My Design Process

The first thing I do to is to make a mind map with the theme of my project in the centre. I would then find three of the best ideas from that and research artists for more inspiration. I would look into different styles and techniques and how I can make my work unique. The internet is always a good place to start for research but lots of other things have inspired me such as adverts, films, nature, buildings, even ripping things from magazines - which I can then use that to make some drawings. Group discussions and talks with tutors helps a lot with my design process, I get to talk about my ideas and plans and if they can work or not, or when I'm completely lost.
One piece of work I've done in my art foundation was a film of me and my brother fighting with wooden Kali Escrima sticks in our back garden. I worked over the top of the frames, adding a very dark, black and white comic book style to it, removing all of the background and adding rain. 

To come up with this idea I used a small sketch book to put down lots of notes and sketches and I researched artists that had similar styles or techniques that I could use in my work. I wanted to do the fight scene the most as it's theme I wanted to work on, which was martial arts. I had to fit this around the theme I was given for this project which was urban environment, so I decided to use animation to transform me and my brother's fighting into a street fight. I sketched a lot of ideas in a small pad which included the choreography of the fight, the animation - what will be inverted, silhouettes etc. and the storyboards so I had the best selection of shots. I also keep a notebook at hand to put down any rough ideas that just come to me.


Once I had my fight scene filmed I put it into Adobe Premiere and exported a third of all the film frames, I can then use each frame 3 times and have less to edit. I used Photoshop to put on a basic black and white filter effect on all the frames and using a graphics tablet I edited out the backgrounds, drawn in the figures, created silhouettes and layered rain. 

The Process

Original Frame

Added Filter Effect

Removed background and drawn in figure as white silhouette using a graphics tablet

Created rain with and drawn dots using graphics tablet

Here is my film with the animation over the top. You will notice near the end the background hasn't been removed with the black and there is no rain, this is because I didn't manage to finish it on my course and I haven't been able to get hold of the program I used.