blogbybilal

Happy new year

Well, back again after a long hiatus. Happy new year!

Starting off 2009 with a link to one of my posts from september last year, as Obama is getting inaugurated today: HOORAY!

the end of creativity

So I guess this is it, the “exploring creativity” course is over. Instead of rambling on about what I thought of the course, my reflections, summaries etc, I’ll end it with the following “qoute”:

Stanley Kubrick was making the movie, ‘2001’.
He was shooting the apes.
He had a second unit shooting the space station.
Rotating in space: the docking sequence.
This was a model, but Kubrick wanted to be sure it didn’t look like one.
So he wanted to see the previous day’s rushes.
Kubrick said, “Let’s see them with sound.”
The producer said they hadn’t had time to do the sound yet.
“What’s the sound going to be?” said Kubrick.
“The usual sort of metallic space communications.” said the producer.
Kubrick said, “Well I don’t want to watch the rushes mute. So just put some sound over the pictures.”
The producer said, “We haven’t got any sound at all.”
“Just dig around and find something. Anything.” said Kubrick.
So the producer looked around the deserted studios, and all he could find was an old vinyl recording of ‘The Blue Danube Waltz’ by Strauss.
So he shrugged and put it on.
Then they watched the rushes.
The producer cringed at how inappropriate the music was.
A 19th century soundtrack with 21st century visuals.
Kubrick simply watched.
Then after a while he said. “Do you know what? They’re going to call me a fucking genius when I use this in the movie.”

Exploring Creativity

Exploring Creativity 10.11-14.11

This entire week was dedicated to our elective courses. In the exploring creativity course we were supposed to write our essays. Last week we had a lecture by Erik Lerdahl. Having read parts of his book it was really quite interesting to hear him speak about his subject as well.

Anyway I had a hard time deciding what to write about. I did however thoroughly enjoy experimenting with the happy accident method a couple of weeks back (I highly recommend reading this post first if you don’t have a clue what happy accidents might be), so I thought about doing something with that. Erik from the same studio course as myself also wanted to do some accidents and so we decided to work together. We met with Einar on tuesday and presented our (few) ideas. Einar, being easy-going as usual, of course let us work with the happy accidents method, even though it meant that our essay probably would end up with a little less words and more pictures.

So Erik and I went out and got lots of stuff, different kinds of paper, markers, ink, sponges, etc. and then we started drawing abstract/random sketches. We also had the Scott Robertson tutorial running in the background on my laptop. The inspiring voice of Scott and his endless fascination, descriptions and ramblings about spaceships and jetpacks was of course indispensable. Some pictures from our process below. (Never mind the first picture here where it looks like I’m smoking a bong or something…)

We also tried out the technique that the guy over at the “Daily monster” uses, blowing random ink spatter across the paper, finding a potential monster, and then drawing him (or her) a little bit more detailed. It was all really good fun and we enjoyed this sometimes messy, but entertaining technique. Check out some of our monsters below:

Of course we soon had to reluctantly break ourselves away from all the sketching and go digital. We scanned in our sketches, and continued experimenting with the happy accidents method in photoshop. We enjoyed the process, and some of the results didn’t turn out too bad either. A few of them even looked kinda cool at the end of the week. Some of my photoshop compositions from this week are posted below. All of them are really quite early stage stuff, and it would be cool to revisit a couple of them later to really sketch them out digitally and create some concept art or whatever.

happy accidents

Exploring Creativity 28.10

Einar held a lecture on “applied imagination” today. It was short but informative and interesting, touching upon some stuff I find to be really cool. Einar mentioned for instance the “Rorschach inkblot test” (a method of psychological evaluation) emphasizing the implied shapes that we make up to be something in our own minds. Example below.

He continued talking about concept art, in video games for instance. I love cool concept art myself and so thought it was great fun to actually have a lecture on it. We were shown some concept art from the Playstation 2 game “Shadow of the colossus”. The game itself being very conceptual in many ways, the art in this case also suited very well for this particular lecture. Contrary to a lot of concept art that clearly expresses its intended characters/environments (which we were also shown), the art from colossus on the other hand showed some great suggesting environments. Check out a couple of examples below:

We then watched a Gnomon tutorial video by guru illustrator/concept artist/designer Scott Robertson. In his video “creating unique environments” Scott demonstrates what he calls the “happy accident” method. He starts off by quickly drawing several completely random and abstract marker sketches and scanning them. He then layers them over each other using different layer and blending modes, opacity, etc. The next step is zooming into the image and finding portions of the image which might imply some sort of…well anything actually, but usually environments or something. Finding random stuff on the zoomed-in image, Scott would start drawing on top of the implicit shapes and creating environment concept art, and also a couple of characters and several spaceships… A few screenshots from the video below:

It is easy to see similarities between the different stuff we were shown, everything from Rorschach to Robertson. It was now our turn to try out the happy accident technique. The task was to create characters and/or environments based on happy accident methods. I only had time to do one Photoshop composition based on a few abstract marker sketches. It turned out “okay” I guess, with a few cool elements. It was my first time trying this stuff out though, so I guess that’s my excuse ;)

Anyway, the method itself was really fun to do! For me it was like a completely new method, and I can’t say I have done anything very similar before. Also I have never really had much of a thing for abstract art, but I love how the randomness and the abstract sketches in this particular method are utilized to create new cool stuff. Of course a finished concept art drawing would require a lot more photoshopping and much more time, but this technique can potentially send you off to a great start! My photoshop composition and some of the sketches it is made from below: