Last brief of year one.... HOLIDAYS

Holiday Brief:
What I Did In My Holidays.
This was our last brief to round off our first year. It was, what the tutors said, something fun for us to do for our last project and could be interpreted in any way we liked and presented in any way we liked providing that we use the skills that we have learned during the past year in different applications. We also had to use at least two of the applications together. So the final product could be anything - an animation, film, website, interactive CD ROM or a poster - something involving print/graphic design. I thought that since the previous projects have all been video editing/flash/website related that I would experiment with producing something in print - something that we hadn't actually done before.
The first thing that came into my head when this brief was given to us was Hong Kong. That is where I will be going on my holiday abroad this year, and even though it isn't until late October, as soon as I thought of it, ideas started flowing. Initially I wanted to produce a poster about Hong Kong - something that would be seen in a brochure- and so set about starting to research Hong Kong, brainstorming and looking through pictures.
Through researching and as more ideas started to flow, it became apparent that I was moving away from the 'how to advertise Hong Kong' and realised that what I was looking at was what Hong Kong meant to me.
I stuck with the idea of a poster and went ahead with trying to represent what goes through my mind when I think of Hong Kong - what the place means to me. First - it reminds me of family - as aside from my parents and brother here in the UK the rest of my family reside in Hong Kong. The other factor was all these images that come into my head due to the fact that I am trying to remember past trips/holidays there to see family and to see the sites and where my parents grew up.
With these two factors in mind, I planned to produce two posters, both representing what Hong Kong means to me, but I wanted to show two different styles. The first that I produced was one that showed everything that came into my mind when I think of the place. I used the colour red which is what the flag colour is and because in chinese tradition, red is a lucky colour. I also chose to feature pictures of transport and tourist landmarks in the poster as I remember visiting them from my last trip there. I used Illustrator to produce lines that were in a radial formation and pasted this into photoshop (to combine two applications). I put a picture of me at the bottom and the radial lines behind me and the pictures in a college effect on-top - the radial effect interprets what comes out of my mind when I think of the place. The second poster, I went with a different style. I have recently been getting into painting so I came up with the idea of re-creating a painted poster using illustrator and photoshop. When I think of Hong Kong, I think of family, so that was the main idea for the second piece. I placed pictures of my family into illustrator and using the pen tool traced their faces and features. I pasted this into photoshop where I used the brush tool to colour them in. The outcome was a watercolour effect which I was very pleased with.
I enjoyed this brief as it allowed me to further develop my skills in photoshop and illustrator, something we hadn't done before as it was very web based and to do with video editing more. This also helped to develop furthermore my art skills.