Thursday 5 November 2015

Lip-sync madness



Yesterday I discovered something new and whacky that only the Internet could have created: I was really taken by a story on SBS news last night about a hugely popular Filippino show, Eat Bulaga! The story was difficult to follow because of its oddness but here's my attempt to share it.


There exists a website called Dubsmash where we as members of a participatory audience can film ourselves lipsyncing to a variety of provided soundclips, or from a song imported from our smartphone music collection. A Filippino twenty-something, Maine Mendoza - you may know her as Queen of Dubsmash of YouTube fame, was so popular in the Philippines that the producers of Eat Bulaga! wrote a part for the YouTube star, extending her Internet identity to her TV character: "...she delivers no dialogue although she lipsynchs songs or lines from movies, etc. prepared for her by the writers the night before" (Philstar). If that's not whacky enough, her TV character, Yaya Dub, develops a romance with another character "via split-screen, with Alden at the studio and Yaya Dub out in the streets" (Philstar). This romance has been so watched and followed that the producers bowed to public pressure and wrote into the script a meeting of the two lovers.
There is at least one fan site, currently with 130,000 followers, developing the story, imagining the romance - there are Photoshopped images posted of the lovers together. Check it out on Facebook.
I love this aspect of the Internet, an active audience who, through things such as fan sites, exert influence over the producers and get their say. These guys are changing the storyline.
And here's our go at Dubsmash.
https://youtu.be/VOeaolXfNMg



Tuesday 1 September 2015

New media and collective creativity

The Internet has allowed creative individuals, who would never ordinarily meet, to produce and share creative stuff. This collective production is known as participatory culture. There are many sites and platforms which encourage this type of participation and Unsplash! is one of them.
Unsplash! offers “free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos” with a new image available each day. The image shown here is one of three cards that I have designed for Queensland Strawberry Industry, using an Unsplash! strawberry image by James Wilkinson.
Right now, Unsplash! is creating a book of their beautiful images, but are also requesting contributions from creators to “take your pick of any Unsplash photo and remix it into whatever art form you want. Really, we mean it. Go nuts."
Unsplash! is one of the many organisations who are using the Internet as it was intended – a place, freely accessed, for sharing information.

Monday 20 April 2015

Graphic design – is it green?

I'm at uni again. It's absolutely excellent. The thing about uni is that it makes you think, you take time out to ponder bigger questions than "matt or gloss?". Of course there's more to graphic design than that, but I started to wonder about whether graphic design was just adding to the wasting our planet's finite resources by creating a brand and personality for a product or company, fuelling desire for that product and in turn, increasing waste of resources. Maybe you didn't want that jam, but you loved the packaging and so you bought it. And what about things like the iPhone with minute changes to product which just add obsolete stuff to the junk pile way too soon. 
Within many design professions there is change happening. Think upcycling – eBay and Gumtree have made it cool to reuse and recycle products. Items that would have gone to the tip are now sold second and even third-hand or made into something completely new. The building industry and the architecture profession also have sustainable approaches/products that the general public are aware of.
But what about graphic design? I did quite a bit of research for my uni assignment on this topic and sadly, there isn't much evidence of graphic designers understanding the end-of-life for the packaging, brochure or direct marketing piece etc. These are pretty transient pieces which require new thinking.
Kunara on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland is doing a great job (see image). This is thoughtful graphic design: Kunara is a huge organic supermarket which only offers paper bags. The paper bags for  holding things like rice and nuts are transparent (because the tannins and lignins have been removed) so you can see your product and 100% compostable. The bag, firstly, is necessary, secondly, has come from sustainable sources and thirdly, can go into your compost. Finally, the bag tells us this story so that we, as consumers, are being educated along the way. Love it.