Wednesday 30 November 2011

The holy grail: genius loci and a doner kebab!

The last couple of days have gone in a blur.  Friday there was the presentation rehearsals.  I did the timing.  The team had done a lot of work compiling and consolidating vast amounts of data and still awaiting some sections. 

Amongst all this we looked for the meaning of genius loci and listened to various pieces of music searching  for the embodiment of Eastbourne.

I didnt leave uni till 9pm.    I put heart and soul into my section. Thinking of what Jamie said about limiting time. I feel maybe I need a better balance. However it is difficult to restrict the time when you are learning. I have racked up stupid hours on both woodwharf and eastbourne. 

Its no joke without a car, thankfully Nick dropped me to the high street.  I didnt like Eltham Station one bit.  The journey seem to take forever. I hadnt ate much, so faced with a long walk and no food in the fridge with only a chip shop enroute; I seriously contemplated a kebab....
  

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Eastbourne and everything else

 Ok now to wrap up Eastbourne.  I submitted in my piece of spatial character. I had a good chat with Paul who will be presenting this section, along with landscape character, materiality and flora and fauna.  I had thought I was 80% finished with Eastbourne until I spoke to Paula.  Ok so I need to do a bit more and it will push other stuff back further again.

Julia suggested that I introduce a bit of sketching into my portfolio.  So I have started to make more of an effort in that direction



Tuesday 22 November 2011

Wood Wharf III - the final cut and many problems

So happy with my work I wanted to get RID of it before it took OVER my life.

My Problem
As I pulled together the project on quarkexpress I was restricted to my mac at home.  My usendit for some reason wouldnt send and to cap it all my quarkexpress file exported to a whopping 240MB PDF format from a 10.4MB file!

I managed to download adobe acrobat on to my laptop.  although  after the adobe treatment it was reading as a smaller file on my computer but it was been treated by my email servers as if it was not compressed and was far too large to send.    So  now I thought I will have to hand deliver it

3 CDs later - they were so slow opening and reading the files I thought this is not going to work, whos going to wait 5-10mins when they have hundreds to view.  I went back in again to quark and managed to compress it to a baby 6 MB without loss of quality.

So at 6.21 today I pressed the SEND button and said au revoir to Canary Wharf and bonjour to Eastbourne...

Wood Wharf II - the last week

So I ended up putting in the  hours to get it finished.  I was quite pleased with the result and what I managed to do and actually I started to feel like a designer for the first time. 

Although I had "finished" I went through my submission with Paula and had a list of tweaks. I had resolved there was no way I was going to do any touch up before submission that perhaps if time I could do before handing in my submission in next month.  But....

...me being me couldnt let it go knowing that I could improve it so I spent today tweaking. Then once I had that done I spent hours trying to save it, reduce it and send it.

Wood Wharf I - the last 2 weeks

Last Monday I got pretty frustrated with Wood Wharf.

A technical brief for an ideas competition.  I would have preferred to do something arty but felt I had to adhere to the brief.  I dont know how one could deliver a collage and still deliver the brief.

So I went through the technical route and built the model to scale in sketchup - very time consuming.  Anway in the end it was a case of I started so I'll finish ...

As a means to the end, I  bolted the main raw unfinished criteria together for my first crit as I wanted to find out what I needed to do.  The output didnt reflect the input, but how could it be anything else at this stage?

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Eastbourne

 The air was blue in Eastbourne when I hit the white balance off my shiny new camera. Shame such nice pictures....
















Thursday 3 November 2011

Painting with Photoshop

Yes Jamie it did lead to hours of fun...

Painting (or a bit of slap)

Blending (a lot of slap)