Experimentation

Graffiti Pillar

In terms of our 'Graffiti' pillar of Hip Hop, we luckily gained a contributor know as Tom, who is a Graffiti artist, has been caught and convicted of illegal vandalism before, but also does his artwork on 'legal' walls for public interest.

We spoke to Tom about filming, and managed to find an interesting location on a rooftop, of which at 5am with the golden silhouetted shapes of our Graffiti artist doing his work would look outstanding. Furthermore, we had previously recorded some footage near to where he lives in Poole, and were querying whether to return there and improve/refilm in the same area as it fits with the Hip Hop theme. We decided against this after our rooftop idea came into effect.

On the left is some concept art from our Graffiti Artist, showing the sort of image he plans to create for us on a legal wall on the rooftop, and furthermore to be the focal point of our Graffiti pillar. This has taken a lot of experimentation and concept work in order to decide exactly what we want visually.

Canvas Experimentation

This image I took from Google is of an old fashioned TV, of which we wanted to base our main canvas from - the shape and style. The tuning knobs on the right are a key feature as we want the audience to 'tune in' to our work. This also links back to the roots of Hip Hop and the decade of which it came known and into fashion. 

Prominently, we tried to change our piece right near the installation day, which in hindsight wasn't a great idea, as we were limited by time. In reflection, we should definitely consider all options before committing to a final piece so early on. 

This image on the right is a picture I made showing the rough latest outline of our installation. We have changed the shape of the canvases which are all white, and have arranged them in a slightly different order. This is our final layout before installation day, and I feel is a good representing point of our project. The square is for the motion graphics, of which will play on a loop, and the purple line underneath the project resembles the timeline of which I researched key points in history with another member in my group. Our plans are to send this off to Tom our graffiti artist, to create a graffiti piece of which we can physically install on the wall.

 Above are the final 'canvas' shapes ready for our projection and installation on Tuesday. This is a step up from our square canvases and I feel it could be more aesthetically interesting to look at. However simplicity is key and we may have over thought our project too much by trying to represent too many sides of Hip Hop in such a short amount of time. We could have focussed on one or two, but 5 seems to be stretching our limits. It may have been interesting to do 2 longer pieces on more specific areas of Hip Hop, and really get a strong insight into the topic, rather than 5 1 minute pieces of which don't quite explain enough about the style and genre.