founded Fiction Records together in 1978. Both were based in London and also maintained a satellite office in New York. The label is best known for being the home of 'The Cure' for over 20 years. Fiction Records achieved 'The Cure's' first No. 1 album in 1992 with 'Wish'. The song 'Friday I'm in Love' from the album also topped Billboards Modern Rock chart. Fiction was also the home to other artists and released many acclaimed albums, such as 'Eat's 'Sell Me a God' in 1989 and 'Die Warzau's 'Engine' in 1995. Other artists during this time were from the likes of 'The Passions', 'Cult Hero', and ...

Inspiration from posters and advertisements

I decided to look at some music posters to get some ideas of how music is advertised and for some artistic inspiration. I noticed a lot of music posters have bold colours, shapes and font and want to explore this in my own work. I also noticed the aesthetic of many music posters go with the genre of music. I plan on doing some illustrations of musical instruments with bold colours and shapes inspired by these posters. While researching music posters I came across the work of Craig Frazier . He has been an illustrator and designer since 1978. “I like to think that one of the explanations for Craig Frazier’s expressive and memorable illustrations is that he has been—and still is—a designer. The search for a concept—and not putting anything down until a concept is found —is what makes the end product great work that communicates, often about difficult subjects.” - —Ivan Chermayeff, partner, Chermayeff & Geismar I like his illustrations and the simplici...

Inspiration from film

I decided to look at some of the music videos by bands/artists on Fiction Records to get some inspiration and ideas from film rather than posters/artwork. I particularly liked ‘The Amazon’s’ video for ‘Ultraviolet’ as I enjoyed the different lighting effects and the animation work of different shapes and patterns that bounced off the musicians at different points throughout the video. I thought that this would be a fun thing to try in my own work so I would like to try out some animation like this, maybe some over our own videos. As I go to a lot of gigs and festivals I thought maybe looking at some of the advertising/promo videos would also be useful. I decided to look at some Download festival promo first as it is a festival I am familiar with and regularly attend. I like how the video includes the logo and general aesthetic of the festival. I wanted to also look at a different festival so I can compare the different promo videos for different kind of festi...

Fiction records | Unit X

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