Fact Exercise Update

Today we performed our Erasmus Darwin Fact Exercise in front of an audience of 13 people (12 more than we anticipated). The sell out performance was a huge success. Our performance was done at a bar over looking the canal as it was not practical/possible to ask our audience to travel to Lichfield and watch our performance at the 'Erasmus Darwin House'. The canal was relevant still to Darwin as he lived during the industrial age and one of his established inventions was a canal lift which was used to life canals (surprisingly). We also brought the Darwin house to Nottingham (not literally), but in the form of a short film beautifully shot and edited by Les. Les also but his photography skills to good use and took some photos of the exhibit.





I was in charge of the Erasmus Darwin Bingo (renamed Darwingo Bingo) which was fairly successful. The winner coincidently was Joules who is now the proud owner of an Erasmus Darwin pen and bookmark, which I’m sure he would agree, is a fantastic prize, and one he will cherish forever!



Suckdeep did a fantastic job of introducing the performance and taking the audience through the key points in Darwin’s exciting life and Isaac created an interactive timeline as a visual aid to Suckdeep’s speech.




Overall we worked well as a group with very few fights. This is the first time we have all worked together but I’m sure we will work together on many more projects in the near future.

Sony Bravia Adverts

As part of the identities project I have been looking at different types of advertising that really captures my attention. Two adverts that really caught my eye were the 'Colour Like No Other' ads for the Sony Bravia HD Colour TV's.

One ad involves an estate being demolished with paint whilst the other involves hundreds of bouncy balls rolling down a hill in San Francisco. The two adverts are very bizarre and unusual which helped catch my attention. It was something that was completely original and has never been done before. The scale of the ads was also amazing. I had seen the ads several time and always wondered how they made it look so real. After a bit of research I discovered that it was actually all done for real.

70,000 litres of paint, 358 single bottle bombs, 330 meters of steel pipe, 57 km of copper wire and an abandoned estate in Glasgow were used to create the amazing 'Paint' advert, whilst 250,000 bouncy balls (or super balls as the Americans call them!) were used to create the second ad, which earned the advert a world record for the most props used in an advert.

The music used is also very cleverly used and really captures the mood of the advert. The Paint advert is accompanied by music from Rossini's opera La gazza ladrauses which is a dramatic piece of classical music.

The bouncy ball advert is accompanied by the song Heartbeats, written by Swedish duo The Knife which is a soft acoustic track which creates a peaceful and calm mood

Here are the adverts as well as two behind the scenes videos on how they made the ads.

Bouncy Ball Advert



Paint Advert



Behind the Scenes

Identities Research

I am already well into the Ident project and am now starting to bring together all my ideas for the presentation in two weeks time. I have decided to do the Trent Media option as I work closely with Trent Media, especially Platform, therefore I have a good idea of what Trent Media is about and their aims.



There main aim is to get students involved in the three areas of Trent Media, TV, Radio and Magazine. It’s by students, for students. This is the fist year that all three media's have merged and been branded under 'Trent Media'. Although the amount of interest and student participation is dramatically higher that any other year, i still found that over half the students i surveyed had not heard of one or more of the different media platforms. The results show that 65% of people did not realise that Trent TV existed, just over half of the people did not realise that Fly FM existed, 22.5% of people did not realise that Platform existed and
32.5% of people did not realise that Trent media was ran by students and that they could get involved.

Therefore, hopefully with my inside knowledge and my 'creative' marketing skill I will be able to update the brand and show a more distinct link between each media. The marketing campaign will also emphasise that Trent Media is constantly out there covering many aspects of student’s life and it will hopefully encourage students to get involved and most importantly, get people to tune in to Trent Media

Over the last few weeks I been researching leading TV, Radio and Magazine companies and looking how they go about marketing there brand. I have discovered quite a lot of interesting techniques about effective advertising though my own research and the branding lectures.

I have looked at logos in particular and found that most TV corporations have a similar look and feel for all of their logos in their channel portfolio. This is something I would like to adapt to show a obvious link between Trent Media and the three different media's.



I looked at some channel Idents and found a lot had real life elements mixed with animation elements. I also found that most of them were abstract and unusual. This is also something that I would like to use in my poster and leaflet designs.



I looked at various poster designs that were unusual and caught my eye.

Collaborators - Respond To Place + Space

Over the next few days a design gallery is on show place in Waverly, showing professional designers scale models of set designs and live art performances. There are a wide range of interesting models and art projects that have helped me to understand more about live based art projects.




Roma Patel had an interactive stand that showed the live art project that she had worked on. The project looked amazing and was done on a grand scale. I never really knew how popular these live art shows were, but today I learnt that they can be very popular and have some visually amazing sets. Roma was responsible for designing the sets for two site specific live art shows, 'The Merchant of Venice' and 'The Tempest'. The sets looked stunning and Roma explained that the 'Merchant of Venice' lasted around three hours and had and had an audience of more than 200 people, which just showed how popular these shows are.



The set for ‘The Merchant of Venice’ responded to “various histories of the sites and the architecture of Cork City. Some of the spaces were kept the same, whilst others were contained set pieces and video projections to incorporate the story. ‘The Tempest’ similarly used the Victorian features of ‘Fitzgerald’s Park’ to create a spectacular set that consisted of walkways and vertical structures.

This was just one of many interesting ‘site specific’ live art projects that was on show and this has helped increased my understand of live art projects that will help me work on my fact exercise project over the next two weeks.

Fact Exercise

Today we were given a new group project to work on. We were given a name of a local celebrity and asked to come up with a live art based performance based at a location that is significant to that person. Our "celebrity" is Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin trained as a physician and was well known as a poet. He was one of the founder members of the Lunar Society, a discussion group of pioneering industrialists and natural philosophers, most famously; he was Grand Father to Charles Darwin.



The other four people in our group are Les, Sukhdeep, Isaac and Jennie. So far we have come up with several ideas for the performance, and the location where it can be set. There is ‘Erasmus Darwin House’ in Stratford, Lichfield which is where Erasmus carried out some important research. This would be an ideal location to perform our live art.



This can be filmed and shown to the public in Nottingham. Ideas include a quiz, Darwin Bingo and a Darwin treasure hunt. We had an idea of having a series of live presentations and videos taken on location at Darwin House and then asking questions to an audience. We also had an idea of having a game of bingo, with key dates of Darwin’s life as bingo numbers. We will perform a key scene from Darwin’s life and then give the date this happened. The audience can then cross off the date, if they have it. As our performance is aimed at an older audience, as well as school students, we felt that this was a popular game with the age groups and would make it more entertaining. There would also be a possible prize, to add an incentive to watch the performance.