The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown

After finally reaching the end of the first module, which, in hindsight, actually went quite quickly considering the amount of time we've been on the course, we've now begun work on the second module which so far has been concentrating on research techniques. [Oh - and a little note, I've got a friend who does BA Graphics at Leeds Met and so far since September they've had three projects. And one of them involved taking pictures with a camera phone. Jeeeesus...]

So yeah, our first task with the new module was to take 100 pictures around Leeds of people, places, objects, textures and type. I was using my 8 Megapixel point-and-click, which has a broken display, so really all the images were guess work like using a film camera. Still, some of the images came out a bit, well... lame. So I used Photoshop to tweak them and make them look a bit more professional, here's a few examples for ye -

Original...

Edited...

Original...

Edited...

I spent hours going through every photo and editing it so it looked better because I figured 'Oh, well when we're in on Monday we'll probably have to select the best few' or something, and I didn't want to show up with a load of pants looking photography. Still, saves me editing them later on.

The next step was to take a theme from our pictures and elaborate on it through research, so I ended up choosing Smoking because I thought the end product to the research might be really interesting, like using cigarette ash to paint a picture of lungs or something. We needed to get 10 Primary sources of research and 10 Secondary sources of research. First, I created a survey and I wanted the results to give me a feeling or mood about smoking as well as statistical data, so I asked questions like 'How does it feel physically to be desperate for a cigarette?'

I also emptied the contents of my ash tray into a plastic sleeve so it'd give the texture and smell and everything. One of my secondary sources was a South African anti-smoking campaign i found on adsoftheworld.com, it had things like a 48 sheet on top of a tower block saying "Jumping from this building when pregnant may harm your baby" and the tagline "You wouldn't ignore this warning, so why ignore those on cigarette packets?" [http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/national_council_against_smoking_building_billboard]

Some of my photographic research into smoking:

After the smoking research, we were put into groups of four, I was with Liam, Chloe and Carl, and together we decided to research 'Melancholly' for the next brief, unfortunately I was in Watford for the Monday and Tuesday afterwards so I missed the beginning of the brief. When I got back the guys told me we were looking into S.A.D. - Seasonal Affective Syndrome, so I began looking into daylight emitting lamps and where S.A.D. is most prevalent and the like.

We later decided to do a photoshoot of ourselves dressed up in all the winter clothing we could fit on ourselves in the photography studio, before Liam edited them in Photoshop and I came up with a title and logo for us, 'It might never happen' - ie: Cheer up mate, it might never happen. Chloe said she'd like the logo to be similar to the United Colours of Benetton logo, so I tried to keep it in that sort of style, only, different.

In the end, I felt like although our work collectively was of a decent standard, and the photos came out quite professional-looking and all that, we failed to collate all the information we had and actually create a purpose for what we were doing. The posters we did [sadly they're on my account at Uni but I didn't have a USB Key with me to take them home...] looked decent, but how was it actually helping to combat S.A.D.?