Tears of Inspiration

It has been 215 days or approximately 5,161 hours since this blog was lastly updated. 'Blog momentarily on Hiatus', although two-hundred fifteen days are quite a lot of time to turn hiatus to dead.

I hope the members here have done some sort of art, be it music, film, paintings, drawing, sculpture, animation, meditation, during this pause. I know I have. As an attempt to bring life back to this blog with a gentle CPR, I decided to post a link of another blog which is absolutely a wonderful source of inspiration. A must-check, a must-bookmark page.

Living Lines Library

With hopes you find this useful, I encourage you to post your work again and get things back to life. Remember that a vital life vitalizes.



Peace.

Luca

Blog momentarily on Hiatus

Hi everyone, as you might have noticed, Electronic Sketchbook is on hiatus at the moment. I am extremely busy with work and studies so I will have to put the posts on halt during the summer.

I will try to share some pictures from the 27th June MCAST exhibition opening which is currently being prepared. I have very high hopes for this exhibition since lecturers and students alike are putting great effort into it.

I leave you with Stephen Jones' 15 favourite hat illustrations from the Vogue website:

Stephen Jone's 15 favourite hat illustrations

Behance ProSite

Am I the only one who jumped on the bandwagon with the Behance prosite? It's a terrific tool for artists and designers to showcase their portfolio.

I've found Behance itself to be fantastic for promoting one's self, and for those who, like me, have no time to design their own website. Let's face it, it's not about designing your own website and making it work. With portfolio websites you need to be able to update it regularly, share the work with ease, and most of all you want people to see it. With creative social network websites like behance this is much easier because you do all the exciting stuff, and leave all the coding to them, and it's much easier to connect with other artists and designers.

The problem with the normal Behance website is that even though it is customisable, it is quite limited. With the new 'Prosite' you can upload your own header, choose from five different layouts and then fix margins, colours and options just by clicking and sliding away.

Of course this comes with a price of $11 a month, but don't roll your eyes and give up just yet. $11 a month is only about 7.8 Euros, but think about it. It's a fully customisable website, you're not paying anything for domain and it's super easy to use. If you have a Behance profile already, the projects appear automatically on your prosite account, you just have to add them. I do sound like an advert here don't I? :) Perhaps you could give it a try here and tell me what you think. (you can try it without paying first, when you're hooked on to it you need to pay though ;)).

My first trial, feel free to have a look through

Gregory Crewdson

I just blogged about this in my Master's blog and thought I would share here. 

Absolutely mesmerised by Gregory Crewdson's photography, from the book 'Moving Pictures' - Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Museum Collections. As soon as I saw the pictures, I immediately thought 'David Lynch' from the lighting, and the positioning / angles of the camera shots and the subjects. Indeed a paragraph from the book states that 'His elaborately staged panoramas often elicit comparisons to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Stephen Spielberg.'

What  I like most about them are the long shots being used, and the importance of the ambience around the people - rather than basic the sole focus on the people themselves. I also find the lighting spectacular (apparently Crewdson has recently employed a crew of up to thirty-five to assist in the creation of his visions).

"In Crewdson's work, meaning if kept just out of reach, where it lurks like a repressed trauma." 

(Moving Pictures, 2003)

StageDive Malta new Blog / Site

So I was lingering on facebook and Stagedive Malta linked to their new site/blog. I was instantly surprised with the creativity of their headers and they also looked slightly familiar. Then I realised, this is Elaine's style! Elaine is one of my HND 1 Graphic students who usually works with collage and found objects and materials. I think Elaine did a great job of designing these headers and what's also interesting is that there are three different headers / background which change if you refresh the page. Click any of the below images to be directed to Stagedive Malta. 

Visit Elaine's work here

Epipheo

So this semester, the HND1's Animation students got a challenging title for their animation. They will need to animate the evolution of MCAST Art & Design in under one minute. Most students are tackling it either in the form of an animated infographic, others are displaying it in the form of a fictional narrative. Either way, I would suggest to these students to have a look at 'Epipheo''s videos on youtube. Even though their videos are animated, they are largely showing statistics & information throughout a narrative and of course trying to sell whatever they have been hired for, in a fun way.

For most people when they think about animation, they think about big budget 3D films, and not necessarily animating for online marketing. I urge students who are inclined towards animation to consider this option; it could be a nice change to the quality of our local adverts.

This is from Epipheo's website: (and visit the website as well, it's as interesting as their videos)
"We are, like, the Crack Commando A-Team of the marketing world. Large and small companies call us when billboards, websites and typical videos don't work. We get hired when organizations want conversion—you know, when you actually want to change someone's mind about a product, solution or cause. We will do whatever it takes to communicate YOUR idea to the world."

Take the time to animate!

BA Digital Arts & Aljazeera Documentary

Here are some projects from the BA Fine Arts on the subject of 'Leisure' for the future.

Jenning's floating Zeppelin TV screen

George's meditative cube (yes that's him in the sea)

Jamie's vandalised Eiffel Tower

Kirsten's stadium on a roundabout, accessed only by motorised bicycles

Ryan's guide to Ultimate Pleasure

Sabrina's new transport system Poster

Sean's outdoor party

Sarah's inquisitive balcony

The projects are still unfinished; will post new screenshots once they are. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Kamy's and Daniella's movie.

This week I was also glad to see our exhibited piece at the 'Art of Silence' in a documentary on Aljazeera about censorship in Malta. This also got Ruth and I thinking about doing another piece for The Front Against Censorship. Click the image to go to the documentary; it's worth a look.

Updates

Haven't posted during these two weeks because I've had a non-stop schedule, from a 3-day stay in Luxembourg with my Media students:

Ritienne Aquilina & Andy Micallef at the EU Bookshop Ceremony

...to shadowing a German lecturer for the BA Fine Arts Course on the Digital Applications Unit. Presentation will be on Friday and I will try to post some documentations here the following weekend!

The Grammar of Film & Storyboarding

Excellent video tutorials on the Grammar of Film kindly provided by my friend/colleague Eleonora (check out her blog here)

The Grammar of Film Part 1 from Eleonora Rose Abela on Vimeo.

The Grammar of Film Part 2 from Eleonora Rose Abela on Vimeo.

And here's some information on Storyboarding - just in case there's no time to cover this in class :) The final few slides are a summary of the above videos.Storyboarding

View more presentations from Moira Zahra.