Time Project

A video about the drudgery of monotonous factory work.

I find the idea of spending 50 years in the same job kind of soul destroying.

TCM — More Fucking Posters

If I Knew Then Posters

My advice for the wee level 4 students.

TCM — The Bad and the Beautiful

Below are some mock ups of another set of posters for the TCM project.

Sometimes I wish I could be arsed to spend the time it takes to draw something reasonably well. I put off pursuing this idea early own because I know my drawing is shite and I couldn't think another way of getting it down.

With some simplification and more refined technique I think I can get these to work.

TCM Poster — Superman

TCM Poster — Spartacus

TCM Poster — The Bad and the Beautiful

Banzai Kid — Finished

This is the finished cover for The Banzai Kid's album “Meh”.

We wanted to keep the whole thing lo-fi as it is in keeping with the ethos of the album — rough cut and acoustic.

I had wanted to get the whole thing redrawn in a more stylised comic book fashion but lacking time and talent settled with this.

Three Little — Bastard — Words

The first project of my final year was to analyse and examine words in minute detail in order that we can best represent the word graphically.

Choosing one word for it's history, one for it's sound, and one for it's visual appearance — Cliché, Perpetual and Phlegm respectively.

Dyslexia

This was my back up plan for the Motion Graphics module, in case the Se7en titles went shit.

The idea was was that someone had thrown their pen in frustration and it would smash into the wall.

At the time I did not know or have time to learn how to use particle systems and was unable to smash the pen.

Dyslexia Ad — Mock Up from Sean Cooper on Vimeo.

I spent the last two days trying to figure it out and came up with this.

Dyslexia Ad from Sean Cooper on Vimeo.

Typeface Latest

I have invested more time in my type design this week, and it is becoming a lot cleaner and more balanced. Download here

Banzai Kid Part 3

I had an idea based on some of the lyrics and themes of some songs (well what would it be based on?).

Like lots of songs these are mostly about extremes of emotions love, anger, worries blah blah. I wanted to play on the anger in some of the songs mainly because this is a side to The Banzai Kid you'll only really come across in his songs.

He is a mostly a calm and quiet person but it seems he uses songs to vent some of his pent up anger. “I tried to give you a knife in the back” are some of the lyrics from “Appointed Part 2”.

What I want to show is “the beast” overtaking and overpowering The Banzai Kid.

I thought I could have The Banzai Kid stalking something/someone (unseen) with a knife whist he in turn is being stalked by his own shadow (“the beast”)

This refers not only to anger but all held back emotions that build up, envelop and consume. Much of the album seems to be about this sort of thing.

This is a mock up of what I mean. I will work on making the shadow more imposing.

The Banzai Kid Part 2

I still don't know what to do for the album cover, but a concept for the identity of The Banzai Kid is beginning to form.

A lot of the songs are about sides of him that you may never see, hurt feelings or repressed anger, one of the reasons he uses werewolves as a metaphor "for the violence inherent in human nature" as he put it.

So an obvious way to show this is crisp clean colours that could sell soap powder torn away to reveal sickly zombie greens, deep blood red. The colours tie in with the Sci-fi/Fantasy elements in some of the tracks.

The Banzai Kid

Getting back into design is tough, it is difficult to remember where to start. So it's a good thing that a friend of mine has asked me to design an album cover for him before going back to uni and having a shit fit because I'd forgotten everything.

Anyway he is The Banzai Kid, and I don't know quite what to do yet.

The album isn't about much in particular, Relationships, Alcohol, Death, Corpses and Werewolves.

So I started by looking at 1940s horror movie posters, The Wolfman, The Fury of the Wolfman and the like and because Banzai is Japanese, Godzilla.

So …

The Banzai Kid said it reminded him of 1940s pulp fiction which is not so far from what I was aiming for.

It's a start at least.

Typeface Design Version 1.010

I haven't being doing a lot over the summer and so inevitably a certain amount of boredom set in.
I'd been wanted to do something designery but found — with no amount of looking — nothing to sink my teeth into.
Then, the other day I remembered that I had fontlab studio 5 and had wanted to learn how to use it, so i have spent three straight days designing a typeface from scratch.
I started drawing a few ideas on paper until I eventually choose a lowercase e and a I liked, then drew them up in fontlab an then designed the rest from there.
This is a fully a working opentype font send me an email if you want a copy. (though I still have to set up the kerning pairs, tweak the metrics, adjust stroke thickness, change some characters and loads of other shit, then make the bold and italic versions!).

Word of Mouth — Negotiated Project

The first draft of my ident for the Word of Mouth project.

Quite a contrast from Visual Development.

Word of Mouth from Sean Cooper on Vimeo.

fear and trembling

This is the final video for Visual Development.

fear and trembling — variant from Sean Cooper on Vimeo.

Sequential Narrative Update

Here's is the most recent Three Blind Mice sequential narrative.
It doesn't seem like I've changed a lot but this is the 35th version!

Posters

Here are a couple of posters.

First is my final(ish) poster for a Matisse exhibition for the Applied Ideas.

Second is an ad for a BBC Four program called Word of Mouth for Negotiated Project. (which I still have to animate.)

Sequential Narrative part 2

I have had a rethink about the story I want to tell for project two.

The tale is a modern day Jack and the Beanstalk, and based on a true story about one of my mates brothers, who sold his van at the pub for a plant. He still claims that it was good deal.

This is the first draft.

Custom Pangram

I wasn't happy with the pangram in the last post so wrote my own.

Z-boy is a reference to dogtown and z-boys which is a documentary about surfers in California who first developed skateboarding in the 70's.

I made the surfer connection because I think the type is dirty and many shapes remind me of coral or seaweed and the bright colours are working much better than any of the Matisse stuff I tried.

It should read “z-boy surfed with verve, quickly making waves but flipped at the crux onto jagged coral” and I have just realised that I have done about thirty variants of this with coral spelt wrong :(

Matisse get shafted

I spent some time earlier making a working font out of my typeface.

which you can download from here (I hope)

Then played laying out the text with various pangrams and think that because I got to tied up with the Matisse bollocks I'd entirely missed the essence of my typeface entirely.

fear and trembling

As requested by Nigel I have made a video of the images from my existentialism book.

It tells the story of the realisation of existence and acceptance of mortality.

It's probably more slideshow than motion graphics.

fear and trembling from Sean Cooper.

Three plugs on the floor

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I decided to do some painting without having thought about what we would paint.

After a small row and nearly not bothering at all, I chose to do a painting of some plugs and a remote control on the floor.

Seeing as this is my first painting for about 21 years and I'm shit at drawing I'm quite happy with it. If you stand far away and squint your eyes it looks awesome.

Sequential Narrative Part One

The brief for this project asks us to consider the of colour and by combining it with simple geometric shapes use it to help tell the story.

First I thought that I would try Hansel and Gretal but I was told that some bastard did that last year so I chose to do the nursery rhyme the Three Blind Mice instead.

I'm working towards getting more colour in my work, one notch of saturation at a time.

Dyslexia Awareness

For Project Two of the Motion Graphics module we had to make a video to promote the awareness of dyslexia.

The last thing I wanted was to come across patronising so I tried to play on an anxiety of reading and writing that might be felt if you were unknowingly suffering from dyslexia.

Dyslexia Awareness on Vimeo.

One Sentence Story

I'm going to start by back tracking

The first of my motion graphics projects was to animate a story personal to myself using only type and colour. The animation tells the story of a long walk home from the Edwardstone White Horse.

One Sentence Story "The Long Walk Home" on Vimeo.

My first blog blah blah

After no small amount of badgering from fellow Graphic Design student Laurence I have started this blog to show off my outstanding and multi faceted talents.

Unlike others who have started blogs lately will update this regularly with what ever shite I concoct to meet the various briefs thrown at us by our tutors at UCS.