Vin's Cliché Monthly Mix—Dec '15

There are no christmas tracks here, but of course there is a DOOM one.

As always, these are a mixture of what I've been listening to through the month; so this month has been a mixture of falling back into my old habits, revisting some tracks and getting the new Grimes Album; oh man that's a good album!

I never have much to say on these, because the music always says more than I could, so just hit play, okay?

Smint: Anything but fresh

Strap on ye' mining helmets, and flick on ye' torches—we be salt mining today ladies and gentlemen!

I'm salty, and Smint are the cause for this!
Oh Smint, why must you betray me like this; I had such faith in you!
Your slogan is 'Fresh to Impress' though you are neither fresh, and I am not impressed!
Yours, Salty McSalterson

So as you may have known, I entered a Smint poster competition, and myself and Shona (A University Compadré) lead in the votes, neither of us actually won, as the votes were totally discounted, leaving us both in the 25 runners up category—this of course entitled us to some free smint goodies, to help soak up the tears of the money we could have won.

I believe Shona may have actually come in the top three, entitling her to £250, but I can't fully remember, but I'm sure they'll  be sending over some small mints to her either way. So if you look below, you'll see what I received in the mail today. (The cat was not included)

The cat tries her best to get into every photo I take

Above are the spoils of my entry, 4 packets of smints. One regular pack, one fruity pack, one regular pack in a 3D sleeve and a slightly larger packet. And with this amount of small mints you may think that I'll have fresh breathe for the rest of my life, but there is a catch! Half of them are out of date!

How long have these been on the shelf? They are solid sugar tablets, how can they even exprire? Nevermind that, some of them expired 13 months ago. Do you understand how old sugar must be to expire, in a sealed container? #freshmyarse

If you can't quite tell, that says November 2014. 13 months in the past.

So, we've established that the Smint products aren't fresh, but what about the brand, are they fresh? Are their ideas fresh? Yes and no. Their ideas will be fresh because they just got 300+ pieces of spec work, to work and play with the ideas as they so wish. They also just paid £500 for a national Ad Campaign and Poster Design, so their Christmas bonuses will likely be pretty fresh too, because they've just scammed a bunch of students.

But do you know what isn't fresh? This idea. They've run it before, and they'll run it again. Looking through their back catalogue of branding and campaigns, it's mostly a mixture of boring branding, lack-luster campaigns and bloody rubbish slogans. So they'll stick on their caps, throw this idea back into the pot next year and land themselves in the same place.

Thanks for the freebies guys, and good luck in the future, but there are a lot of expired mints in Cumbria this December.

Merry Smint-mas!

When design becomes art

Brian Eno once said said something that goes along the lines of "Art is everything you don't have to do" and to me, that makes a lot on sense but he did also create an album called 'Music for Airports', so who knows what the hell this man is about.

As I said, Brian Eno said that art is everything you don't have to do, it's everything we don't need and that's what sets it free. It's expression because we don't need it. We need water, so it's just a matter of living by drinking it, but we don't need Emin's un-made bed, so it's art—well I mean, it's art by description but I'd just call it crap to be honest.

Something that I've been wanting to write about for a while is the debate of design becoming art, and it may not even be a debate, it may just be the ranting of a cynical design student. You see, design is in almost everything we own, and whether you'll agree or not, we need design to function and progress. Everything you own and everything you want to own, has been designed, and it's quite likely you own or want this item because of it's design.

Design is creating something artistic for a purpose, it is purposeful creativity and as I've explained before, Art is anything we actually don't need, it's pure and direct expression. So I feel that I'm seeing a problem, within current trends where people are beginning to turn design into art. By this I mean adding a colour to make it pretty, rather than for a purpose; choosing a typeface for it's looks rather than it's suitability and making something to follow an artistic trend rather than suiting the clients wishes.

When you design anything, it's important to know you are under commission for someone else. You are creating this design for a purpose—whereas art is created without purpose.

So when design becomes art is when you are influencing the design to suit yourself, rather than the client, and this is where I feel both a problem and an interesting solution both lye.

Personally, I think it's a serious problem choosing aesthetics over purpose or suitability. Choosing that nice bright green and pink combo because you like it, rather than it actually working for it's purpose. And this doesn't just come under the umbrella of pleasing the client, because they'll likely only be interested in the aesthetics also, but it's your job of the designer to make the most attention grabbing, most beautiful, most suitable design you can.

But on the other hand, when you have full freedom to disobey the client and create something for your own personal liking, it can really create something exciting and different—which could feed onto being suitable if the client and brief were changed to suit as such. But that's the problem, you are designer and your are operating under the command of another needs, otherwise you wouldn't be paid, so changing the brief or the client to suit yourself is where design becomes art.

I feel this is just a massive mish-mash of thoughts from my head, so if it made no bloody sense I apologise, but well done you for getting all this way. If I had a sticker, you could have one! But I don't so you'll have to go home stickerless. Sorry.

Milk, why have anything you don't need in there?

Lets be honest here, you wouldn't want a dinosaur in your milk, or even an elephant in your jam; so why have it in there?

So for part of the YCN (Young Creative Network) brief this year; there was a selection of topics we could cover, so like any normal person I was head strong into branding milk with a different protein strand; obviously.

I was working on a project for a2 Milk of whom are a milk company, working to get more people who may feel that they are intolerant to milk, whereas they are actually allergic to the 'a1' strand of protein—thus making this milk, but without anything you don't need in there.

I worked with the idea of not having something in milk you didn't need; and through this process I came over a huge range of ideas. One I was planning to run with was an idea of disbelief; animating a character to support this, but that just would not support my time frame.

Considering my time frame, and knowing that this project had to be a moving image as it's final outcome, I decided that it would have to be filmed, in a day and edited the next day. It had to be fast, stupid and milky.

As we were speaking of stupid, I feel I should really highlight something for you.

I realise you may have noticed that the glass is smashed, and you may even see the clip where it does so; and that my friends was my decline into a dark period of strangeness and milk stains.

It was my second clip, I had been setting up for half an hour, I had been shooting for 3 minutes and of course my second item, to fall into the milk breaks the bloody glass; who knew a plastic toy car can be such a destroyer of glass?

Instead of crippling myself into a ball of tears and anger, I flipped that and made something strange and in my opinion, hilariously shit. Don't get me wrong, I love the outcome, I think it's brilliant, but you cannot deny that it's funny because it's just bloody terrible.

So for this,  I didn't get a great grade, but it's going straight into my portfolio, I think it sums me up quite well, it is the definition of a Vincent Walden Botch Job.

And finally, for the music bats out there, you may have noticed my soundtrack is really rather funky, well my friends that is all due to the geniuses that are Vulfpeck, of whom's music I stole for these clips. I haven't the rights to use them, but this is a personal, educational project, so I hope they don't want to sue me to hard!

Also, as I was salvaging the clips I also took a few images for I could make some GIFs for advertisement on social media—cuz all kids know GIFs are where it's at baby!

Those Demon Ways

Beware the GIFs, my son! The clips that move, the frames that jump! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Graphics Interchange Format!

We had a project, it's was a tough one and it was a strange one. It went by the title "These Demon Ways". This project, of which many suffered with, is slightly my fault—actually a lot my fault. So if you are part of the Grillust massive, reading this, sharpening the pitchfork, lighting the batons; I apologise.

Before this brief came into life, I was asked by my tutor (of whom ran this project) of whether I felt that people would be interested in doing said project; and of course I though they would love it. I was wrong, we were wrong.

The project was to work with an author / poet and create a set of moving image pieces to support her debut production in theatre. These would be displayed behind the performance, supporting what the actors were portraying upon the stage. It turns out, people didn't like this; not at all.
I knew that nobody knew truly how to animate but I thought it would be an individual and most unique portfolio item anyone could have—though it turned out a little too different. Sorry guys. 

Above is a test I made of my initial concept. Emma (poet and project creator) had said that she felt that time was non-linear in this play; so instead of showing that, I wanted to show the 'permanence of existence'.

As you'll see, there are white lines moving across the screen; depicting the movements of people rather than actually showing them, as they'll be on stage and I am merely using this to support them.

I wanted to show the permanence of existence was an over arching theme in this non-linear story.

Here is another test, from another scene. Turn out, I had gone too indepth, and needed to make it a little more simple. Oh well, I learnt more about animation!

Vin's Cliché Monthly Mix—Nov '15

LADIES AND GENTLE LADIEs, IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN! IT'S BADLY ORGANISED PLAYLIST TIME!

If you were wanting a small trip into my mind, into my working day and into my music taste—this'll be a great, terrible way to do so. For the November list, you'll see it rapidly jumps from edible desserts to hardcore, right back into duet folk. YEEEEHHAAAAA!

Despite the fact I'm saying it's terrible I also truly believe it's kind of nice to listen to in the same sense; so why not? It's not like you've got anything important to do, like work or spend time your family. pffft!