Commedia Dell Arte evaluation.

Commedia dell arte was a mixed little project for me as it was mainly just about following a brief like wind in the willows and there wasn't much in the way of leeway as to what you could do with the design side of the mask. Also i missed doing the development actually with this unit and all the design work that goes with it as it was predominantly just making the mask. However i did actually enjoy making the mask itself as it involved lots of different steps and techniques that i haven't used before like using mod rock, plaster, clay and then finally latex to get the mask to fit tight round the persons face who its was cast off.


The character who i decided to do was the captain. This was because i felt him to have the best characteristics that you could shoe through the masks with long pointy nose and angular features to show that the character is a untrustworthy person. This along side the mask painted red signifies a danger about him. But when i mean danger i mean he is a untrustworthy character.


Overall i feel the mask looks quite professional and could be something you could see in a real Commedia Dell Arte play. I think this is because i tried to make the features as clean and sharp as possible as i am quite good and enjoy using clay.

COMMEDIA DELL ARTE

COMMEDIA DELL ARTE

Commedia Dell Arte is a very popular form of comedy that began in Italy in the 16^th century and further developed during the 16^th – 18^th centuries.  It is believed by historians that it came about due to the political and economic problems during the 16^th century.  The closest translation of the name is “Comedy of Craft”.  It is a form of theatre that features masked characters and was performed by professional comic actors and consequently became the first professional type of theatre.  Each actor made as good as possible each specific role and it is believed that this form of theatre was responsible for start of improvised performances, based on various scenarios by actors/actresses.  The standard of the acting and performance was more important than the subject matter of the play.

The Commedia Dell Arte is very much characterised by the improvisation from a standard plot and the use of stock characters for all plays and different scenarios.  It was of course not completely improvised, a subject matter would be chosen, a basic outline of the plot and characters would be planned and also the characters relationships to each other etc.  Each situation, scene and outcome would be clear but there was always the opportunity for the actors to improvise.  The actors/actresses brought life to their parts and the dialogue between characters was still expected to flow without pause.  Due to the standards expected actors/actress had to seriously study the characters they were playing and this subsequently changed forever the standards of acting.  In fact the very best actors were able to bring their own individuality and brilliance to each part.  The most important roles were always given to the best and most popular actors.  The Commedia Dell Arte helped to introduce the professional actor into Europe.

The stock characters, mentioned above, were often in very traditional costumes and masks.  These stock characters were used in most plays and were represented by specific types, such as, underhand servants, military officers full of bravado, and silly old men.  The comedic storylines were always a funny drama and not very serious and always had a happy ending.  These stock characters were given to the most popular actors and had parts in the play that were really funny, and often had nothing to do with the plot were called “lazzi” and could be such things as acrobatics, wrestling or juggling, somersaults etc, etc.

Performers played on temporary stages, outside around various towns and cities.  They relied more on props than on impressive scenery.  They were funded by the various towns and cities they played in and extra funding collected during the play was by donations “passing the hat”.  This was so anyone could see the performances free of charge. 

Some plays were seen by the upper classes, kings etc – this enabled certain actors to become very well known.  Key to the Commedia Dell Arte’s success was the ability of actors/actresses to become very famous and have great financial success as well as the opportunity to travel.

Mock up designs

Today we have tried to mock up some possible layouts for the artwork thats going to go up on the bus station wall. This has been made harder for the fact when the architect came in he said we now have some spotlights to take into account and need to design the artwork around them. This has mad it a lot harder for designing now as before it was just one rectangle which is a good canvas to work from. But now with the lights being about a quarter of the way in either side and nearly a metre high up. Means it a big design change to avoid them. So now i have mocked up some possible layouts of photoshop to maximise the space we have!

as you can see the lights are rather in the way. However i did think maybe it could all still be one single piece but just cut around the lights, in the same way you would a socket if you were wallpapering. However if not i thing this layout would work really good. Its

evaluation

The project was to basically create you own hoax using image manipulation techniques. So this project was right up my street as i love to do image manipulation projects like this wether it be just for fun or involved in other projects. This is obviously because i want to be a graphic designer so i have a big interest in it.  However i feel i am really strong in using photoshop as i know my way around it quite well after having it for over 7 years. So i dint want to just churn out another photoshop image with somebodies head on somebody else. I wanted it to have a strong back story that could go off in different directions and incorporate lots of different elements.

Thats why for my hoax i came up with a mysterious killings idea where some campers in the sherwood forest woods were attacked by a unknown creature. That killed them in a mysterious way. So that was my basic idea to start off with. This then ended up sprouting out in lots of different directions, as i ended up doing a government file, police file, autopsy report then the polaroids that i had to do. So as my story built up my original idea kind of changed. I was going to have the secret camera footage that was supposedly found by the government and put in to storage exposed in the newspaper. Although i decided against it actually as i liked the fact it was a bit of a mystery still along with the Manton colliery event that happened over 40 years priory to this. Which all this built up a strong enough story without exposing the mysterious creature.

Overall i feel it has gone very well and looks quite professional like it could actually be a proper mysterious case- or hoax in this case. It has gone quite well from looking into different hoaxes but mainly looking into dyatlov pass incident which was the real life mysterious event that still remains a mystery today. But from reading up about this event it fed and started off my whole story for this project and has given it a really good bases to work from.

photographic evidence.

I have been up to the woods at the top of sparked hill opposite the big lion gates, to stage my murder scene and take photos. I then set up a tent and knock it known, ripped it and trashed it so i looked like something has attacked it. Littered it with clothes, rucksack and added a t-shirt that i painted spots of red to make it look more believable.  For example the top was suppose to have been ripped from one of the boys boys bodies.

 I then photographed the whole scene then the specific items of clothing which will then latter go into the police file and more importantly the government one. To take the pictures i lowerd the image quality from fine to jpeg and set it to the lowest size. This was to make the images from my DSLR look much more old and vintage looking compared to a high quality image.

Polaroid

To get my photographs i have taken to look more like authentic 1970s images i have done a lot of photo editing on them. To get the age look on the images i have tried to play around with different filters, effects and noise to try and get that ruff photo look that i was wanting. After a hour or so playing around i have finally got the look i was aiming for.

to do this i was using this photo as reference. 

So to start i loaded up my image and add a black and white filter- then adjusted the tones of the colors till i was satisfied. This then had given me a base to build up from. 

Now from my base image i added a hue and saturation layer to make the image look a bit more washed out and hazed.

I then added a layer masked and added some exposure around the edges as on old photos like the one i have been looking at they are faded along the edges and corners. 

Now i was nearly done i added a warming photo filter to give it a yellow tinted vintage look which drastically ages your photo. to the filter effect i then added a vertical line effect in so it looked like it had been printed out on a old polaroid. However something wasn't right and it looked like sombody trying to edit a photo to look old. It didn't look authentic enough for my liking and it need to look old but in a subtle way. 

I then added a a speckle effect to the image so it looked battere

d and aged. To do this i had to create a new white layer and added some gaussian noise to it so it looked like this...

Once i had done that i then got the magic wand and selected a area and then deleted it. Which then left lots of speckles over the face. However it needed to be toned down and not so obvious so i added a soft light layer style so it blended in more with the image 

Now finally i was almost happy but i felt it needed like a shinny effect to it where it had a light spot in it. So i basically created a new layer and painted on a white spot that faded out that was then overlaid. 

So once again here is the finish piece. 

Now the only thing left to do now i had my image sorted is to put it into the Polaroid which was 21x 25 cm which was a 1970s size. 

One day project.

This was a little add on project for one day to give us some extra work experience as you are doing it for a real life client. Just that it is within the college itself. The project was to create artwork to go down in main site to show what the ideal student would be like walking through the doors starting for the first time. So the point of the project was to ideally motivative and inspire people to do well, not patronise them which you have to be careful of. Which i intended to stay well clear of! Because people don't react as well to being told what to do.

For this project then there was no paramiters set by the client and we were free to do what we want, which is good from a design point of view because it gives you a chance to do something interesting. So to start off the glass got into a group and thought of all the subjects that they did at college. E.g Maths, english, p.e, drama and so on and so forth. After this we then put them on pieces of paper and picked them out of a hat to decided who would have which subject. I ended up with Travel and tourism which initial i thought would be quite hard, but after i spent half an hour brain storming and looking at other examples of graphic design work to inspire me. I managed to think of quite a few ideas of what i could do to hopefully inspire somebody. Because with traveling there are loads of quotes out there to inspire people to travel the word, which is what i decided to base it from.

I decided to do my design as plane in which i made a silhouette on photoshop and added inspirational words and phrase to resemble the windows and contour lines. I felt this was really strong as it meant it was bold and eye catching. But served a purpose as i could hide lots of writing in it, but without it having really obvious long boring sentences. So the writing on the page would appear to be very minimal. This gives the poster more of a visual impact and helps to make the poster have more impact as it isn't shouting to the reader! I also think it gives a more interesting view to the page.

these are the variation of designs I did

However  this is the design that i ran with as i felt it was just that little bit more of a less obvious choice to go with having the word fly. In very small letters to almost create a unusual perspective with the plane!