Stock Photo Rights

Copyright for images is a minefield and up til now, stock imagery sites have not helped us to understand how it works. Check out www.stockphotorights.com to help get your head around it. Basically remember these 3 things to watch out for: Models, marks and designs.

Inception

Whoa!

This film blew me away. It is the story of a time when the technology exists to enter people's dreams allowing thieves to extract secret information from people's subconscious minds eg, the combination to a safe... Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a successful theif, is asked by the owner of an energy company (Saito) to complete a mission in order to grant him entry to America to see his children again. Saito's main business competitor is an old man who is very sick, and his son is about to take over his father's company. Saito wants the son to break up his father's empire. Cobb agrees out of desperation to see his children again.

However instead of performing 'extraction' (getting information out of someone's head) he needs to perform 'inception' - the planting of an idea into someone's mind. This requires a team of people and creating dreams within dreams. As time passes much quicker in dreamstate than in normal life, this creates a multiplying effect - 5 mins asleep = 1hr in a dream, 1hr of a dram within a dream = 1 week etc.

The creators had really thought everything through very very carefully. One interesting aspect was that as they fall of a bridge, whilst asleep and dreaming, this affects the dream - there's no gravity!

The ending is very smart. It is a cliffhanger, but because of that it encourages you to really think hard over what you have just seen in order to fathom out the answer to the question left hanging.

How can I sum it up? "Watch it!"



Links: IMDB, Inception website

Gorillaz.com

I have just finished reading an article about the redesign of the band Gorillaz' website and although I'm impressed with the site, all the games you can play, features etc etc I can't help but feel that the website homepage doesn't have a "Gorillaz feel". It's a bit too "websitey". Gorillaz to me is hand drawn, telling a story about the characters, if you look at the header bar (in white at the top) it's just boring and manufactured.


The homepage is pretty good aside from the header bar, however as you navigate through the rest of the site there's next to nothing hand drawn. Maybe it's a good thing as it gives a bit of space and tidiness from the characters, I can't make up my mind! Any thoughts?


Links: Gorillaz website, Mike Robinson, Ben Sims

Design Society Website

I have been working on the new Leed University, Design Society website recently and I'm interested to hear what people think of it. The target audience is of course the School of Design students but also the tutors and potential employers of Leeds Uni graduates/students.

There are a few aims for the site:
- to give advice to School of Design students, advice written by students, not lecturers.
- to let our members (and non-members) know about what's going on in the society, socials etc.
- to help put University of Leeds design graduates firmly on the employee wish-list!

So please let me know what you think!

Student life: how to make an alternative income

I have been lucky enough to win quite a lot of freelance projects from websites such as freelancer.co.uk and studentgems.com. My contact details got passed onto the Guardian to be interviewed for an article published today: "Student life: how to make an alternative income"

Pictionary Campaign, Ogilvy & Mather

Really like the simplicity of this campaign for Pictionary by Art Director, Juan Jose Posada of Ogilvy & Mather. However would it make me go out and buy Pictionary or would I just think to play it if I was really bored one day? Although it reminds me about the game, it doesn't give me a reason to buy the game as opposed to just playing it, I have no idea what the advantages are of actually owning it...

La Geode, Cite des Sciences, Paris

La Geode at the Paris Science museum is really very impressive. It's like a miniature planet that changes appearance with the weather, time of day and angle from which you look at it.


La Géode is a sphere with a diameter of 36 metres, consisting of 6433 steel triangles. It cost 130 million francs to build.

"The Bayswater Omnibus", 1895 by George William Joy and "They Could Not Imagine", 2009 by Gasan

The first of these paintings, "The Bayswater Omnibus", shows passengers inside a horsedrawn omnibus. The artist's wife and daughter posed as the mother and young girl on the left.

Joy described the passengers, "In the farthest corner sits a poor, anxious mother of children, her foot propped on an untidy bundle; beside her, full of kindly thoughts about her, sits a fashionable young woman; next to her the City man, absorbed in his paper; whilst a little milliner, bandbox in hand, presses past the blue eyed, wholesome looking nurse in the doorway."

The artist of the second painting, "They Could Not Imagine" said:
"I was interested in how the artist had different classes of society together, and wondered how realistic this was. The painting provides so much information about how people lived, from fashion to travel and advertising. I transported these people into 21st century life. The ladies are fascinated by what they see and the businessman has already adapted with his laptop. The smaller characters have been affected by the recession, but the balloons represent hope. The fading reflection of St. Paul's shows Christianity as a traditional lifestyle disappearing, which I think is sad."

Both photographed in the Museum of London.

"Viaduct", 1998, Michael Johnson

This painting from 1998 is a bitter comment on Modern Britain, made at the time when London was enjoying its reputation as the fashion "capital of cool".

It is set on Holborn Viaduct in London. On top of the viaduct are Arts Council officials, artist Damien Hirst, politician Peter Mandelson, businessmen, scientists and their mad-cow creations. Mandelson is holding the Millenium Dome and Hirst is holding a pickled sheep.

Under the viaduct are the poor, whose contributions to the National lottery keep the arts going.

Photographed in the Museum of London

Museum of London

I visited the Museum of London to see the "Exploring 20th Century London" exhibition. In amongst all the "history stuff" were some examples of the early advertising and a printing press dating from 1780.





1780s Printing Press:

Some examples of early promotional posters:

The more typefaces the better:
www.dollardreadful.com:


Link: Museum of London, Advertising

Espace Dali, Paris

I recently visited the Salvador Dali museum in Paris, Espace Dali. I didn't really know anything about the surrealist artist before I went and was suprised to find that I really liked his work and found it very interesting. Not long before I visited the Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre and had been really dissappointed by the works there so I was pleased to have my interest in art reinvigorated!

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) was particularly interested in the juxtaposition between the strength and fragility of life forms, in particular the snail, with it's tough outer shell protecting it's vulnerable, slug body.
"As Dalí believed that nothing occurred simply by accident, he was captivated when he saw a snail on a bicycle outside [Sigmund] Freud's house, connecting the snail with the image of a human head; more particularly, with the head of Freud. Dalí was also fascinated by the natural geometry of snail shells, and like the egg, the duality of its soft interior with its hard exterior." (Quoted from this site.) This is his sculpture, "The Snail and the Angel":Another animal that fascinated him was the elephant. Dali liked to exaggerate this contrast but giving the elephant long spindly legs in his pieces of art:


This work of art is particularly interesting as Dali has taken a proposal for the site of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to be used as the body and trunk of the elephant:" There was a pre-Napoleonic (1758) proposal by Charles Ribart for an elephant-shaped building on the location of the current arch." (Quoted from this site)

Here are some other items I photographed in the museum....

From his "Alice in Wonderland" series:
Sculptures:
Some of his furniture designs:


Espace Dali Website

"Dreamlands" Exhibiton, Pompidou Centre, Paris

The title of this exhibition came from the name of an amusement park built in 1904 at Coney Island in New York. Dreamland marked the beginning of a sensational new movement in architecture. Dreams were becoming reality.

Dreamland Amusement Park, 1907. This was to be a high-class entertainment village with elegant architecture, exhibitions, rides and thrills however the park was destroyed by a fire in 1911.

The exhibition had a section about Salvador Dali's "Dream of Venus" pavilion for the New York's World Fair in 1939. This was a piece of installation art before installation art had even begun. You can guess that the pavilion was a very weird and wonderful place; topless mermaids swimming around, a leopard-faced mannequin covered in shot glasses, Venus in her boudoir....

"Skyline" by Kader Attia is a collection of fridges covered in tiny mirror panels.

"Delirous New York" original cover by Rem Koolhaas.

“Nothing Stops a New Yorker” by Malachi Farrell. This was a quirky piece of installation art, the cardboard skyscrapers were at first made to do a work-out then that was interrupted by news reports from September 11th, terror alerts broadcasts and exerts from Public Enemy songs. It was interesting how the artist had surrounded the skyscrapers by junk. It seemed to show the collapse of New York's infrastructure and the nature of our "disposable" way of life accumulating in the streets. The installation was cleverly placed by the panoramic windows of the Pompidou centre, showing the city carrying on behind as if forever into the distance.