Message and delivery, crit

Here are the 3 sheets from the crit we had last week, I felt a lot of the feedback was constructive but also at the same time no one really knew fully what the project about. Some of the crit sheets said they didn't no who Fidel Castro was, and I feel this is quite an important factor in understanding the project as a whole. If there was a way I could include some background information with the brief then it would improve the understanding of it, at the same time though it will take away from the messages in the posters.

 

Message and delivery, Poster OUGD403

As my chosen news story was about the wrongly reported death of Fidel Castro I chose to focus on all the previous attempt to kill him by the C.I.A. I knew a bit about Castro to begin with, all the pretty basic information. When I started to look a bit further into his past it really got me interested.
Their was some really crazy plots to kill castro that I read about and I wanted to put this message across in my posters.

This is just some of my development work from my sketch book

I watched a documentart called 638 ways to kill Casto on BBC iplayer, this gave me really good insight and knowledge on everything to do with Fidel Castro during the time his life was most under threat. It really helped me in my research as well.
638 ways to kill Castro
I used several articles online to develop my research but as I decided my posters wernt going to be directly linked to the news story a lot of my research was done generally around Fidel Castro.
here are some of the articles and web sites I looked at.
The Guardian
The Independent
Article on assassination plots
This is all research directly relating to my posters.

The first poster Idea I started creating was the just image poster, I began by collecting lists of all the weapons and techniques used to attempt to kill Fidel Castro. Once I was happy with the list I started to sketch out the outlines of the different weapons I wanted to involve in the poster. From my research I found other interesting items that were used in attempt to kill Castro. The sea shells for example on the poster are there because Fidel Castro liked diving and the C.I.A. planned to pack a shell full of explosives and paint it bright colours, when he dived down to pick it up the shell was to explode underwater.  This obviously never happened, but it is another example of the amount of ingenuity that went into some of these plots.

My second poster, image with type was the only poster that it was completely necessary to include type at the bottom of the page just to give a brief explanation of what the stars meant. There are 638 of them and i did this just to show the sheer scale of assassination plots or attempts taken out on Castro. When a figure is seen as something more visual I think it helps to show the true scale of it. I also coloured the stars in according to the Cuban flag which I think helped tie it together with the relation to Castro.

For my final poster, just text, I had a good idea that it would need a quote relating to the research I had been doing to make sense with the other posters. I didn't want the tone to be too serious because it is almost a joke how Fidel Castro couldn't be killed. I eventually found a quote he said,
"If surviving assassination attempts was an olympic medal, then I would win the gold."
I felt this quote worked well with the other posters.
I chose to do the type in this way because I did some research on cuban typography and graffiti and a lot of the street art has this very simple angular look to it, often using bright colours. I quite like the way the type turned out I think it fits well with the other posters.

Message and delivery, Mail shot OUGD403

This is the picture I used for Castro's illustration at the bottom of the inside of the mail shot.

For the final part of the message and delivery task we were asked to produce a set of 5 envelopes with a message inside to be sent to relevant adresses regarding your chosen subject. At first I really struggled at this task and it took me some time to come up with a solution to it. Fidel castro was my subject so theres wasn't much direction I could take it in, it was only until I asked Simon for help that he suggested maybe writing to the newspapers that wrongly reported on his death. This was my  starting point where my development could grow from here.

I had used a lot of time trying to develop and think of a solution to my problem this meant I had to think cleverly about how I was going to produce my mail shots, I decided to instead of produce a separate piece of work that goes inside the envelope I combined the two so that the envelope was double sided and folded out with a message on the inside.

This is the outside and inside of the letter, aligning the two correctly for it to be printed double sided was the only real problem I had.

Designing the actual envelope was relatively simple, my message really related back the the original news article that got me interested in the first place. Fidel Castro was angry about that fact that a rumour had spread that he had died and my message was a sort of retaliation to the 'Imperialist media'.
I found a quote from him attacking the media, saying they publish all these lies that people are beginning not believe any more.

Completed alphabet, Illustrator OUGD403

For the alphabet soup brief we had to choose a letter from the 10 we made relating to the world we were given from the randomiser. I was given boom which from the start I felt was a pretty straight forward word to represent as a letter form.
The task was to take your chosen letter and produce an alphabet using the same techniques you used to create your original letter.

I chose a combination of the two effects I created from the original 10 letters to make my final alphabet. I liked the way they these 2 letters looked, but I felt that they didn't represent boom well enough so I used the different effects to make a slightly different looking letter form.

I used a pretty simple technique to achieve my 'boom' effect, it did take some trial and error to achieve but when it came to producing the alphabet it took me a relatively short time.
The original letter form is at the top of the image, I then use the roughen tool to give the letter some texture. I used the pucker and bloat tool to distort the roughened letter to give the exploding effect.

I chose a font off the internet to use as the basis for my alphabet, I liked the way the font was bold and pretty simple, I though that the original letter form would have worked well representing the word boom even without and manipulation.

For the final alphabet some of the letters worked much better than others, for example the letters with curves like the O or the G spread out much better creating a more realistic explosion sort of shape. I dont think the letters would work very well if they were to make words, but I did have a play around and the original word boom that I was given works really well.

The orignal work for this brief is on my PPP blog.