Online and On Time

After designing, re-designing and re-re-designing the new FireBox Dance Theatre website with my new found Dreamweaver skills it finally online today just making my self-imposed deadline of 'the end of January'. I work best when I have deadlines.

The design was inspired by the photo shoot we had at The Arches with Derrick (Linton) at the start of December as well as the new logo, which incidentally inspired the coloured stripes across our faces in the 'naked warpaint' shots, but I was having problems finding a colour for text that would work well on both the red and the grey part of the brick background. The solution was to add a plain panel that would contain all the text, with a few exceptions just for variation, but this seemed very sterile and precise against the background. So I searched around and found a black panel with a grunge border that gave the impression that the black strip had been painted onto the wall. With this in place, everything else seemed to work together and, personally, I feel the website is a real indication of the style of the company and our dancers.

Here it is, let me know what you think.

Light Graffiti

I stumbled upon some light graffiti artists recently and it occurred to me that it'd be a really interesting way of capturing movement in a still image. There are a lot of people doing this at the moment, some of the best I've found are Lichtfaktor and this film clip (scroll to the bottom).

I happen to have some glow sticks handy and a few bike lights to experiment with this weekend so hopefully I'll have something to show next week.

Painting by Keywords

I was pointed in the direction of net.art generator by Dan and spent ages on it last night creating images from keywords. The idea is that you stipulate keywords, net.art generator searches google images for matches and collages those images into a new image.

I restricted myself to 'firebox', 'dance' and 'theatre' and was quite pleased that the majority of images included were my own (my meta tagging must be pretty accurate). Some of them are really interesting and some are awful but that's part of the fun. It seemed to me like painting by numbers but with even less skill involved but I'm sure it won't be long before someone convinces a gallery to exhibit this as their work.

First Week Back

Tutorial with Katrina

We discussed my practical work and agreed that if I am to produce a successful, accurate account of my performance for the assessment panel I must stage it in advance to give myself enough time to document it fully. I'd like to create a single screen work out of the performance piece as opposed to just a documentation of the work so will need to consider how to do this and what it will entail.

She also suggested I look at some Cunningham work to reference my theme of 'no fixed front'. It seems it's time to dig out the old books from my BA.

SDT

4-5 min promo for the Interactive programme plus documentation of their latest piece. We need extra bodies to help with filming and boom mike operating but people seem reluctant to get involved, hopefully the 4th years will be more proactive. We need to consider how to mike up Janet and how to ensure we cover all the material for maximum editing options.

DVD Pro Authoring

Fairly straightforward and probably best to try with a project in mind.

Feedback from Gair and Course Meeting

Everything seems to be on track for the year ahead. I have lots of projects planned and just want to get started. My feedback was pretty positive from both Gair and Katrina but I am conscious of not resting on my laurels and keeping the momentum going. I really want to get more practice editing and would like a proper intro to Final Cut as I missed the first one. We have the option of requesting workshops and there is money for library books so we'll need to make the most of it.