Project 4 Crit
THE NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
Master of Arts Degree in Graphic Design
by Registered Project
Critical reflective review of the Fourth project: Local Spaces
Marcus Christian Cosker
15th July 2010
This project has brought me to my local surroundings of Nottingham City. Here I have found that the vast network of roads that we use to negotiate our lives demarcates the territories that we traverse in our daily activities. Through my academic research I have found that the dichotomy of thoroughfare and destination is one of several methods of division that can be used to describe the spaces of our metropolis.
Nottingham it seems is not untypical of other cities both in the United Kingdom and indeed around the world. In the terms of Human Geography, the Nottingham metropolis is built around a structure of places that have sustained history such as Nottingham Castle and The Trip To Jerusalem Inn. These “places” will have gradually been surrounded by a weaving network of “non-places” in the form of transport infrastructures and more recently by international shops that unfortunately provide very little additional character or sense of history to our metropolis.
For this final project of my Masters study I explored the local city centre and found several examples of interesting Victorian architecture that has adjusted to the requirements of our time. Possibly the finest example is The Lace Market area of Nottingham. Once a thriving light industry area it has over recent decades been rejuvenated as service industries and housing developers renovate and reoccupy the factory spaces. I chose to focus my first illustration on one of the service yards that has become a shared semi-private entrance to a factory converted into self contained flats. The Victorian detailing was one of the most difficult parts of the early stages of this scenes development. As I was battling with modelling Victorian windows and arched brickwork I remembered being shown The Alchemy of Mirrormask by Dave McKean & Neil Gaiman in an early tutorial. The Mirrormask illustrators had montaged a small set of windows onto a wall texture in a way that hid the repetitiveness of the duplicated windows and created the illusion of difference. I returned to The Lace Market to take shots of the windows so I could attempt this technique in Photoshop. It worked very well. I built the base texture up with shadows around the edges of the window frames and then layered damp textures on the lower areas of the image. After ensuring that I reduced as many visible patterns as possible I created an opacity map that made the windows transparent so the inside of the building could be seen once that was modelled. I am pointing this out because it was the first time I have tried this technique and I feel that it was the foundation for the occupational details that followed in the development of the scene. Also for the first time, during this project I began using the popular VRay renderer which is known for its high quality results. I coupled this learning curve with incorporating High Dynamic Range Imagery (HDRI) as the main lighting solution. I found that this setup was capable of producing exemplary results. As the project moved along I learnt how to use VRay’s Dirt Map, Depth Of Field and Fog features. These features were quick to set up once understood and provided excellent compositing finishing touches to the scene.
During the development of the first scene I explored the space around me further. I found that the road network has a tendency to leave non-spaces in its wake in the form of pedestrian spaces, crossings and structural dead spaces. My daily drive to work includes driving under the Dunkirk Flyover. This architectural hub of non-space has several dead spaces within its construction. On further investigation these were relatively large spaces that were fenced off and lifeless at one end and a simple cycle path at the other. I photographed the space and the typical textures of its construction. Having travelled through this space many times both by car and by bicycle I found the area had an interesting feel to it when I stopped to experience what it had to offer.
During a tutorial I found out that the South Bank Centre in London has a skate park underneath it. After discussing its interesting history I decided to travel down to explore it. The South Bank Centre is a fantastic example of Brutalist architecture that has an interesting undercroft space which is home to the impromptu skate park. While I took photographs I considered the unused spaces of Dunkirk Flyover and it seemed a shame that these areas aren’t more creatively used. Even temporarily by skaters or BMX’ers as found in the space in London.
This project has developed my skills in creating narratives through incorporating signs of occupation in a scene. I found that when showing that a scene is occupied it becomes more than just the stark building on its own, it seems more believable to the audience. I researched this further by carrying out two surveys. The first asked those who work in the architectural illustration & visualisation industries for their opinions about using signs of occupation to create believability. I used two specialist architectural illustration groups on the social networking site LinkedIn to make contact with a wide range of professionals working in the field. This was convenient in many ways not least that the high end companies like Visualisation One and Hayes Davidson have members in these groups. Unfortunately I cannot tell who specifically answered my survey but the quality of the responses was very good and informative. The sample size was Twenty-Eight. The second survey was designed to find out what kind of narratives an audience might imagine having viewed my work. Ultimately this was a test to see if my work could influence an audience to create brief mental narratives. The sample size was Twenty-Seven. This survey was distributed via my MA Online Reflective Journal (gdma.wordpress.com) and completed by two groups of students who I work with. The feedback was varied in quality, but overall showed that my work had encouraged the respondents to create their own narratives of events for the scene. In some questions the respondents even imagined things that were never modelled in the scene, for example what the inside of the converted building might be like.
This project has neatly drawn together the threads that have developed during this study. I am really pleased with my current illustration work. This might be the end of my MA study but this experience has planted many seeds within me that will be developed over the coming years.
