Major Project (Initial Ideas)

BRAINSTORM

For my major project I decide to do a series of tourism campaign posters for Tanzania. My inspiration for tourism campaign as my major project comes from a Sri Lanka Tourism campaign by Visual Ashram. In one of their poster the formed elephants out of words that are (I am guessing) related to the things you can do in Sri Lanka. It was quite a unique poster and it inspired me to go with tourism campaign poster.

Sri Lanka tourism campaign poster
source: http://visualashram.com/Sri-Lanka-Tourism-Campaign

Anti-Drugs Campaign

Final Piece

As you can see, the anti-drugs campaign poster is an incredible success.  Unfortunately, this campaign poster was not our first idea. My team (Patrikas and Guilherme) and I wanted to do an environmental campaign at first. We wanted to inform an audience about the pollution of the River Soar and convey a message that we should keep the river clean or else we would ruin the ecosystem of the swans. When we went down to the river channel next to LIDL to take some professional photographs with better angles of the polluted river channel by surprise we met a cleaned up river channel. Therefore our campaign poster could not work, we had a brilliant idea but no evidence of the pollution.

The river channel before on the left, the river channel after on the right.

Because of this disadvantage of the environmental campaign, my team and I decided to go with our 'plan B' idea for our campaign which was an Anti- drug campaign. Our reason to why we decided to make an Anti-drug campaign is because there are lots of young people getting under the influence of drugs. From our experience we have come across many young people who are dealing with drugs on frequent basis, therefore we know know it is a big issue that should be taken care of. Especially, in may case I lost a friend the beginning of this year due to the overdose of drugs. With all these aspects considered, my team and I wanted to make a powerful anti-drugs campaign.

Recently, a famous rapper named Mac Miller passed away due to drug overdose. He was just 26 years of age, he had so much more life to live through but he fell under the influence of drugs. My team members and I thought it would he would be a good example to show proof what drugs can do to a person which is dying young. Before using Mac Millers face for our campaign we decided to some market research to see whether a majority of the young adults audience knew who he was.

Market Research

Our team placed a photo of Mac Millers on to the board without his name. Then we asked our classmates to raise their hands up if they knew who this artist/rapper was and the majority raised their hands up. With this research my team and I knew that using him for our campaign poster was going to work out great. After our research, we started to brainstorm ideas for how to represent Mac Miller. Since he was dead we were brainstorming ideas on how to represent that on our campaign poster to imply a message that this what will happen with the use of drugs. We came up with idea to photoshop a half of a skull onto a side of his face.

Mac Miller: the photo we used for our campaign poster
Source: http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/mac-miller-profile.html

 

The Skull: we used the right side of the skull to photoshop it into Mac Miller's face
Source: https://boneclones.com/product/human-male-european-skull-BC-107

With these two images presented above we formed our image for our campaign poster.

After Patrikas photoshopped Mac Miller's face with a photoshop app called pixelmator we did some research on different anti-drugs tag-lines to get some ideas so that we could we could create our own.

g

This was the site that we used to get some ideas for our tagline.

Source: https://brandongaille.com/61-catchy-just-say-no-to-drugs-slogans/

After our research, we came up with our own initial tagline idea "Don't take drugs, Don't die young." However, after some deep thought about our initial tagline idea we realised it was not a powerful one. We needed a powerful, shorter, powerful tagline. Because of this, we thought of reverse psychology.

"Reverse psychology is more likely to be successful with people who have a high need for control. Rebellious teenagers who naturally do the opposite of what their parents say are classic targets, as are Type A people and those with narcissistic or even psychopathic tendencies"- changingminds.org. As a result of usually telling young adults not to do something and they would always do the opposite, we decided to come up with a tagline that tells them to do drugs. Our final idea for our tagline became "Take drugs, Die young." Research for a powerful quote by Mac Miller that relates to our poster idea Source: https://wealthygorilla.com/15-inspirational-mac-miller-quotes-from-his-lyrics/ To make our campaign poster even more striking we decided to add one of his quotes. We did research through the web browser for quotes that relate to the fact that he did not want to die young. The quote we decided was strong  and ended up adding to our campaign poster was, "Never scared of death, but I ain't ready for that day to come." The reason we chose the bold colours orange and yellow for the text was for the words to stand out. We used a slightly darker shade of orange for the tagline so that it would give sort of a warning message. In conclusion, I think my team and I did our best to present this poster in a powerful way. I like the fact we had a good thought process throughout the whole project, we all shared and combined our ideas to form this poster. Patrikas was in charge mostly in the photoshop part of the project and Guilherme and I were mostly the ones doing the researching and coming with tagline and the searching for a powerful quote.

Initial Website Design

Today, I started to use Wix to design my website. So far I have been able to design parts of my template, edit the background and the fonts in class. There is so much more to work, on as I will have to insert my own image and the edit the backgrounds a bit more. I will work on it this week and make it interesting.

PRESENTATIONS

This week we had to present our advertisements and explain how we created it. It was interesting to hear and see other groups projects. Every single one of the groups came up with unique ideas for their advertisements or their campaigns. There was a colour pencils advertisement, a sleep mask advertisement, and  an anti-gaming campaign.

Color pencils advertisement
source: https://wonderandmadcheshir.blogspot.com/2018/10/hi-wonders-its-just-that-tomorrow-i-was.html

I really liked the way the colour pencils advertisement group worked together. Each member of the team had their own role into creating their advertisement. I also liked the way they made their poster look interesting even though the did not use photoshop to make their advertisement look engaging. The other thing that I found interesting about their poster was the contrast between the overhead image and the bottom image. I would say that they had a very good thought process. Although, I would like to mention that should have had more insight towards their ideas for their tag-lines. The team should have done more research to get ideas. However, during their presentation I could see that they really worked hard and put effort into creating their poster and they taught me that you do not need photoshop to make a great interesting poster.

Sleep mask advertisement

source:https://arkadkow.blogspot.com/2018/10/product-design-part-v-final-outcome.html

This group was very organised with the way the showed their work process and how they came up with their advertisement idea. They were also blessed to have someone who was skilful with photoshop. Although, I did not see much of their research done, they should have shown more of research and explain their editing process during their presentation. I really like their logo and their thought process on how they decided to create it. In conclusion, this advertisement team had a good thought process going on and were really creative with how the designed their poster to convey their message.

Anti-gaming campaign
source: https://ricardocfantunes.blogspot.com/2018/10/blog-post_17.html

Out of all of the advertisement and campaign posters I really liked the anti-gaming campaign. It was so interesting how they came up with their image for their poster. The game lives, the time and the game controller fading away is a very striking image. You can clearly identify what idea this campaign poster is trying to imply. During their presentation the team should have been more enthusiastic when they were presenting their poster because it is quite a powerful piece. However, the poster's text should have been edited a little bit more to making it a striking tagline. The other fact that I liked about this groups presentations is that they made an effort to explain how the photoshopped and edited this piece.

B L O G B U D D Y

MY BLOG PARTNER IS OKSANA PLOTTSEVA !

She is from Russia and she speaks 4 different languages. Her progression route is animation and she would like to work in Japan in the future.

M O V E M E N T (my own sequential photography and research)

FINAL PIECE

     

Eadweard Muybridge
Source: Image

At first it was kind of hard to come up with an idea for my next sequential images, so I began researching on different sequential images done by famous photographers to get some help with brainstorming. While I was doing my research I came across an English photographer named Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). He begun his study of sequential motion when he was assigned to take photographs of a moving horse. After that first encounter with the study of motion he continued to take more photographs of the other movements.

Eadweard Muybridge's first sequential motion piece: Study of the Horse
Source: Study of the Horse

Out all of his sequential photography, the one that caught my attention was the 'Woman Dancing (Fancy)' piece. I liked the flow of the figure and how in each photograph it showed the steps to the lady's dance. It is quite an elegant and graceful piece and it portrays to me a sense of calmness and ease.

Source: Woman Dancing

This photography inspired me to make one of my own dance motion sequential images. I decided to be my own model for the piece. I used my iPhone 7 as a camera and put it on a time and live setting to take the picture of me while I dancing. I had to put my music on and moved around while my phone took a live picture of me or else I would not be giving a feel of calmness and ease like the Woman Dancing piece. I had to be basically in my zone.

Then later went and chose one of the live photos from my photo gallery and pressed on the edit button. In the edit section, I had a bunch of images that  I got to choose from that made up my live photo. From those images, I chose the movements that I found interesting and gave me a proper progression of motion. 

Later on, I cropped and straightened out those images and used filter on them named 'Vivid Cool' with my phone's editing tool. Afterwards, I used an app called 'Aviary' so that I could arrange the images in order sequence. 

The reason to why I chose that filter was to give a sense of calm vibes to the viewers. The tones in that filter express a sense of peaceful feels and that is what I was trying elaborate with my sequence piece.

The Draft

Reflection:
It was fun creating this piece since it was quite relaxing. Although I need someone to take pictures of me next time since I had I could not continuously dance, I had to stop press the camera timer a couple of times to get the perfect motion. Also, I would need a fast shutter effect of a camera to take these movement photos.

FREEDOM (sequential images)

FINAL COMPOSITION

These sequential images are conveying a message of freedom from depression. I came up with the idea of someone gradually rising up from the ground and my partner (Oksana) came up with the idea of gradually increasing the colour in the pictures. The furthest, top left image is the lowest point of the process of the subject's life and the furthest, bottom right image is the highest point of the subject's life. The reason to why we decide to start with a grey image and gradually increase colour into the other pictures is to illustrate depression as a sense of darkness being lifted off the subject. Because Oksana and I think that depression can come in as a feeling of darkness.

We used an iPhone 7's camera to take these pictures. We just used the Photo setting of the camera. After we took the images on the camera we chose the ones we wanted to work with and edited them with an app called InstaSize. We cropped and straightened the photos and gradually decreased the effect of the filter called Radio. To put all the pictures together and in order we used an online photo editor called Pixlr.

THE DRAFT

Reflection:

It was fun creating these sequence images for the first time. Although, while taking the images I realized that I need a better camera to take these photos professionally and I also realized that we also needed a stand for our camera because we couldn’t get a proper horizontal photo it was always slanted.

V A L E N C I A ' S I N T R O

MAMBO! (That's how we say hello in Kiswahili.)


I'm Valencia Kitainda and I am from Tanzania, although I am half  Russian . For the most part I grew up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It is a country on the east side of Africa next to the Indian Ocean. If you haven't ever heard of Tanzania, it's a beautiful small home to many national parks such as Ngorongoro Crater which is one of the 7 natural wonders of Africa.

Source: http://wellmake.co/editor/?

My progression route is Graphic Design. What made me choose this course? Well,  I am mainly driven by the inspiration I find in art. During my A-levels, I started to research on art related courses in the school library. Zaha Hadid is a famous architect who is one of the many art based creators that has inspired me  now along with many others.

ZAHA HADID
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaha_Hadid

Heydar Aliyev Centre
Source: https://qa.herschel.com.au/journal/stories/design-spotlight-zaha-hadid

One Thousand Museum
Source: https://qa.herschel.com.au/journal/stories/design-spotlight-zaha-hadid

Wangjing SOHO
Source: https://qa.herschel.com.au/journal/stories/design-spotlight-zaha-hadid

 For some period of time I thought I was going to pursue an architecture course in university. However, as I started to pursue this I realised that it was not going to satisfy me career wise. As I want to study a subject that is more broad, a subject that will give me many different types of job aspects. Due to my sudden change of thought I decided to do some further research. Finally I came across Graphic Design. It was definitely intriguing when I came across the details and depths of the subject . It was everything I wanted an art-related topic, free to convey my own individuality.

Inspiration Piece
Source: https://99designs.co.uk/blog/design-history-movements/historys-most-famous-posters/

The composition above is of Barack Obama the former president of the United States of America and it portrays a concept of him described as a hope for his country. His country is the United States of America and I can tell that by the colours used to symbolise his flag. This is one of my favourite graphic design pieces because it has a bold message and it stands out.