Cross Discipline Work: Post-Mortem
- Savannah Edwards
- May 2, 2019
- 5 min read
Collaboration # 1: Album art for Nell Madden's "Roots" (Successful)
Nell reached out to me via Facebook Messenger after looking at the album art I had made for "The Jang" last trimester and wanted me to make her some art for her acoustic album "Roots" - to which my style of painting was suited to. I was very flattered that someone had reached out to me without me posting anything in the Facebook page or even asking around. Once I agreed to get on board with the project Nell and I met up over coffee as well as one of her friends who i believed to be a music producer (I'm not to sure as Nell was my main point of contact) and we discussed what she wanted to include. Working with Nell was really easy and she gave me some really great direction and a lot to work with. Roots was a album about her father and her growing up, hence the name "roots". We discussed what flowers reminded her of home and her dad as well as the green ribbon tattoo she had on her wrist to remember her father. I really wanted to get this right for her.
She really wanted warm browns and the texture and grain of the paper to come out. This was perfect for me as i was very comfortable working traditionally with inks and watercolours. The only issues I really had was struggling to get the art to her on time . I was a bit ambitious and painted out 12 options for her and waiting for them all to dry is a painful process - especially when using masking fluid as the paper had to be 100% dry before you painted over the top and when you peeled it off. Moreover I was a bit inconsiderate of the time I had to do things and it ended up snowballing. Thankfully she didn't need the art for a while as she was having some issues on her end with recording. Next time I definitely would give myself a little more time and make more rough drafts in the beginning.
I didn't really get to learn much about audio but it was definitely a very different process in comparison other times I've made album covers. It didn't feel just like "this is the name of the album, do some cool artwork," she knew what she wanted and gave me some great material to work with. I did learn that it was standard to have album art at 6000 x 6000 pixels and edited them all to that size so she wouldn't have to worry about it. Overall I really loved working on this project.
Collaboration # 2: Album art for Nell Madden's "Dear Government" (Successful)
After the first album art project with Nell, she let me know that she may need me again and I was happy to be on standby as I needed collaborations. She reached out to me again with a more lighthearted and cheeky track. There was not as much time to execute this one as she needed it in about a week and we couldn't discuss much other than "I want this to be a cheeky or silly cover" and so I looked into the lyrics of her song and she mentioned avocados. I asked her if I could go with making a cover that featured avocados and she was keen.
After a bit of thinking and doodling some avocados, I decided to try something a little different and did paper art as I didn't want to paint details and keep stopping in the process to wait for paint to dry. I painted 7 sheets of cold press paper different colours and then set up a few squares and painted backgrounds. I cut out one group of paper avocados and took a few photos of them in different arrangements and sent them over to her. From there I got a few ideas and spent about 20+ hours cutting out tiny letters and avocados with blunt scissors. Despite the constant accidental snipping of my own fingers I was very pleased with how the final results were.
In brief, It was a bit of a race to get this done amongst all my other work but I was keen to get it done and we were both very pleased with the results.
Collaboration #3: Cautionary Tale (Unsuccessful)
This project single-handedly takes the cake for the worst and most difficult experience I have ever had working in a group. I am truly not proud of the finished project, however the video is linked below.
This was the CIU project, the topic we were to focus on was violence in the media and in our case, we were talking about animated violence in video games and the misinterpretations that guardians have of it. Our proposed project was to make a slightly animated storybook (disguised as a kids storybook with a brutal story inside). There weren't too many successes of this project other than we still managed to keep all group members and that we actually handed something in. We also had frequent meetings outside of campus as we came closer to the due date of the project.
In this project I was working with 2 other animation students and another film student. I felt alone in wanting to actually do the best I could as right from the beginning there were red flags with messages like "We're not aiming for a HD". It was really hard to get people to do work and actually take some initiative, i didn't want to have to be responsible for carrying the group through and I certainly couldn't do it on my own. I thought that even though I had some problems with unresponsive members in other groups I've worked in, I thought we could get it to work in this group as I have done before. I really should have contacted my lecturer much earlier in this project and sorely regret only asking for help when I knew it was too late to do much.
I had issues with people being unreliable, not showing up, nobody taking initiative unless it was fun, people getting distracted and then having them make fun of me when I got frustrated with nothing getting done. I was really upset with this project and I didn't end up learning much about film as the shotlist that was made for me to work off for illustrations was not explained to me and I ended up having to look up all of the terminology online whilst I was illustrating 27 panels of illustration on my own in 48 hours. Next time I have issues like these I will immediately contact the lecturer and discuss what could happen as I was way too late when I asked for help and I knew it.
Cheers,
Grassland
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