"A deed without a name."

Above: study of Macbeth based on the film adaptation by Orson Welles.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

- Orson Welles

Visual experiments illustrating Shakespeare's Macbeth. A short flirtation with Macbeth was abandoned as a comic adaptation would require severe editing of the source text and would leave audiences unsatisfied.

Below: a contemporary take on Macbeth illustrating Tony Blair, prophecy and oil




(left: initial pencil sketch. Below: mixed media. Ink, acrylic and collage on typewriter paper).






A section of the text was typed on an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, cut-up and pasted on to the illustration. With my laptop out of action, I resorted to using a typewriter to complete the illustration. Click to enlarge.

SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE OF THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR








Lost Highway (1997 ) Directed by David Lynch


Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.

Ed: What do you mean by that?

Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

PGC phase

blog in prog... unedited 1st draft:

Trial and error and happy accidents...



I have always found inspiration in film and focusing on visual research throughout the PGC phase, I had the good fortune of having a personal tutor with good taste in film who frequently uses film references in our meetings to communicate ideas. Visual research has made me look under the skin of visual narrative techniques; to break them apart and reconstruct them in my own practice through illustration. I am interested in developing a mixed media project, exploring visual storytelling techniques for both print and screen based contexts.

Using visual beats to communicate the narrative was something that my old sketchbooks contained... the PGC research phase has put these scribbled sketches into focus. The design process project was for me the most important part of the PGC phase as it took me away from the computer and forced me to create a conceptual storyboard that would get immediate feedback from an international class of peers.

Telling a story visually forced me to see the flaws in the storytelling in my artwork and alter it to make it more readable to the audience. To explore visual storytelling further and got hold of a copy of a Gnomon Workshop DVD by Ian McCaig entitled 'Visual Storytelling'. In the workshop, he presents his own work in progress with a voice-over narration using simple art tools (pencil and paper) to illustrate his own twisted sci-fi take on 'The Little Mermaid'.

Above: screenshots of Ian McCaig in action

McCaig creates illustrations that tell the story in visual beats and constructs a sequence that communicates the story using character, composition and tone to convey meaning. Discussing the workshop with my tutor, Simon Perkins, at the second group tutorial, I found that I had stumbled in the right direction. Beat-scripts have been a tool used by Simon to construct his own narratives in film and in the group setting, being able to bounce ideas around, the idea of using different perceptions and points-of-view of an event to create a visual narrative was explored... the tutorials helped with the development of the learning agreement and using limitations to find creative visual solutions. Starting the narrative 'in medias res' (in the middle of the story) will allow me to disguise the motivations of the central character and by also using an unreliable narrator I hope to produce work that will stand up to repeated viewings.





http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/157/

Illustration: content/context

Yoko and I jumped on a train to Sheffield to attend the Illustration: Content/Context conference @ Sheffield Hallam University


The focus of the conference was the role of authorial practice in furthering the context of commercial illustration output...

3 presentations by:

Simon Spilsbury, Benjamin Cox and Andrew Foster

followed by a Q&A session and a viewing of Andrew Foster's exhibition at Sia Gallery...


blog in prog... the contents of my notebooks will be digitized



(...)


Check out Yoko's blog: http://yokoyoshihara.wordpress.com/

Subjective narrative

Detour (1945)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Lost Highway (1997)

Directed by David Lynch

D.O.A.

D.O.A. (1950)
Directed by Rudolph Maté


"I want to report a murder..."




in medias res Latin [ɪn ˈmiːdɪˌæs ˈreɪs]

(Literary & Literary Critical Terms) in or into the middle of events or a narrative

[literally: into the midst of things, taken from a passage in Horace's Ars Poetica]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

Visual narrative "in medias res"

Aeon Flux
(Pilot: first broadcast 1st September, 1991)
Created by Peter Chung

The 12 minute pilot for Peter Chung's Aeon Flux was first broadcast on MTV for Liquid Television in a series of short 2 minute segments. Chung begins the animation "in media res" (in the middle of the action) and slowly reveals Aeon's motivation as the plot unfolds. Aeon is seen opening fire on an army of masked soldiers from the very first frame of the animation. Her mission is unclear and she shoots her way through the lines of soldiers to get to her destination.






The second 2 minute segment in the series shows the viewer a different point of view. We see through the eyes of one of the dying soldiers. We see the event from a different perspective. His perception of reality becomes distorted as he hallucinates in his final moments and we see the extent of the carnage, questioning the assumed heroism of the previous 2 minute animation.

Visual Storytelling in The Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone: Four of us are Dying
(Season One, episode 13. First broadcast January 1st 1961)


In the opening sequence of this episode, Rod Serling's narration alters our reading of the visual signs. We follow the main character and are warned by the narrator that he is not to be trusted, that he is a man with "a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste." The camera is slanted at a Dutch angle to immediately communicate that there is something out of place about his motivation and a diagonal composition is used as he checks in to the hotel. The close up reveals the face of a nervous man eager to get to the safety of his cheap hotel room.





As he begins to shave, visual information that would normally be decoded as a process of cleansing and purification is subverted by a warning from the narrator. Serling's voice-over is used to expose the inner character of the man and warns us not to trust what we see;

"Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at a very early age.
This much he does have.
He can make his face change."

As the frame changes to an over the shoulder shot, a new face is reflected in the mirror. The moving camera follows his hand as he flicks cigarette ash into the ashtray before again abruptly changing position to an over the shoulder shot to reveal another new face reflected in the mirror. The change is accented by a musical cue.