Monday, September 17, 2012

Littering Fact

Time goes by, it's 2012, 21st century already; what's our earth like so far?
It's like this, -Environmental Issue,  http://www.biophage.com/environmental-issues.html
Environmental issues are harmful aspects of human activity on the biophysical environment. Environmentalism, a social and environmental issues through advocacy, education and activism (Wikipedia)

There's a list of environmental issues I found on Wikipedia
List of issues
-Climate Change
-Conservation 
-Energy
-Environmental degradation
-Environmental health 
-Genetic Engineering
-Intensive farming
-Land degradation
-Land Use
-Nanotechnology
-Nuclear issues
-Over population
-Ozone depletion
-Pollution
-Reservoirs
-Resource depletion
-Toxins
-Waste
(Wikipedia)

Littering is one of the ways to waste on our earth, and it will be a huge problem if we don't stop and continue doing what we are doing and acting like we are blind.

Litter consists of waste products that have been disposed of improperly, without consent in an inappropriate location (Wikipedia)

Cigarette butts are the most littered item in the world, with 4.5 trillion discarded annually. (Wikipedia)
Littered Cigarettes Butts, http://www.sushi-suzuki.com/blog/2007/01/tax-cigarettes-in-way-that-makes-sense.html
Smoking is harmful to human health, but people still do smoke, even though it's harmful  to our home- earth, cigarettes butts are very small pieces, but when you put them together, it will be a big chaos like the image above, think about how those cigarettes butts are going to be disappeared in the world, there's no way to make them disappear in this world, the more people smoke, the more pollution we get. There are many solutions, and many things we can do to stop this harm for our earth. First of all, stop smoking, or smoke less; do not throw cigarettes butts everywhere; and recycle them to make them into new products.

Illegally dumped items containing hazardous waste can harm the environment and have a potential negative impact on human earth. Hazardous items are often dumped in isolated locations, such as National forests and other public land. (Wikipedia)
Illegally dumped items,  http://www.hkcleanup.org/en/content/illegal-dumping-fact-sheet
This about this, who is going to pick the dumped items in the woods? Nobody, nature would like to be ruined by this way? Think how beautiful the forests look like to you, would you still dump in the forests? In this image, it only contains tires and some furniture stuff, what if it's hazardous dumped items right there, how bad would it be in this woods? How do we stop this? -Dump those items in the certain areas such as recycling bins or recycling garbage to recycle the items.

Litter can exist in the environment for long periods of time before degrading and be transported large distances into the world's oceans, Litter can affect quality of life.
Litter affects the quality of life,  http://media.herald-dispatch.com/blog/cobb/2008/04/litter-affects-quality-of-life-in-our.html
Such as the image above, what is it's in front of your house? Would you ignore or would you go mental? I would personally go mental; trash are degraded in a very very long period, and some of the trash are even meant to be sent to the oceans, how many people do litter everyday? If everybody does littering very often, our earth would be covered full of dump, would you live in a better life or a worse life? So stop littering for a better quality of life.

I personally went out to shoot some littering facts around me, the photographs are awfully gross, and the facts are on our campus, people litter so much that they don't even notice this fact.
Dump's everywhere next to the soccer filed, nobody cares, everybody just simply walks by and never pays attention to it; dump stinks very bad, this makes the quality of our life worse on the campus. There are many solutions, such as setting up different trash bins, recyclable and non-recyclable, and separate the trash into different bins where the trash belongs, recyclable trash will be recycled to be made into new products.
 
Beautiful green soccer filed with one piece of white dumped item. I visualized how my campus would look like before I got here, it was a green campus, beautiful and refresh grass land everywhere, but by the time I got here, I asked myself "where the hell am I?" I personally chase after being perfect, I want everything perfect around me, a big white trash spot does really not look good on this peaceful green soccer filed, let's start with not littering everywhere, but in the bins!

The gutters are full of dumped items. Gutter, nobody ever simply cares to have a look, but when I saw this, I was shocked, gutter is for the water to run away, but these ones are basically to resort the trash, and I bet the trash will never be gone if there's still no body cares about this huge issue.

Animals are even living in a bad quality of life, not only human beings, animals have life like humans do, they need clean homes as you do, human beings usually clean and decorate their houses into perfect heavens, but they've never given much thought to out there, look what kind of environment those animals are living at? Would you live out there if you were them? 

The lake would  be beautiful if they didn't dump the trash here.

\
Disgusting fact

This is where we live

The lake, the school. Can you actually see the facts? We live in a "deep shit"! What's the lake for on our campus? For everyone to chill at, not for everyone to dump their crap out there. I don't know what karma we are going to get, because I am not a fortune teller, but I have a very good example to show people what kind of karma we might get.
The Simpsons Movie,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Movie
Everybody knows what The Simpsons is, there was a movie published in
2007 called The Simpsons Movie, it's basically a story about how Homer Simpsons destroyed the whole town by dumping his "Spider Pig's" crap into the lake, and evil happened after all.
We don't want that, do we?
So from now on, let's start on our own, stop dumping, stop littering, let's all protect our home- earth!

 

 
 


High and Low (studio)

This task is about High key and Low key, so I did some research.

High key (Wikipedia)
A high-key image consists primarily of light tines, without dark shadows. A photograph or printing that aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done partly for technological reasons, since early film and television did not deal well high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood. It is often used in sitcoms and comedies. High-key lighting is usually quite homogeneous and free from dark shadows. The terminology comes from the key light (main light)

Low key
Low key as a term used in describing printings or photographs is related to but not the same as low-key lighting in cinema or photography.
A painting or image is low key if it's dominant values are dark.

After the research of high-key and low-key, Mr. Shawal gave me some lectures of studio lighting.
 Basic Studio Lighting
There are 2 basic types of studio lights
1 Strobe light/Studio flash.
2 Tungsten light

Fronting lighting, to light the object from at the front, it does no shadow, images are flat and white.
Side lighting, to light up the side of the object, the shadow part and the bright part should be equal.
45 degree lighting, to light up the object from 45 degree corner, a triangle shadow at the side.
Top lighting, to light up the object from the top, it gets butterfly effects
Bottom lighting, to light up the object from the bottom, the shadow goes upwards.
Back lighting, to light up the object from behind, it's either to light up the backgrounds or light up the object, which is called silhouette.

Silhouette (Wikipedia)
A silhouette is the image of a person, an object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single color, usually black, its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is basically featureless, and the whole is typically presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.

Main  light, the one flashes and connects to the camera.
Fill-in light, to make the shadow side brighter.
Background light, behind the model.
Hair light, to highlight the hair)
Snoot, a snoot is a tube or similar object that fits over a studio light or portable flash  and allows the photographer to control the direction and radius of the light beam.

After the lectures, it's supposed to be the practical work, so I tried each lighting, there they are:


Front light


Side Lighting
45 degree lighting
Top lighting
Bottom Lighting


Back lighting Silhouette

Then the lecturer gave me more techniques on how to shoot high-key and low-key

High-key
1, Eliminate harsh shadow.
2, Create a bright environment.
 Requirements
Studio lighting, 4 pieces (2 background lights, 1 fill light, 1 key light (main light)

Low-key 
1, Highly dramatic
2, indoor/dark
Requirements
One light (Min) not more than 2 lights, the lights can be everywhere

Then I did some high-key and low-key practise






Low-key



High-key

So this shoot is about environment, I did some research for the ideas.

Greenpeace (Wikipedia)
Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Greenpeace logo


Recycling
Recycling is processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials, reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reduce energy usage, reduce air pollution and water pollution by reducing the need for "conventional" waste disposal.






Recycling logo

So my high-key idea is to draw these 2 logos on the models and to deliver the Greenpeace and recycling messages.


These are my final work.

My low-key idea is to rob the toilet papers around the models and deliver the message of waste, and represent how awful you look like when you waste.





Final work
In the shooting, couple of the images were shot with the slow shutter speed.

This is my High and Low assignment, hope you like it.









Sunday, September 16, 2012

Visual Through Sound

Visual through sound is a form of visual art that produce an artwork through listening to music or any form of sound into art piece.

How to draw through sound?
Listen to the sound and visualize.
Can be created through 1 line, 2 color,  3 shape, 4 value, 5 texture, 6 space

RESEARCH
Grid (page layout) (Wikipedia)

What is Grid System?
A typography grid is a two-dimensional structure made up of a series of intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure content.

Why do designers need grid system?
The grid serves as an armature on which a designer can organize text and images in a rational, easy to absorb manner.

Where did grid start?
Antecedents
Before the invention of movable type and printing, simple grids based on optimal proportions had been used to arrange handwritten text on pages.
The seminal work on the subject, grid systems in graphic design by Muller-Brockmann helped propagate the use of the grid, first in Europe, and later in North America

Where is grid used? (example)
Grid used in web design
While grid system have seen significant use in print media, interest from web developers has only recently seen a resurgence. Website design frame workers producing HTML and CSS had existed for a while before newer frame workers popularized  the use of grid- based layouts. Some examples of grid system frame workers are:
960 grid system.
grid system generator
Semantic
Flexible CSS Grid with SASS
Modular Grid pattern

What is Column?
Column or Pillar in architecture and structural engineering is an structural element that transmits through compression the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below in, other word column is a compression member.

What is Gutter?
Gutter, in editorial design, the blank space at which two pages come together in a two-page spread.
Gutter, in interface design, the blank spaces that separate rows and columns in screen.
Gutter, in Grid(page layout), is the blank space between a column or row.

Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian (March 7, 1872- February 1, 1944) was a dutch painter.
He has important contributor to the Destijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo Van Doesburg. He evolved a non- representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.
He was born on 7th March 1872 in Amersfoorts, Netherlands.
He died on 1st February 1944 (aged 71) in Manhatton, New York, United States.

I chose a song called One Day- Asaf Avidan, link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKtRL7FkjQA (Youtube) to finish my art work.
The beginning of the song is a short period beat, then the base kicks in, and soft piano sound kicks in with the beat and the base; the whole song doesn't really have much vocals, but I did research the lyrics of the song to help me finish the art work, there are only 2 vocal parts in the whole song. after the first vocal part, the main tune kicks in then the second vocal part, the last is the main tune with the piano sound; so first of all, I visualized the chart of the song through each parts, it starts at the lowest point and gradually starts going up in the middle and the whole song gradually goes down to the end.
So through this visualized chart, I started my sketches.
First sketch, How I visualized through the song at the first time.

2nd sketch, different shapes/lines represent different sounds

3rd sketch, Grid

4th sketch, Grid

5th, gutter design, to represent the base, the most shown part in the music

6th, shape/line design for the main tune

7th, redo the grid system

8th, fix and change the lines and shapes better

Final decision

Through all the thinking process and illustrator lecture, I started doing my work on illustrator to design my own piece of vector artwork.
Like I mentioned above, I visualized the song's going up from the lowest beginning and going to the top in the middle and going down in the end, the top part is the vocal part, so the grid at the lyrics in the middle is not the vertical columns way like the rest; and the reason why the first part of this work is black and white and the second part of this work is with color, because the song at the beginning is basically simple music, I could visualize the colors when the vocals kicked in.
The black circles and stars represent how the beat starts at the beginning, the 4 small circles at the first and second gutter represent the small drum sound, the the rest little triangles in the gutters represent the base, the base kicks in after the beat.
then clearly, you can hear the piano sound kicks in, that's why I drew 5 lines with 5 black rectangles to represent the piano sound and music, because 5 lines represent 5 lines music chore.
After the music, the song starts being alive, you will hear the sound like someone pulls out a sold, so I drew a lightening shape to represent that sound, after that sound you would hear the main tune of the song, and in the middle of it, it suddenly stops and plays with 4 beat, "pa pa pa pa" the the four stars in the middle of the column represent the beats, after the "pa pa pa pa" sound, the main tune follows in.
The next would be vocals of course, so I used the type tool and typed the lyrics in the next column.
The main tune kicks in again after the first vocal part, then the second vocal part kicks in which is more vibrant than the first vocal part, so I typed with different colors in text. 
In the end the main tune and the romantic and soft piano sound ends up the whole song.
This is my grid system artwork, hope you like it.

After the presentation, I got a feed back from the lecturers, is to improve my combining skills.