Rob Francis SVR

Strategies for Visual Research -

SVR By: Robert Francis

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CONTENTS

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#004 INTRO #006 DISCOVER #016 DELVE #030 DEFINE #036 DEVELOP #048 DELIVER #051 EVALUATION

CONTENTS

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INTRO

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CLIENT: SMALL COMPANY MESSAGE: APPRECIATE CULTURE TARGET AUDIENCE: STYLE CONSCIOUS 20-30’S From the outset of this project I had been confused, the brief was ambiguous and the tutorials I went to were not much help in establishing what exactly needed to be done to fulfil the brief correctly. I attempted to become part of a group at the recommended size, but was rejected. Which meant forming a partnership, perhaps not ideal for such a group style exercise.

Despite my initial confusion I followed what I did understand from the brief and quickly chose a client and a specific message. Then to be told I wasn’t going to get the most out of this unit by working this way, I took heed of that advice and went back to the drawing board, re-reading the brief again and again, but to no avail. I kept coming back to same starting point. I felt that in order to complete this brief properly I needed to define a client and message from the outset, in order to then work on researching that client and discovering more about them to understand what it is they do, so I can move forward with the appropriate research to communicate their message.

Originally I selected a book publishing company Gestalten, as I thought they fit the bill for my three triggers and would realistically want to communicate to that target market. I began researching into what it is they do through existing material, such as publications, their website and web TV channel.

Then when I was told I may be heading down the wrong path with my approach to this project. I changed tack and looked for another client, I have been adamant through out this project that I wanted

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the client to be real and not hypothetical, so I could potentially use the project to generate new business or at least open up conversation with that client and for the project to not be a pointless waist of my time.

This lead me to my second potential client, a weekly short film screening event called Short & Sweet. I arranged a face to face meeting with the lady who runs the event Julia Stephenson to ask her questions about the event and to gain an understanding of why she set it up and what she gets from it. As it is a free event, with no interest in making a profit. This meeting was really very useful and I garnered enough information to spark some ideas of how I could help.

After the point had been reiterated that we were not being marked on our final outcome, only on our research. I decided that I didn’t want to waste Julia’s time by annoying her with research questions which would lead no where.

Now with this in mind I had to figure out a real life client that wouldn’t be disappointed if I didn’t actually produce a completed final out come for them at the end of the project. The reality is no client would be happy with this, so I decided to focus the rest of my time on this project coming up with ways to promote and establish my own project that goes under the name of Klang Blick which is a Visual-Music collaboration that uses music and visuals to tell a story.

This document outlines some of the research I undertook for each of these clients and their potential target audience. I will take you through a few of my development processes and talk about how I create my work, using both research and instinct.

DISCOVER

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DISCOVER

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DISCOVER

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CLIENT: GESTALTEN

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PAPER CRAFT KITS:

To kick start research I went straight to the clients website and read through what they had to say about themselves and also discover the full variety of products they sell. I learned that they sell more then just books. This could be a potential area to do more research and see if their existing market are aware of the different products they sell.

BOOKS: DVD’S:

COLLECTABLES: MISC:

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DISCOVER

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WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, HOW...

The way I always begin to understand a brief is by asking questions, this is key to discovering more then what is written in the brief, as many times things are missed out or overlooked.

Meeting with a client face to face to answer your questions is the best way to ensure you understand not just the brief but also the client. What do they find funny, what offends them, how much do they care about the brief etc.

It is not just important to ask questions but also to ask the right questions. In my first presentation I talked about key questions I ask every time I start a new project for a client, sometimes not all questions can be asked or answered, so I always ask the most relevant and useful questions first.

Some of the following questions may seem obvious, but they can bring interesting and useful answers to respond to the brief, as a lot of times a client hasn’t considered them. A designers job at the beginning of the project is to query every aspect of the brief in order to then respond or challenge it to make it a better brief and inevitably a better outcome for all involved.

WHO WILL I BE DEALING WITH DIRECTLY? WHO IS THE MESSAGE AIMED AT? WHAT DOES THE CLIENT DO? WHAT DO THE AUDIENCE DO? WHAT DOES THE CLIENT WANT?

WHAT DO THE AUDIENCE WANT? WHERE DOES THE CLIENT TRADE? WHERE DO THE AUDIENCE LIVE? WHERE DOES THE MESSAGE NEED TO BE? WHEN IS THE DEADLINE? WHEN WILL THE AUDIENCE BE AROUND? WHEN WILL THE MESSAGE WORK BEST? WHY THIS MESSAGE? WHY THIS AUDIENCE? WHY DOES THE CLIENT WANT ME? WHY DO I WANT TO DO THIS? HOW MUCH IS THE BUDGET? HOW MANY OPTIONS DO YOU WANT? NB: This is not an exhaustive list, the questions in bold are ones I would consider to be of high importance to get the answers for before any work begins.

DISCOVER

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CLIENT: SHORT & SWEET From being told I was heading in wrong direction with my initial work on the project, I reconsidered my approach and thought about a new client. I arranged a meeting with her to ascertain what work I could possibly do for her. Which is a bit of backwards way of doing things, as usually a client would approach me. But it was actually a useful process and one I may employ in the real world to generate new business.

I arrived at the meeting with this set of questions:

COULD YOU TALK ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE SHORT & SWEET EVENT? HOW MANY PEOPLE USUALLY ATTEND THE EVENT AND IS IT A REGULAR CROWD? HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE EVENTS AUDIENCE IN TERMS OF AGE, GENDER AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND ETC...

WHAT KIND OF PROMO WORK HAVE YOU DONE IN THE PAST? ANY COOL NEW PLANS FOR THE FUTURE? SOCIAL MEDIA: IS IT USEFUL FOR YOU?

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In reality I wasn't able to frame the questions in this way as the meeting was much more informal then I had imagined, it took the form of a conversation over a beer. So instead I made notes immediately after our meeting.

Here are some points Julia made about Short & Sweet:

"IT WAS ESTABLISHED IN 2006."

"IT'S ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE AND BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER." "PROGRAMMING OF THE EVENINGS FILMS IS IMPORTANT." "I WANT PEOPLE TO FEEL EMPOWERED." "THE SOCIAL ASPECT IS KEY, IT'S ABOUT MAKING NEW FRIENDS." "WE DID A 3D SHORT FILM EVENT AT THE BARBICAN AND TOURED IT IN 11 CITIES ACROSS THE UK." "REAL POSSIBILITY OF A TV SHOW, BUT NEED TO CONVINCE BROADCASTERS THERE IS AN AUDIENCE FOR SHORT FILM."

DISCOVER

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SURVEY: TARGET AUDIENCE

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Question 3: What do you do regularly?

TALKS

Parallel to the research above, we sent out a really quick and simple to answer online survey to our target audience.

27.6%

CLUBBING

These statistics are based on a response of 29 design students between the age of 20-30.

Question 1: How old are you?

62.1%

LITERATURE/READING

44.8%

MAGAZINES

44.8%

INTERNET

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

3

6

2

5

5

3

1

2

0

1

1

89.7% 75.9%

TV RADIO

Question 2: Female or Male?

37.9%

COMEDY

27.9%

LIVE MUSIC

65.5%

UNIVERSITY

58.6%

WORK (FULL TIME) WORK (PART TIME)

13

16

34.5% 31.0%

EXHIBITIONS

51.7%

GALLERIES

37.9%

THEATRE 10.3% OPERA 6.9% FESTIVALS DVD RENTAL CINEMA

37.9% 17.2 62.1%

DELV E

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DELVE

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DELV E

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CLIENT: SHORT & SWEET After my meeting with Julia from Short & Sweet, I felt the information I had gained from speaking with her gave me a good starting point to continue my research. She mentioned she needed to persuade TV channels that there is an audience for short film, I felt this would be an interesting topic to "delve" further into.

I went to their Facebook page to see how many fans they have (1,595), to review pictures on their profile and to read the comments that would help me gain a better understanding of the event and its audience. When used correctly social media sites such as Facebook are a fantastic tool for conversation. Times have changed from talking at, to talking with.

Here are some pictures posted to the group:

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SURVEY: TARGET AUDIENCE To "delve" deeper into our target audience we went out to meet them and ask three simple questions: Where are you from, where do you live and name three things you enjoy.

Keeping things simple like this meant that we got a fair few people to take part in our survey. It sparked several conversations, that were far more useful then a lengthily rigid set of questions would have been. We went to three key locations in London: Carneby Street, Camden and Brick Lane.

We also took photos to act as a visual record of the people we had spoken to. I used these to refer back to during the project, they helped remind me who I'm communicating with. Here are a selection of some of the photos I took:

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Below is a map showing the percentage of where the people we spoke to originate from. It is amazing to see that just within a couple of hours in London we spoke face to face with people from so many different places.

3%

58%

3%

3%

3%

14% 3% 3%

3% 3% 3% STATS BASED ON 34 PEOPLE

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This is a Wordle of the responses we received, when we asked the people we spoke to, to name three things they enjoy. The largest word was the most popular and the smallest words were the least popular. It was interesting to see Music coming out on top and depressing to see only one person we spoke to enjoys life.

To make it easier to understand I have included the number to indicate how many times that word came up.

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DELV E

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CLIENT: KLANG BLICK After wanting to use Short & Sweet as my client I decided to change to use one of my recent project concepts as my client, because of the reasons mentioned earlier in the report.

All the research I had carried out for the target audience was still appropriate and in fact influenced my decision to change client.

As discovering that such a large number of people we spoke to enjoy music, I thought it was a good indication to bring this project forward and use the time in this term to develop it.

The project is called Klang Blick, in the context of this SVR project it is a start up small business that specialise in Visual-Music projects, it is neither a band or a production company, it is a new fusion of the two.

Visionsonic 2010 - Trailer by Visionsonic http://vimeo.com/15504735

Something I needed to achieve for Klang Blick was some way of promoting it to its potential audience and future collaborators. I felt this fitted with the "appreciate culture" message and as this SVR project is purely hypothetical, I thought there was nothing wrong with changing the client to a more appropriate one for my own benefit.

I'm not sure if this is in the right section, but once I had established that my client would be Klang Blick, I decided to research into the best way of delivering it's message, which would be through the medium they work with: Visual-Music. On the following pages are links to videos that have been an inspiration for the Klang Blick video I intend to make.

B3 by Ne-O http://www.ne-o.co.uk/b3.html

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CLIENT: KLANG BLICK

MInus 60° by Karl Kliem http://vimeo.com/11103174

Amazing Sound Structure by WonderHowTo http://vimeo.com/2543965

Slamdance 16 by Nico Casavecchia http://vimeo.com/8291655

Phoenix by Xaver Xylophon & Max Mörtl http://vimeo.com/8442679

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DEFINE

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DEFINE

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DEFINE

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CONCEPT: #01 KINETIC TYPE

CONCEPT: #02 SOUND OF LIGHT

One of the first concepts I had was to create a kinetic type animation. This animation would give all the information about the project to spark interest in Klang Blick for both future collaborators and its future audience.

My second concept fell into a much more abstract form. I was inspired by a simple LED bouncing dog ball that I found online. The idea was to film the bouncing ball in a large darkened room, whilst also recording the sound of its impact on the floor and walls. This would then be cut together to create a rhythm from the sounds recorded on location. Each frame of the footage of the ball flying through the air would be frozen one after another. This would turn the single glowing dot into a line, much like a laser beam.

Here is a link to an example of something I worked on last year, I imagined this new piece to be a development of this process.

F = Factory Records by Rob Francis http://vimeo.com/8035418 After some reflection I began to feel this concept would not do the project justice and may exclude certain people I want to reach. in terms of language barriers. I began to want to produce something more abstract, but would still communicate the message.

This concept relates directly to what the Klang Blick project is about, fusing sound and visuals into one piece of work. I put this theory to the test in the develop stage of the project.

DEFINE

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CONCEPT: #03 FERROFLUID CYMATICS

CONCEPT: #04 NON-NEWTONIAN CYMATICS

For my third concept I wanted to work with Ferrofluid for more information on it take a look at this Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid

Another Cymatic concept was to create a mixture of NonNewtonian fluid, here is a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Newtonian_fluid

I had discovered a magnetic fluid earlier in 2009 and was reminded about it a few months ago, this sparked a new interest in the substance. Through some research and lateral thinking I came up with the idea of creating a musically controlled electro magnet that would cause the Ferrofluid to react to it. Similar to what you can see in this example video below.

When this fluid comes into contact with a sine wave (a certain type of audio wave form) it starts behaving erratically as seen in the example video on page 29. There are lots of examples of this online to the point of almost being boring. I love the shapes that are created from the sound waves and had an idea to use a green screening technique I developed last year for one of my FMP films Technicolor Secrets. Here is a link to a behind the scenes to how I captured the floating shapes http://vimeo.com/11700179 I will use a modified version of this technique to film the fluid reacting to the audio. With it being shot on the green screen I will be able to key out the shapes and place them into another environment, something to this point I have not yet seen.

The environment this gloopy substance will be put into is an undisclosed disused building. Here is a short treatment for the film...

Black liquid magnetic sculpture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d44LW6KZ_iU&feature=related This concept would prove costly as only 50ml comes in at ÂŁ20.41 Despite this I ordered one 50ml container to use as a sample.

Though with this high price tag I decided it isn't appropriate for this specific job, as I have only a minimum amount of budget. (my loan).

It will begin in an abandoned location, moving from one room to the next, building in anticipation as the audio from each room is exaggerated through high quality recording of the location sound.

This gloopy substance begins to ooze into the shots slowly as it settles to the floor the music begins and hectic rhythms of industrial drums cause the gloop to begin to move erratically. This will be achieved by compositing the green screen gloop with that already in the shot.

DEVELOP

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DEVELOP

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DEVELOP

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CONCEPT: #02 SOUND OF LIGHT The first concept I wanted to develop was the Sound of Light idea.

As mentioned in the define stage it would be a complicated process of in camera tricks and post production. It was important to carry out some tests before deciding upon using this idea.

I'm very glad I did carry out some tests of this concept as the results were not quite as expected. I went to a location that had some empty rooms with high ceilings which have great naturally occurring reverb, perfect for the recording the sound of the ball bouncing. On the test shoot I only had access to the camera equipment, so the sounds I captured were from the basic mic on the camera body.

Test Bounce 01 (FX) - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18500368

Bellow is an unaltered shot from my test evening out on location, opposite are two attempts at trying out my concept with the fake laser beam effect of repeating each previous frame of the footage.

Test Bounce 02 (FX) - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18500543

Test Bounce 01 (NO FX) - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18498965

Unfortunately because the ball is an LED it flickers which has created the dashed effect you see above, this was not the intended idea, as I wanted a solid beam. So I decided to move forward with testing my fourth concept.

DEVELOP

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CONCEPT: #04 NON-NEWTONIAN CYMATICS During the same evening of testing out the Sound of Light concept I took pictures of the location intended for this Cymatic film, as it is in the same location.

On this page you can see shots from various rooms of the abandoned location. I used these when story boarding and fleshing out the concept. This is a key part of my development process, I look for interesting shapes and lines on a location and contemplate camera position and the action which can occur within it. With this also being an audio project I listen and look for things that make interesting sounds unique to that location, such as the lights buzzing when being turned on.

Being in this space at night is a strange situation and I wanted to capture that strange feeling in the shots, location sound and music. I felt this was the strongest concept after being inside the location and imagining the Cymatic gloop coming to life on the floors of this deserted building.

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DEVELOP

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After having seen lots of test footage of the Non-Newtonian sound experiments people have uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, I needed to carry out my own test to see if my concept would actually work.

I mixed up the solution of approximately two parts cornflour to one part water and was immediately taken back by its consistency and how it reacted when applied with force.

After preparing the mixture I set up a sub speaker hooked up to my mac with a simple bit of software called ToneGen, which creates

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a pure Sine wave, then with a tray taped down onto the speaker I altered the frequencies and amplification until the shapes began to form. It wasn't as successful as I had hope it would be, I wasn't able to have the volume as high as was needed for long enough and also just taping the tray down wasn't enough. So I will need to run the test again this time with help to hold the tray down and a time of day when my neighbours aren't in.

Gloop Test 01 - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18793507 Even though the test didn't go quite as well as planned it gave me confidence that my concept would be possible, if I get the consistency of the fluid right and the amplification high enough to cause the sound waves needed for the fluid to react to it.

The next test would require me to paint the tray green and light it evenly so I can comp the tray gloop with the gloop captured whilst on location.

DEVELOP

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In preparation for the next test I painted the tray a chroma green, to give me the ability to key out the tray in post production.

For the second test I was able to get some one to help, as I needed more then two hands for this part of the job. The tray needed to be held down whilst the sine wave was emitted from the sub, because if it wasn't held down some of the vibration would be lost and in turn would not be as effective. Bellow is the set up with one studio light above, though I found this not to be enough light. I needed

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much more light so I could close down the aperture to increase the depth of field and have all of the tray in focus. I intended to play with the depth of field in postproduction, so I have complete control over that part of it. Below is a much better test compared to that of above. This time I have mixed in black food colouring as the gloop filmed on location will also be a dark almost oil looking.

Gloop Test 02 - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18791526 The major problem I encountered with this test was that of the vibration. I had read somewhere that if I matched the frame rate to that of the frequency of waves it would eliminate blurring caused from the vibration. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, I had them both set to 100, this will be something I will need to address for the finished outcome. But if it's not possible to eliminate it, I will have to work out how to limit it or make it part of the intended look.

Another great reason to test out concepts in advance, as there are things that wont become apparent until it's taken from paper to the real world.

DEVELOP

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DELIVER

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DELIVER

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DELIVER

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CONCEPT: #04 NON-NEWTONIAN CYMATICS

EVALUATION

Once I had completed sufficiant research into the Cymatic experiments and was confident that the concept would work I moved on to production. Filming on location, following the story boards and recording the ambient sounds found on location.

To f inish of f this S VR document I want to openly talk about my development over these pas t few months. I am now considering myself more of an ar tis t then a gr aphic designer.

I have become to realise through out this projec t I have little or no desire to solve clients problems any more (unless the money is right). I have spent f ive to six year s successfully doing that. I now intend to focus my career on things that appeal and mat ter to me on a deeper level.

What I am able to present at the delivery stage is the first few moments of the Visual-Music film, before any music begins and any of the Cymatic gloop is integrated into the shots.

This sequence will show the overall look and feel of the intended final piece, it is a first draft. The music and sound design will be developed further once the 'mood' of the film has been hypothetically signed off.

I was surprised this unit is within the third year of a degree, it is a process that I believe should have been covered during year two. The time this unit has been given I feel is dispropor tionate to the amount of time we have for our Final Major Projec t, this entire unit could have been completed in three to four weeks and would have given a much more “real life design indus tr y” feel to the projec t and could have been far more useful for those on the cour se who don’t have much industr y experience, to get people learning how to research methodically, but at real world pace.

The rigid structure of Discover, Delve, Define, Develop and Deliver along with the predetermined order we have had to follow goes against my preferred and natural way of working. At degree level I would have preferred to be tr us ted to embark on this projec t using our own methods and research techniques that we have formed over the second year.

Render 01 - Password = svr http://vimeo.com/18989698

I have learned a great deal during this unit, though perhaps not what may have been intended. This hones t evaluation may be detrimental to my f inal gr ade, but it is a tr ue evaluation of this unit.