Visual Communication Rotation

At the foundation show from last year I found vis com the most interesting group of work because it involved many aspects which I am interested in such as photography and advertising so I was eager to begin this rotation to gain a better undertsanding of what it consisted of. I struggled with the initial start of this rotation after being given the words 'leaf' and 'cell' to work with as sort of direction. I filled a small sketchbook with doodles and line drawings of things i associated with the words. We were then asked to use found images from magazines and books combined with our own drawings and thoughts to form a short narrative. I did struggle to get into this because i was unsure of what materials to go with, yet i found using watercolours and fine liner worked really well considering i had not used them very much before. The magazine i had selected had a large feature on tony blair so i chose to focus on images of him as the character in my narrative, also the science encyclopedia i found had some really nice images of water and waves which i liked. Using these images i formed a narrative of tony blair travelling through the jungle in a 4x4 voltswagon when he crashes into a tree so he gets lost in the jungle and finds himself by a river. There is an abandoned boat in the river which he climbs into and travels along trying to find civallisation, but approaching is a waterfall which his boat falls over THE END. :) Here are a few images i selected from my narrative.

I got good feedback from the tutors about the way i presented my narrative because I used the pages of the sketchbook in a variety of experimental ways which i enjoyed. For example using the spine of the book as a river and varying in scale. I was surprised the tutors liked this as i didn't really know what i was doing i just went with the flow and felt to keep the narrative interesting i should vary the way it was presented on each page.

Over the second week our brief was called 'messages' and it was made up about the idea that we had to send a message to someone but not using words. The first example we were given was one girl wanting to tell her dad she wanted to be a stamp collector, which some of us found confusing because the breif said it had to be a serious message, something which was hard to say. So initially i was finding it hard to come up with ideas and inspiration as i thought it had to be light hearted and comical so i explored animal testing on rats who wanted to be punks by having the rats in gothic outfits and spelling out i dont like red in lipstick kisses, i have no idea where this idea came from as its mega random and not really interesting. Then i looked at cats who wanted to be dogs so i drew a cat with a bone in its mouth, woofing and peeing against a tree. I didn't find this subject matter very interesting either, i dont know why i went with animals because i dont even like them.. Whilst struggling with these ideas i spoke to the BA graphics tutor who reassured me that the idea should be personal, serious and true to work best. So i decided to focus on the issue of being prosecuted for buying a chid travel-card and how i could break the news to my mum. I played around with the letter i had recieved, my oystercard and emails to the prosecutors at southern rail. Whilst experimenting with these images i thought about transitioning the oyster card into an inmates identity card. I reproduced the oytercard with watercolours and tried different images in the photobox which i formed into a short animation.


Im happy with the concept i came up with yet the execution is not perfect, and if i hadn't been so confused in the beginning or if we had more time the end product may have turned out  better.