Adventures in Flash

The beast that is Flash was slain but a few days ago.

The focus of my project was around time spent watching television. We had to communicate a statistic using rhetoric:

rhet·o·ric

n.

1. The art or study of using language effectively and persuasively.

I focused my project on a stastistic based on a study of how long people in Britian spend watching Televsion. Turns out, 26 hours a week is how long, on average, us English folk are staring at the box. This is 3 hours 42 minutes a week. I approached the project by comparing this little tidbit with a study done on musicians, athletes and people in other skill based activities.

The studies were performed and researched for a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The study stated that anyone who has reached a certain level of excellence or performance in a subject had practiced their chosen area for at least 10000 hours. The phenomenon is called the 10000 hour rule and is based off of several studies. What's interesting though and why it became the focus for my project was that 10000 hours of practice, works out at around 3 hours of practice a day for 10 years.

The comparison between this and the time people spend in front of the TV was obvious. My animation focused on challenging the viewer to turn off the tv and find out what they want to become great at, by communicating both the statistics and comparing the two, followed by questioning the viewer.

I formed the animation from many different video clips and sound bites, the visual of a fellow changing the channel and the combination of each clip created the statement that I wanted to communciate.

Overall I was happy with the project. I felt strongly about the subject matter, and the project offered me the oppurtunity to explore the message of going after what you want in a medium I was not used to. The use of time and animation offered unique ideas and ways to explore the presentation of a message and I felt through research in to artists such as Shepard Fairy that I used the medium in a way that was appropiate to the message I want to send, in that I incorporated the style and medium that I wanted to create a message against.

In other news, I attended The Four Designers (it's for designers?) conference on the 23rd and 24th of Febuary.

Overall, it was good, a large amount of nuggets of knowledge were thrown our way. The focus of the talks were varied, with different speakers focusing on different areas. Some speakers simpply showed their work and talked about it, others focused on sending a message to the crowd. One of the main points of interest was that at least 2 of the 4 designers were self taught, however one noted that after 3 or 4 years in the indsutry being a self taught he designer, he started to see the benifit of education, and how he had gaps in his knowledge base which he felt an education would of learnt.

The final and best speaker, Andrew Shoben commented about how as he was self taught, he gave himself the belief that he could do anything as it was the only way he could approach his work. The message clicked with me and the outcomes of his work reflected this outlook, you could see it in the originality and how out of the box his interactive media based projects were.

Some Other Ideas Presented During the Conference (for your reading pleasure):

• Don't wait for the ideal job, similar to a surfer and a wave, just take it and see what you can get (these were the words of one of speakers, not mine)
• Waiting is standing still.
• Frances Jackson stated she used to look for creative people who were also original, and now she focusing on looking for creative people who can talk about their work, as this is such a key skill when dealing with clients.
• When designing, get in to the mindset of 'what's the worst that could happen?'
• Approach new projects by making something, get out of the house, get off the internet, approach things from new angels.