Sainbury's Brand

I have chosen to examine the Sainsburys.co.uk website

The type of brand this company represents is a ‘personality brand’ they have set of human characteristics associated with the brand. They link personality traits and emotions to themselves to determine what their consumer outcome is. This is done by targeting gender, age, class, race and moral values of the consumer through icons and celebrity’s

In particular Sainsbury’s use their image of Jamie Oliver to define their brand, his uninitiated look,  middle class status, views on healthier food for children and being a family oriented man all reflects on the brand image of Sainsbury’s.

This makes them distinctive from other rival companies as they have someone who is constantly in the media spotlight, campaigning for a better way of life, which serves as a powerful relationship devise between the company and the public, which other rivals just don’t have.

3 Example elements:

eXistenZ (1999)

My first task to kick-start the context one: assignment two: visual essay module was by watching the film eXistenZ (1999) , what can only be described as an acid trip where reality is messed with extremely. We weren't asked to write a review but explain how certain threshold concepts are visible through narrative, interactivity and convergence.

Firstly the narrative of the film is full of examples of transformative information, where the understanding of the subject matter is shifted to a different perspective. For example the film deals with the question of reality on multiple levels, we begin to realise as the narrative progresses that eXistenZ is more than just a game, It's a battle between realism and virtual reality. D'Arcy begins to feel that the real world is a mere fantasy and suggests living out his entire life in the game, this shifts the audiences perception of reality, we begin to realise that the pursuit of living out a fantasy's is a way of blurring out reality.

Throughout the film technology is represented as biological rather than mechanical, this could be seen as troublesome information, this idea may shock the audience as the game can be directly plugged into the human body, acting as an extension of the human body. It plays with the idea that technology is more than a tool but the product of are own consciousness. People may not want to accept the idea that technology is becoming a bigger part of human existence.

The final concept I can identify is that of free will, this can be characterised as 'bounded', the idea that humans choose there own paths in life which lead to different outcomes is absent in eXistenZ. Players are given a decision to make, if they go against the game programming they fail.  Life in the game is represented as just existing and progressing, with a pre determined dialogue and actions, this does not allow for free will.

Well that's all I have, It could be complete nonsense! as Jooles said he wanted us to leave the lecture without a clue what we had learnt and what we had seen, and it worked. Hopefully I can elaborate on the threshold concepts in the future and gain a better understanding of the subject. All I know for sure is that eXistenZ is a very unusual film where reality is warped, but is also very interesting and imaginative at the same time.

Maybe I just dreamt the whole film? Is this real?

Samuel Dobson

C.R.A.P Lecture

For are lecture last Tuesday we were asked to read the C.R.A.P lecture, CRAP is a design for layout of screen space, including text, graphics and illustrations. First of we have contrast, which can be presented in many different ways, for example: Large text with small text, a cool colour with a warm colour, a thin line with a thick line --------------------------- -------------- and many more. Secondly repetition, the idea of repeated interesting design aspects to push the customer to read on. Alignment, the idea that everything should be connected to something else, nothing is randomly positioned on the page. Finally proximity, the idea that everything should show a relationship to each other.

For our task we had to bring a bad design layout from home into the lecture and swap with fellow students to identify the design flaws and how we would improve them, we were given the DVD cover to Forrest Gump, although me and my group felt that this design has little flaws, we did find a few. The alignment of text was uneven, they could have been more proximity between the graphics and text and finally the text read from the right instead of the left. We were given the opportunity to redesign  the image and here is what I produced:

Original:

My Design:

 Western Version:

I have aligned the text right as that is where your eye naturally reads from in our country, made a contrast between small and large lines, created a relationship between text and graphic as he looks like he's staring at the text, positioned the text in line with each other to create deeper impact and also placed the academy awards at the bottom of the page so the title of the film is one of the first things you read.

Samuel Dobson

My Multimedia

 NEXI - Robot with facial expressions 


A new invention by  MIT Media lab is a new robot that is able to show various facial expressions such as 'slanting its eyebrows in anger', or 'raise them in surprise', and shows a wide assortment of facial expressions while communicating with people.

This particular new technology piques my interest as I believe the evolution of robots could change our world extremely, we already live in age where technology aids our everyday lives , the possibility of improving human/robot teamwork in the future will open up many possibilities and controversies. The robots we have at the moment are great for perfectly completing tasks on the production line and can accurately design anything we want them to, but what interests me is when it gets to the point where robots function in the domestic environment, helping us put dishes in the dishwasher and cooking meals for us.

Anyway this new invention tells me that were getting closer and closer to breaking the limitations of everyday robots, I can't imagine people enjoying a realistic expression on a robot, personally It would make me really uncomfortable, but it will be very interesting to see how these new technology's can be used to further the development of human kind, for better or worse.


CREEPY!

My Design Process - (In One Minute)

This is my presentation for my design process rounded up into one minute. At no point could you indicate to your specific area of work or product, so you have a generalized view of the design process. Let the video do the talking for itself.
I also understand that our second assignment in context one will be a visual essay, apparently this style of work is good preparation for that. Tricking me into subconsciously learning an assignment I haven't even been set yet, those NTU staff are smart for sure.



Inspiration
Brainstorming
Analysis
Synthesis
Planning
Research
Finalised Ideas
Development
Evalution
Approval and Launch

Samuel Dobson 

Context 1: Assignment 1 Task: Essay: My Design Process.

While analysing the design processes which I implemented, I will be specifically looking at the music video I created in A level Media Studies: CSS – THIS MONTH DAY TEN, where we had to create a video for a song that didn’t already exist. As this was a group task it was difficult to come up with ideas that everyone agreed upon and other times it was just difficult to get those ideas out of my head and into something others could visualise. This leads me to my first design process which was inspiration. We all decided to note down any visual styles of existing work that we enjoyed and could see potential in, this varied from adverts that were on TV at the moment, to old Clint Eastwood films. We then listed any artists we enjoyed and came to a mutual decision on the song and artist, one we would all be passionate working with. The main inspiration for our video was the CSS – Alcohol video, which has arts and crafts made characters and environments, all being animated with sticks and stop-motion.

Cadburys advert.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly stills

 

                            
                       
  

Now we had our inspiration we started to brainstorm any ideas we could incorporate into our video, the look of the characters, the pace of movement to the song, the background images. We annotated everything so we could future reference our original ideas and be reminded what it was we wanted to do.

Next we started to identify our target audience, we collecting qualitative and quantitative data on various subjects, this involved the age range of CSS fans, Opinions on existing CSS video from both fans/not and the subculture that our artist most appealed to. This helped us better understand the audience that would be viewing our product, the preparation was crucial as we now knew what was expected from this particular artist, conventions that would be most suited to the age range and generally stopped us from creating something personal that might appeal to us but not the intended target market.

With all our inspiration, ideas and data we began to prototype and develop our video, we made rough templates of characters and environments to view which best suited the music, we experimented with different camera angles and shot lengths in an attempt to create the best atmosphere, we slowly narrowed down the concepts until we were satisfied with the end result.

First design for house/stage

After we had completed the developing stage we decided to show clips and extracts to fellow students and tutors, this gave us varied feedback and issues that we didn’t necessarily notice, the opinions and advice allowed us to further refine our product, perfecting it and eliminating any problems, which ultimately gave us the finished product. For example we got complaints about certain hand-held camera movements making people feel sick, so we decided to tone it down.

    Finally we came to the conclusion that our product was effective in achieving what we set out to do and would have the correct impact on our target audience, being confident with our work we rendered it and released it into the market. (Well into the examiners hands.)

              End Result: CSS - This Month Day 10   

Samuel Dobson