Exhibition

To begin with, I would like to say that I am pleased with the final exhibition.
I knew we would not be able to prepare our exhibition as we had planned (‘painty paint’ style, a lot of colours etc) because of the lack of money and time we had. It is impossible to prepare exhibition in just one day (also there were only five people in the morning on Friday that showed up – including me)! Also the exhibition was made from our pocket. Many people that visited our exhibition were asking about financial support. It was shame to say that we did it with our own money. The university did not help us financially. For this reason I am not disappointed of how we prepared our exhibition. Of course there are some things which, I think, could be done better.

From the beginning I declared to put our best works near the entrance so that visitors would get more interested about our exhibition. However, all the works were mixed, and I think our best ones were behind the images that should not be exhibited at all. As time showed, I was (unfortunately) right. to put our best work on front. A lot of visitors did not even enter the exhibition after they had watched one or two front images. Some left with a smile…

To make our exhibition look better I think it would be much better to use colour instead of white paper. This would bring more colours to the exhibition (which was the style we wanted to have). It’s a pity that we couldn’t paint the walls, If we were not forbidden I believe we would spray the walls with colours. I think then it would look more attractive to people.

Another thing that we could put at the walls was the link to exhibition website. Probably few people would visit the website but I still think it should have been done (it would also filled free space on the wall).

Another thing that I think we could use in order to make the exhibition more attractive was the banner that I had made. I think that this would look (of course with changed background) very good if it was slicked on the front glass. Some posters were simply too small to see (and to be honest some of them were not good enough). I The banner would look good on the glass as banner itself looks interesting (like everyone in the class said to me).
What I really like in our exhibition were the props, t-shirts and linen with sprinkled paint.

Now I’m going to describe my three days that I spent at the exhibition

Friday:
Friday was the first day of our exhibition. Maybe not really an open day because that was a day when we created an exhibit of our work. Unfortunately there were only 5-6 people that showed up (including me) in the morning (in the afternoon the rest of the class came). I spent all day long with Kiel to hang others’ works. We only had fishing line and tape to use. We worked hard but some of the works still were fell down. What is more we did not finished our job but a lot was done
Hanging our work was not the only thing I was doing with Kiel and with the others.
Saturday:
On Saturday morning Adam and I finished hanging the works that I and Kiel did not finish the day before. I also did different stuff like spreading leaflets and so on.
It was also the opening day of our exhibition. Soon afterwards we had visitors. I was very happy when people were looking at my works. It was also a pleasure to me to talk with them about my works. They asked many questions about ‘Pygmalion’ image. They said they were looking forward to seeing the final animation. I think from all of the three works that I decided to exhibit ‘July’ was the most successful one. One lady was so pleased with my ‘July’ picture that she even asked for a copy of it! Some marriage said to me that they like that calm and romantic atmosphere in this image. Another young couple could not believe that ‘July’ image is a fully 3D generated image – as they thought it was a photograph.
‘1st of November’ was probably the image that many people did not really understand; especially young people. I am from another country and I presented the ‘1st of November’ as a very personal day so it is very symbolic and nostalgic. But it was very nice to see how people try to understand importance of this image (before we added description under each work).
The very popular section was the ‘sketch wall’. Many children just came to us to draw something on the wall. We also received some good comments in ‘comment book’.

Sunday:

Sunday was less busy than Saturday but it was for also an enjoyable day. It was very quiet at the beginning and we didn’t have any visitors. I decided to draw a nice and colourful character on the ‘sketch wall’ section for the visitors to give more colours to the section. Cartoonish style is not the style I feel comfortable at but I did my best. I drew a young skateboarder with ‘flaming’ like hairs (the sketch can be seen between flash and animation text). I also drew two alien characters. One of them is rather scary so I put my drawing on the opposite wall (with the rest of the class drawings)
After some time people began to come to visit us.
We had some people that were asking as for 30 minutes about our work! It is nice to hear how someone appreciates the hard work that we put on. Again some people liked the projects that I have done.

evaluation

At the very start I didn’t think that this module would be so time-consuming. At the beginning the students were divided into a few groups. Our task was to come up with an exhibition theme. My group chose a ‘nature’ theme. Unfortunately the group wasn’t very good. Some members did not carry out their work so everything was done at the last moment. I think they did not treat the job seriously. As for the first group project, I was responsible for layout. I presented our ideas in 3D and also created some logos. I have to admit that I was ashamed of the final presentation because our work was not finished. (two persons from my group did not finish their tasks or … just did them one hour before the presentation). In the mean time, as everybody in the class, I had to create a CV and a business card. I had problems with creating my business card and CV. I had many ideas but I couldn’t really decide which one would be best for me.. When I finally finished my CV and business card their styles were totally different. The idea was to keep the same style referring to the CV and business card (which makes sense). After being given feedback it was changed. Another problem appeared when we were told that we should fallow the same style when creating a blog and a website. I think if this had been said earlier it would have been much easier to organise our work. At first I wanted my business card and CV to be clear, easy to read with simple design but I also wanted to show my 3D skills. For this purpose I used the image banner that I produced for ‘design studio’. I think my CV and business card look simple and aesthetic which was something I wanted to achieve. We also had to present our work through the internet. I decided to deal with website rather than with blog to publish my work. For the website I used the same graphics and style as I did for the CV and business card so that there was ‘connection’. The problem with creating a website was the time. I believe If I had more time the website would look better. Another work that everyone had to do (as a personal work) was producing a printed portfolio. Probably this was a real problem in the whole group. The truth is that within last three 3 years at the uni we did not create images (or images are not good enough) to be shown in our portfolio. We were more concentrated on animation, modelling and so on. It was a bit confused by the fact that so many people in the class didn’t know what they could show. Even for me it was confusing because I mostly did 3D models and animations rather than images. To create my portfolio I decided to use images and graphics that I had created before studying at uni. Very few images recently done were also used . I showed some logos ideas, posters, images, screen shots of animation and so on. To organise the portfolio I decided to put several images onto one page, for example: ‘cartoon network’. Three screen shots were inserted together, thanks to this, it is clear that they belong to the same project. Again I believe I could produce a better portfolio if I had more time. I would change the background colour for each of the printed pages. The main project was the ‘studio desing’ project. The class was devided again into three small groups when each group was responsible for something diffrent. I was in ‘graphic team’ I never produced anything for the website so I am quite happy I had opportunity to gain some experience and knowledge of creating banners and images for the website. I think this knowledge can be useful for me. I created graphics for banners and posters. The problem was I was not in the meeting week before, when It the class discussed the style, so we couldn’t use any of my work as they were in diffrent style. But we could use some ideas. One of the posters that I have created was used later. The walls were covered with paint so the style match to the style that class have chose. This picture was also used in the website. For the banners I also had some ideas but the group most liked the idea of poeple covered with paint. The onl thing they wanted me to add was the ‘studio desing’ text in top left corner. Personall I like the banner. I think it looks fresh and it really match well to the ‘studio design’ style. To say something about style... I have to say I am not happy of the style that class decided to go with. I think that is a bit childish, when in my opinion we should show ourselfs from maturity point of view. I also think that the website is not that good as it could be. I do not like the wooden backround with white box with the text (description) in centre of the website as it does not look good. I am not a web designer and I could not do it better but as a viewer I think it does not look good. But I respect the other people opinions and I tried to give them what they expected from me. That was a good lesson for me.

portfolio

To present my work I decided to use a box. The box is in a4 format and fully black. Inside the box there will be my CV, buisness card and work that I decided to present. To make the portfolio look better I ordered a few silve plates with the inscription ‘Portfolio Robert Chmielak’.

images...

I forgot to say something about my three images that I want to present at my exhibition.
I decided to show these pictures, which refer to the modelling and animation. These three images It took me a long time to prepare them and I had to use some different software.