Fourth Year: Week 6 Summary

So here we are at the end of week 6. November, and therefore ideas day, is frightfully close and there are only about 7 months left until the end of the project. That still seems like a long time, but the way things are currently going, it doesn’t quite seem like it is going to be enough at the speed that we are going at. So without further ado, here is what happened in week 6.

• Monday: A studio day where our main tutor was still absent. He was off the previous Tuesday because of some sort of illness, and he was still off with it all of this week. Our workload seemed to drastically plummet and yet again we still do not know for certain what we were to have achieved for that day specifically. We went over the three briefs that we had created for the Monday. Luckily, my three were alright with minimal changes needing to be made. The big question of whether or not light and colour was going to remain a part in my project became very apparent after the big decision to exclude that theory from the three briefs at the moment. The way I am tackling it is that I am going to step back from light and colour at the moment, but go ahead and try and incorporate it once again when I have done some more idea generation/development… hopefully. A chunk of the time in the studio was spent making the Dan Wheldon picture I have already posted.
• Tuesday. Another studio day. After the one to one tutorials we had the day before we were given another thing to think about with the briefs. We had to think of our values as a designer and determine what the values of the three briefs were and try and match the design language used to our design values. Now, design values were something we had gone over in second year and it was confusing, and yet again, two years later they are still very confusing. I am not the only person to think they were confusing though. Most people didn’t have much idea of what to do and have elected not to make any changes for the following week. I am undecided what I am going to do, I made my brief boards in a style that I think reflected my values as a designer, making them simple and clean without too much information, and the ideas that they are portraying. What I have decided that I am going to do for the following week is to just spend some time fine tuning them and just generally tidying them up. The afternoon was spent doing the Aston Martin DBR9 that I have already posted. Just after I had left the studio, I had received an email that would drastically shape what I did on the Wednesday.
• Wednesday. This non studio day was originally meant to be spent doing my dissertation in a final last push to get the third draft finished so it can be checked over and bound early enough so I wasn’t getting overly stressed by the 7th of December. However, the day before I got an email that changed my plans quite drastically, but I can’t say too much about it. I got an email to do some more work for Top Gear magazine, but it had to be done by 3PM on the Wednesday. I accepted the challenge and spent from 9 in the morning until 3 working on it. I cannot tell you what it was I was doing though (just yet)
• Thursday & Friday. Thursday and Friday have just merged into one really. I sort of did the same thing on each day, and that was spending time sorting out my third draft of my dissertation. I seem to have no motivation to get my work done this year but this is apparent amongst quite a few other people in the class. It doesn’t mean to say that I am not trying, I have been throwing myself at it and somehow never really seem to have too much time off, I have been going to the library for a couple of hours in the evening when I have felt as though I have needed to, but just don’t really seem to be making progress that quickly at all. That is probably because of a number of annoyances that I have had from other people but this is neither the time or the place to discuss that.

So there you have it, week 6. Despite it being a reading week we still had class and seemed to be the only course that was in. There are days that fly by and there are other days that trail on very slowly and I still wish that I had considered doing a different course to begin with. Ah well then!

A Mini Roller Variation

Here is a quick thought regarding one of the cars I created for Top Gear last year. The Mini Roller shown below made it unchanged into the magazine, but I remembered when I was recently looking through my photoshop work on my external hard drive that there was another version that I had done and I had tried to make it look as though it was old.

The Mini Roller was taking a funny look at what the competitors for the Aston Martin Cygnet would have been if other high class manufacturers had produced small city cars for their customers. In all I had to produce four. A Rolls Royce, a Bentley, a Jaguar and a Maybach based upon a Mini, a VW Fox, a TATA Nano and a Smart ForTwo. I am hoping to post them all on here eventually over the course of a couple of weeks so you can see all the work that I did for the magazine.

Moving on to the alternative version I had made, the Mini Roller was made to look as though it was an older car through the use of some effects of photoshop that are fairly simple. A sepia effect and a film grain were added and it does have the desired effect to a certain extent. I remember I was playing about with it whilst I was working on the actual Mini because I was struggling for inspiration for the other cars. The VW Fox/Bentley in particular being one that took many attempts and the trial files are still filling my Top Gear folder on my hard drive.