Group 31: September 2014

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Staining the Tree

Before and after

Today we spent studio time staining the tree with die (food colouring). We painted using brushes and sponges. To make sure there weren't any stain makes or drips after we painted them we wiped them down (this also made them dry faster). We painted the tree a very dark brown and then the pieces varing different shades of lighter browns both warm and cool colours. This meant that the tree now looks more 'completed' and less like cheep MDF. The shapes are also much more definable from each other and the tree itself. The texture of the MDF now cannot be seen and is covered from the stain so the pieces are easier on the eye. We still need to create more MDF pieces so we shall be staining more later. The tree now looks much more sophisticated and professional rather then a cheep child's play game. We want the public to be excited by the shapes and pieces however we didn't want them to think they were too old and mature to play with the tree.

Friday, 26 September 2014

LOGO

After talking with the team I made a near final with their developments

After feed back from the group I constructed more design on their specifications

They chose #2 below

Thursday, 25 September 2014

Logo Design

We thought it was important to give our stall a brand and image, therefore a logo was needed. At first I started looking into more illustrated work with gestural lines as our stall gave a very hand crafted vibe. I however decided that because this was a logo it needed to be well refined and simplistic to be remembered so I started working on minimal imagery.

Moving to the computer I created these to images for my group to look at:

After further discussion we decided we liked the first one the best so i moved forward making more iterations with the feedback being that the tree needed to represent the game more and look like a game/puzzle.

This was the next iteration.

After further chat with the rest of the group over facebook we came down to this. We decided the circle around the logo functioned to frame the logo and define it. It also matched the group we are collaborating with so we look unified/ a collaboration. The tree needed to be a lot more refined though so i passed the bat over to Josepth to give logo design a try as he had the skills needed.

Wednesday, 24 September 2014

Having a go at logo design

Experimenting with using the shapes that make up our tree for our logo

Ambassador meeting week 9

At the ambassador meeting, a lot of things were confirmed, which makes our job easier from here on in. It should go smoothly from now until the day.

Some things to note from the meeting -

Tech (team 2):

We will need to talk to these guys about the light box that we plan to have

Promo (team 4):

will be displaying promotional materials around campus over the next two weeks

Teams 5 & 9:

are creating uniforms for the facilitator groups to wear so they are recognisable

Branding( teams 12&7):

if we want to use the logo on a textured material (we were thinking about laser cutting the logo onto an MDF poster) we need to get it signed off by these teams before we use it.
there are other rules to follow when advertising the event and using the logo.

Cleaning(group3):

a list of rules will be given out to each team on the day
we are responsible for any mess we make.

Stall design:

Will be made out of mesh panels and is customisable to fit what we need
Tables will be provided by the facilitator groups

Financial:

Tokens will be used as currency, 1 token = $1
5 tokens will be allocated to each person at the door
The tokens from each stall will be added up at the end and the money that it converts to can be kept for the amount that we have spent so that we are not out of pocket (but we have to provide receipts, and we haven't been keeping them)
The left over money could be given to the facilitator groups, or donated to charity

Along with the 5 tokens at the start, everyone will get a voting token to go towards their favourite maker team and favourite facilitator team.
these teams will get a really cool mystery prize :)

Decisions made as a team:

We will be collaborating with the team next to us to create a really interactive space where people want to hang out (See Chris' post)
Our stalls will be opened up to create an almost completely open space.
We should try and come up with a logo or some branding for our stall so that we can make stickers and posters

Trying out colour

Our group thought that colour could make the tree more interesting and fun to play with. We decided that spray painting would be the easiest and quickest option. The colours we chose for the trial were bright along with black and silver because we thought that the colours could work well together, or possibly separately. The colours were also supposed to give definition to each piece of mdf so that people could identify the pieces they added to the tree.

After painting the tree and leaving the pieces to dry for a while, we started putting the tree together and realised that the tree looked very juvenile, confused, and not so fun. Mostly, I think, this was because of the bright pink and yellow. The black and silver were less intense and juvenile, so we added them in with the MDF pieces to see if it would be an option to have parts of the tree dark.

We thought that the black pieces stood out and had definition over the other pieces, but we think that this could be more effective to have the tree defined within all of the pieces so that the builders could see what parts were added on and which parts were part of the tree. Up close, the black spray paint looks a bit patchy on top of the mdf, and we thought it would be cool to still have to wood feeling and look, so we thought of using a black stain instead of paint. We will test out staining the tree in the next couple of days

Staining the tree

Today I trialled a stain on one of the mock up trees that had broken. I used food colouring because it is a lot cheaper than wood stain. On one of the sides there is always a blotchy pattern around the edges where it has been cut. The stain doesn't seep into it straight away but once I worked it with the brush a little it became even.

The first one I did came out a little uneven because I watered the stain down near the end to see what it would turn out like. The stain goes over more evenly when watered down a little, as you can see in the second photo below.

I like the lighter colour better than the dark but I think it could be somewhere in between. The photo below is a trial of a medium red-ish brown which I like best. I even think that we could stain all of the small cut out pieces as well because it really makes them look tidier and shows that time has gone into making and designing the whole project. I think the tree will look good a darker colour than the rest of the pieces even if we do stain them all so the next trial is to stain a full sized tree and see how the pieces look on it all together.

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Sea Creatures (update)

UPDATE

Sea Creatures all done with Illustrator. Ill sketch some weapons up tomorrow and fill the rest of the page in then.

Sea Creatures

Sea Creatures

Got some more animals to add to our
wooden army.

Social Media Competition

Though we didn't want to participate in adding our own social media campaign to the mix of many around we decided to involve ourselves in Fuse's obviously! It will help with promotion for our stall and the market itself. Also with the incentive of prizes we used the #coca288 and submitted this picture via instagram

Poor wee Josepth knocking over our tower, but to make it up we ended up winning a competition! Thanks a lot social media team.

CLASSIC COLLABORATION

Being placed beside the ROTAVIEW stall (group 33) in the market palace layout has led us to collabourate with them, opting to not have a wall in between our stalls and having various elements of each others ideas spread out through our new larger area.

Group 31 have opted to use a ROTAVIEW headset and create a time trial like game with our laser cut pieces while still having our construct tree in the quieter more relaxed corner of our stall.

We believe the lively competition like nature of the time trial game will attract patrons who will then discover the construct tree if a heated race is not what they are feeling like.

below are some quick sketches that were created among a few of us from each group discussing a final layout in which both groups could benefit.

Group 33 has opted to use cardboard for their stall facade/construction -which we have agreed to also use making for an overall cohesive aesthetic.

Testing it on others

Today I experimented with the tree letting other massey students test it out. After playing with the tree ourselves we found that around three people at a time playing seemed to be the best as it was being built at a quick pace and others would remove pieces and help others.
Observations I made:
Everyone first off got very excited by the animals. This was something that hadn't come out while we where playing it because we were the makers and had seen then many times before. They kept trying to find fun/ cute ones in the ground.
Instantly Ed started trying to stack the tree as high as possible getting excited trying to find the right parts that were longer than others.
As Sam was placing the pieces he started making stories about how the parts were hanging out together.
They were all talking wanting to show each other what they had made.
Sometimes making inappropriate jokes about the parts.
Sam bored in about 5mins.
The boys liked the weapons and started using them to knock the tree down.

Tuesday meeting

Our tree evolved greatly since the last model we made! (before and after shots below)

I used the negative shapes from the smaller tree we had previously cut out to make two structures which were to protrude out from the walls

After discussing this with the group we decided that there was a health and safety risk involved in having structures from walls that people could build onto as heaps of people moving around and touching it at once could cause it to topple.

As an alternative placing the cut-offs on walls, we could attach them to the light-box that the tree would be sitting on top of. This way we are still using up our waste and adding another element for our keen tree builders to utilise.

I particularly liked the shapes that were able to be hung from other shapes.

This photo shows the scale of our tree (but it can be built much bigger!)

One important issue we must resolve before the day is how we attach our tree base to the box. This could be done with glue. Also, the parts on either side of the slots start to come apart (shown below) when the tree is built up a lot. These will also need to be fastened.

Sunday, 21 September 2014

Doodle

doodle, absent-minded scrawl or scribble, usually executed in some unexpected place, such as the margin of a book or manuscript or a blotting pad when the doodler is preoccupied with some other activity, such as attending a meeting or lecture. The word is supposed to have gained currency because of its use in the film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), though the practice of course is much older, doodles being found in medieval manuscripts, as well as in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and on the margins of manuscripts written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The increasing preoccupation in the 20th century with manifestations of the unconscious and the desire to interpret them both as art forms and as clues to the nature of personality have led to considerable interest in doodles. The Surrealist method of automatic drawing was used by Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and André Masson, and Jackson Pollock, an Abstract Expressionist, did a series of drawings that were used as an element in his psychoanalysis.

__http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/169234/doodle