Design Assignment 43: Create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.

Inspiration
I’m no Bergman connoisseur nor real film buff for that matter, but Bergman’s The Seventh Seal has a scene that is pure poetry, verbal and visual. To set up the scene, a knight, Antonious Block, returning from the Crusades, challenges the devil to a game of chess believing this to be a clever ploy to stall for more time, life. Delaying the inevitable, the knight along the journey back to his castle meets a juggler, Jof, and his wife, Mia, and young child, Mikael. The wife shares the family’s meal, strawberries and milk, and Block remarks:

I shall remember this hour of peace: the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk.
[He drinks from the bowl.]

Block’s comments really resonate with me and remind me of my constant quest to live in the moment or hour and make the most of the rich yet simple encounters that make up a life. I think that for all of the pleasures and opportunities that the digital world brings that it also antes up the challenge to live mindfully.

You can watch this scene on YouTube and if you’re as intrigued by Bergman’s work as I am then you’ll enjoy this retrospective on his work by Woody Allen. Allen was seriously influenced by Bergman’s work and work ethic and believes that Bergman’s films will stand the test of time and still be enjoyed and studied when the trendy films are long forgotten. It is both the soul and the technique of Bergman’s work that inspires Allen.

Process and Reflections

A minimalist poster seemed quite appropriate for Bergman’s metaphor-rich film.

I knew immediately that I would integrate a nod to chess and to the bowl of strawberries in my poster. The simple black and white squares I think conjures up a chess board and hints at the good/evil dichotomy of the story. I placed the bowl of strawberries on a diagonal to draw the eye immediately there. The one red strawberry adds a touch of the surreal and lets the viewer know that all is not as it seems. Finally, I used the Google Languages tool to translate the title into Swedish, Bergman’s native language.

Aspirations
I cut the bowl of strawberries from clipart and made some effort in GIMP to smooth the edges. I’d really like to learn to use a program like Illustrator that I’ve heard others mention to draw an abstract bowl of strawberries in black and white. Then I’d colorize the one strawberry for effect.

Or I’ve seen Giulia Forsyth create amazing drawings on her iPad. I’d wonder if that would be a good approach to create drawings. I love to draw.

It just occurred to me that my friend Norm always closes with “That’s my story. Any questions?” and I always seem to end with a question to help me tell my story better. An appropriate sign-off for me.

Design Assignment 366: Design a film-based cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesick.

I have admired Spacesick’s ingenious “I Can Read Movies” book covers and the amazing interpretations by DS106ers like Chad and Scottlo. Well, I like a challenge so I set my sights high with this assignment.

I know to admire good design but have never studied how to create it, so I decided to try a bit of an experiment and design my book cover green with no formal study; then go on the Design Safari to study design elements, and then return to my original design to see if I would change anything.

I certainly had a good time on my Design Safari or “Search and Rescue” as I came to refer to it, and I know what the elements are and can conveniently refer back to them with my design trading cards but I can see that it’s going to take a lot more practice to understand how to apply them successfully. I was curious when reading Roger Ebert’s brilliant “How to Read a Movie” about his hypothesis that directors don’t intentionally consider visual strategies when composing their shots.

I have never heard of a director or cinematographer who ever consciously applied them. I suspect that filmmakers compose shots from images that well up emotionally, instinctively or strategically, just as a good pianist never thinks about the notes. It may be that intrinsic weighting is sort of hard-wired.

I’d like to think that the “hard-wired” intrinsic weighting can be achieved after much thoughtful study and practice until a degree of automaticity is reached. That’s the hopeful, eternal optimist perspective.

Inspiration
Spielberg and Kubrick’s AI is a movie that continues to play in my head, always conjured up when I’m amazed by some new technology and how the “axemaker’s gift” may be changing what it fundamentally means to be human. I liked the idea of trying to design a novel cover that would play on the human/artificial human tension.

Process and Reflections

I measured a Spacesick’s original to get my dimensions right but stopped short of copying her template. She’s opted for “All rights reserved” and it seemed questionable to copy anything but her idea. I could be overly cautious but that’s the side I’d rather err on. I think if she had wanted to encourage copying that she would have chosen a Creative Commons license.

Using GIMP, I chose a digital background, simply typed in a giant A and I, and added a small image of the blue fairy and the android-boy that I colorized to blend in. So you see my simple, original cover on the left.

After my Design Safari, I tried hard to come up with some clever way to improve the design. No go though I do understand now some of the elements I used unintentionally. Those include the alignment of the A and I so it almost seems house-like to represent the home that the android-boy wanted so badly (metaphor, symbol) as well as the digital background to reflect the AI component. No breakthrough aha’s. I’m a bit better at GIMP now so I was able to resize the fairy-boy image to fit in the A and attempted to distress the digital background a little with the smudge tool.

I’m going to continue to try and apply the design elements and I’m especially interested in gestalt theory and how that might affect the design process. If you have resources you’d recommend, I’m all eyes.

Everything is free now
That’s what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away

Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay
— Gillian Welch, “Everything Is Free”

Don’t hate me, Gillian Welch.

Not that I’ve ripped off anything from you yet. But at the rate I’m going and since you’re one of my all-time faves — it can’t be long. In my first music remix for my DS106 radio segment, I “borrowed” work from a Karoke orchestra’s version of Summertime, Mamas and Pappas, and Pat Metheny.

I’ve always taken a hard line on copyright and fair use issues with my grad students, believing that they are the last defense for their students to learn to respect the intellectual property of others and their own. One memorable gray area was when Scott used the Beatles’ recording of “Eleanor Rigby” as the soundtrack for his video response (bookcast) to Laurie Halse Anderson’s Winter Girls. He really liked the connection he saw between the anorexic protagonist in Anderson’s novel and Eleanor’s loneliness.

But I thought that he was not using the song in a transformative manner, so advised against. Then he came back with his own rendition of the song that he played on his guitar and recorded. I still think he was wrong to use the piece; the song is not his intellectual property even if he plays it. And I don’t think it’s integral to his piece. Sometimes I worry that we take the easy way out and use popular songs because listeners tend to respond to those faster when we could do a better job if we used our craft to tell our story.

Yet, I’m a huge fan of Pogo of Perth with his unique style of remixing films (most famously, Disney and Pixar films), creating music using syllables, notes, chords, and sound effects only from the movies. His work is transformative, I would argue, and he adds a special value for the public that didn’t exist before.

This is not the first time I’ve grappled with copyright and fair use and make my case in this post for the use of copyrighted materials to be transformative.

So in creating my piece for my cabin’s DS106 radio show, I appropriated up to 30 seconds from the Mamas and the Papas’s “Dancing in the Streets” and Pat Metheny’s “Letters from Home” plus a few seconds from a Karoke version of “Summertime.” How do I feel? Surprisingly, confident that I did nothing wrong and I don’t think it’s rationalization.

The music was integral to the storytelling — not something I chose because it was pretty or I liked it. In each case, the music “chose” me because it was referred to by my those who participated in my inquiry. So is it transformative? You know, I actually think so because I do think I remix music and neuroscience research to share some pretty interesting findings.

Would my piece pass the YouTube test if I uploaded it there? Well, probably not. That’s why I think the work done by Larry Lessig and others in helping us understand that copyright laws need to change to reflect the “art” that we can create today using digital tools. It’s way past due. The only approved uses included in Section 107, US Copyright Law are those of “criticism, comment, news, reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.” Art that doesn’t fit in those categories is ignored. Tim Wu does a laudable job of helping us frame our questions for this digital era.

One of the questions I’ve framed is inspired by Creative Commons and the encouragement of the Open Educational Resources Foundation (OER Foundation) that creators share their work openly and freely through a BY, attribution-only license. There’s a really interesting discussion of this move to encouraging everyone to choose a “BY” attribution-only tag for their work in Lisa M. Lane’s post, “Why CC-BY Just Isn’t Good Enough.”

In the spirit that “learning should be free for all,” I’ve lobbied for all of the work I develop for online teaching to be free for all — those seeking accreditation pay while those interested in learning for learning’s sake pay nothing. So far, North Carolina State University and the professional associations I’ve developed online courses for have agreed.

But as a free-lancer, I still grapple with how to license the work that I do that is not commissioned. Stories like Alec Couros’s encourage me that there may be good reason to opt for the CC-NC-SA. Ultimately, I’m with Gillian — I’m going to create anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.

I was inspired to create a poster to highlight the Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons connection. It was the first time I’d attempted to use GIMP to cut and insert objects so I learned a lot. I’ve still much to learn about being precise and smoothing the edges after cutting. I also explored the use of multiple typefaces which has always seemed pretty scary to me. It’s sort of like matching plaids and florals — tricky but effective when done well. In this case, I followed the advice I’d read and used a sans serif title and a serif message that reflected the roundness of the Creative Commons typeface. Would love any feedback on whether or not it works.

I CAN HAS OER THROUGH CREATIVE COMMONS!