"Quotes Poster"

"Quotes Poster"

 An 'out of the hat' quote. Design a poster, billboard and a t-shirt.

For this project we were given a quote and told to design from that. I got given one by Sharon Stone:

"Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships".

 Whenever I get given project the first thing I do is my research - I can not design unless I am properly informed about the subject matter. Sharon Stone is an actress, model and producer, perhaps best known for her role in Basic Instinct and Casino, for which she won a golden globe. She is someone who may be considered overtly sexual and has on occasions been known to have a tenuous link with the truth. For example, her role playing the bisexual serial killer Catherine Tremell containted a notorious scene where she is being interogated by police offices. She is sitting with her legs crossed, un-cross's them, spreads her legs and reveals she is wearing no underwear, then recrosses them. All whilst smoking a cigarette. She plays it overtly cool, never flinching, a female seeming wholly in control. It was one of the first bits of full-frontal nudity in film history and gained her a certain leval of notority. However, she later denied she was aware of the nudity, saying:

"I knew that we were going to do this leg crossing thing, but i did not think you would see my vagina in the scene - I was shocked".

The director of the film, Joe Eszterhas, said otherwise, stating .."she was fully aware".

This was a repeated pattern over the years, with people such as the Dali Lama claiming she was a liar. She has also stated she is a member of Mensa, although this has not been verified. To get a broader view of Sharon Stone I also collected some other quotes:

"A woman has many faces as she goes through her life. It's like we need more than one hair-do. We have many, many changes in the evolution of our lives. We have, we learn, and we grow; we view life differently, and life views us differently."

"At first it was exhilarating but when I realized it wasn't going away, it became scary and claustrophobic. Fame is a weird thing."

"Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman in the world, and it's wonderful that she didn't cut up her face. She addressed aging by picking up her chin and receiving the light in a better way. And she looked like a woman. She never tried to look like a girl."

"Before I was a year old I walked and talked and I was even potty trained. When I started going to school I think I got on everyone's nerves because I used to ask adult questions rather than settle for the stuff usually fed to kids."

I wanted my poster to evoke a sort of old hollywood glamour, and even though it was purely typographical, be synonomous with the quoter. In the end, for the poster I choose a typeface called Dream Orphans that I felt wouldnt look out of place in some film credits, and arranged the words as if there were legs crossing over.

For the billboard I kept with the Black and White theme and this time, although not explicity allowed by the brief, added an image. To me, doing a billboard poster about a film star without an image of said film star seemed odd - afterall, film stars careers are wholly based on their images. I there included a sultry looking pose of Sharon, alterend to monochrome, and stated a few facts on the opposite side of the image. I wanted the poster to show the side of Sharon that was perhaps untruthfull.

The t-shirt design, which in the crit someone pointed out would be so much more appropriate on a white pair of underwear, I put the word 'fake' in the middle of the spreadness. This was to make a comment on how sexuality in cinema is quite often the complete opposite of what actual sex is life. Sex on film is impressive - artfully tousled hair, full face of make-up, simultanious multiple orgasms. Sex in real life is real - great, but sometimes funny, and often messy. If we all had a fictional film sex life, I imagine life would be a lot less fraught!

To accompany this project I also made a book that included images of Sharon Stone and various quotes to give a more well rounded view of her. 

Ten Ideas for an Internet Youth TV Station

Ten Ideas for an Internet Youth TV Station

Decided a title - pick a theme and style, consider branding, content, corporate ID, demographic

The first of this years projects was to design an internet TV station, aimed at a youth audience. The first thing I had to do was find out what an Internet TV station actually was - and despite haranguing the lecturer - couldnt get a substantive answer. After some research (on the internet) it seemed to me internet TV stations were things like BBC IPlayer, MTV Videos etc. So how to transfer this into an interesting TV station idea? I brainstormed the following ideas:

1. Can't Cook? Can Cook! - Student cooking site - with everything from how to boil an egg to how to cook on a tight budget. Easy to follow videos. 
2. Student Union TV - Forum for student concerns with a relevant authority to discuss
3. Come Hang for Ten - A platform for not broadly televised sports, giving accessabilty to a wider audience
4. I'm with the Band - Independant music platform for unsigned bands - but from a friends recommendation
5. Every Goal's our goal - Never miss a goal, try, putt again. A website showing only the actual action of a sports game. 
6. Rampent Ranting - A forum for all the rightous and opinionated out there who need a platform to let it all out. 
7. Zombacolypse - A survival website in the event of a Zombie Apocolypse
8. Tadpoles Den - For young entrepernuers - much in the style of Dragon's Den
9. Cut and Paste - An ongoing project, creating a story from submissions in a variety of differnt mediums
10. Revolution around the World - Young peoples hopes and fears for their cultures - a comparison between different issues that are subjective to each situation. 

I decided to focus on the Zombacolypse Website as I felt this was perhaps the most interesting and I didn't want to do anything to do with a talent competition (I blame X-Factor for the decline in original ideas in Media). It came to mind as my friends and I have spent many hours speculating on the best course of action in the event of such a disaster. It was always hypothetical but after frequant discussions I felt I could perhaps impart some advice. To get my project off the ground I did some broad research on the subject matter, researching different historical information including quotes taken from religious texts that could be interpreted as pre-luding to the raising of the dead. For example:

"And the lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalm. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Zechariah 14:13"

I also read some fictional works to help prepare me for my website, including both World War Z and How to Survive the Zombie Apocolypse by Max Brooks. Of course, a research into a zombie survival site could not be completed without watching films such as '28 Days Later', 'Dawn of the Dead' and 'Aaah, Zombies'. I think the Zombie genre endures because of humans natual thrill at gore, and our own morbidity, and also the self belief when watching films like this that we would do things differently, we would be smarter and we would survive. 

My website needed to be informative, visually attractive, and have factors that would be attractive to an outsider. Nearly all Zombie films used the colours black and red so I designer my website around those colours. I took images of Zombies and civillians from a variety of films and outlined them in black, sometimes adding a splash of colour that would give a nod the the film they came from. For example, on the page referencing Film and Literature I had drawn an blacked out image of the character JIm from 28 Days later in his iconic green scrubs (if you are unfamiler with the film the story focuses on Jim, portrayed by Cillian Murphy, and how he awakes from a coma to find zombies have taken over england).

The website was split into five sections - About, History, Science, Film and Literature, Survival. The aim of the website was to have various "experts in their field" to give advice on what to do in an event of a Zombie Apocolypse. I wanted David Starkey to give a history, and had people like Ray Mears and Bear Grylls giving survival advice. The website was designed in a slight 'tongue in cheek style' but obviously with the hope that it would be of actual use in the unlikely (or likely in some peoples opinion!) event that Zombies take over the world.The full website is shown below: