Lecture Notes 13: Dissertation or Extended Written Piece: Library Research

• If you require aid when researching over the summer (With chances being that you won't be in Leeds during that period), do contact chris.graham@leeds-art.ac.uk
• The book loan limit has been upgraded from 10 to 15 for third years.
• eStudio >>> College Library (To the right)
• Notable Things that are available there:
• 1. Harvard Referencing- Comprehensive Guide
  Secondary Referencing Using Harvard, Pg 25 (For referencing the quote by an author different to the book's author itself) 
• 2. SCONUL ACCESS (Allows you to access other University libraries, such as University of Leeds)
  Step 1: Full Time Undergraduate
  Step 2: Leeds College of Art
  Step 3: Fill out a form
  Submit and wait for an email
  You won't have to repeat this process for other facilities once you have done it once
• Keywords when researching: Focus and Relevance
• Clearly define the area of study you wish to focus on before you actually begin researching, so to avoid wasting time looking into irrelevant material
• Examples of Dissertation Titles:
  Straight Forward Example: "The role of costume within the film "A Taste of Honey""
  A More Wooly Example: "Did western society ever need cars; are they a necessary and how have they contributed to the formation of the urban environment" (Practically two topics instead of actually one)
• Mindmaps help as always, to identify areas you should begin to research, it will obviously continue to expand as you go along with your research
• Primary Research - Gathering your own original data (Interviews, etc.)
• Secondary Research (Scholarship) - Reading up on the subject, making use of the research and findings of others for corroboration, disagreement, triangulation, theoretical underpinning, etc. (Books, magazine, the contextualising of your findings)
• Exciting stuff if you can actually contradict you secondary research
• Research methods:
  Visual practice, experiment, interest and enquiry (Research and critical diaries)
  Questionnaires/Survey (Qualitative/Quantitative), try to give a time limit (So people won't take their time when filling it out) and give a draft
  Interviews
  Case Study
  Site Visits
• Literature Search 1:
  Books and Journals (Try to go for text heavy stuff, instead of 'picture' books', though the latter would be of use for the practical response)
  Websites/Blogs/Online forums
  Videos/DVDs
  CDs/Tape Cassettes/Vinyl Recordings
  TV/Radio
  Newspapers/Maps?Reports
  Printed Ephemera (Flyers, Posters, things that aren't actually meant to last)
• Literature Search 2
  Knowing where to look most effectively
  Effective use of catalogues:
  - Narrowing and broadening search terms
  - Using related terms
  - Browsing using Dewey Decimal Classification
  Using of contents page and index
  Reading the introduction or abstract
  Using a book's own bibliography to inform further reading
• Book Search
  SCONUL (Again)
  The British Library in Boston Spa
• Journal Search 1
  InfoTrac (Available outside of college)
  - A store of online magazine articles
  - If at college, click the "proceed" button
  - If at home
• Journal Search 2
  - JSTOR
• Journal Search 3
  - EBSCOhost
• Internet Search 1
  - Athens
  - A store of password protected sites
  - Each student who wishes to access this site will need to ask the Librarian for a login and password
  http://www.athens.ac.uk
• Internet Search 2
  - WGSN (For fashion and textiles)
  - A database of fashion information and trends
  - www.wgsn.com
• Internet Search 3
  - Google Scholar
  - Some fill text PDF articles available:
  - scholar.google.co.uk
• Two Tips:
  - Keep the topic and title focused and manageable
  - Create a sense of momentum (Note taking, writing a draft section when you can, keeping your bibliography up to date)

Subcultures - Character Design Progress 2

It's been a rough weekend (With fatigue catching up to me once again), but I was able to get the bulk of my character designs done. This honestly felt like the first time in forever (Hahaha!) where I actually tried getting some proper character design sheets done, and so while the first character sheet started out a little awkwardly (She still does look like a dress up doll in the final one, but I tried to make it less so with some later changes...), I was able to get more comfortable when it came to designing for the next two.

Goth

Hippie

Punk

I was told that the Goth looked a little too flat, and while I tried explaining that the flat colouring was part of the art style, I decided that it would be wiser to add in a bit more rendering. I also disliked the fact that the Goth's wardrobe looked so plain as compared to the Hippie and Punk, and so I needed to make a lot of changes before I was satisfied with the Goth character sheet. While I didn't make any changes to her hairstyle, I did at least try to give her more varied poses in the final product (And if you look closely, the colour of her make up is different in some outfits).

After some 'encouragement' from one of my tutors, I decided to not be so lazy and include those extra little details on my character's clothing (Such as the pattern on her poncho and her necklace) when animating the turnaround animation.

Sketch

Changed Position of Legs

Adding Colours

Adding Details

Necklace

TRYING to Fix Feet

Subcultures - Character Backstories

Zara the Punk (Zara Euringer)

Age: 19 Years Old 

Nationality: American British

Hot tempered and straightforward, Zara is an incredibly emotional person that gets easily angry or depressed much to the dismay of her friends, and only the most patient of people can actually see past these rather intimidating points and know. Due to a really bad breakup she had in the past, Zara does have some trust issues (Even getting anxiety attacks if she finds herself any situation similar to what happened between her and her ex), but opens up once you are successful in gaining her trust.

Having such a bad temper however also contributes to her ability to viciously fight and argue against those that dare to mess around with her or her friends. While Rita and Millie tend to cower away from such confrontations, Zara is all too ready to step up and take any of these fools straight to school. 

Aside from all of that supposed aggressiveness, Zara proves to actually be really pleasant company when she is in a good mood, cracking numerous jokes and having entertaining fangirl freak outs with her friends. She also has a soft side, and actually enjoys composing heartwarming songs (... with her electric guitar) and dreams of illustrating children books. Just do not ever mention that 'Punk is Dead', otherwise she will agree and will go on a very tiring and depressing tirade about it for perhaps the next few days... Unless you yourself are as passionate about the Punk subculture as she is.

Rainy Daylee the Hippie (Rita Pae)

Age: 22 Years Old

Nationality: Chinese Korean

Rita has had a considerably rough childhood, with her parents divorcing when she was still studying in Primary school and her mother soon enough passing away in her early teens, she was considered a delinquent during her Primary and Secondary school years, skipping classes, as well as having difficulties getting along with her classmates and teachers, with only her mother truly understanding her predicament.

Despite all that however, sticking by some of the hippie's major ideologies has allowed Rita to grow and change into a considerably optimistic individual. It does help that she is now enrolled in an art college and is studying something she is actually passionate about. Humorously, Rita does get scorned for enjoying her meat (Especially when everyone expects hippies to be vegans). And despite her poor health, Rita rejoices in what she has, believing that she has grown to be a better person since then. Just to humour others, she does enjoy punctuating her sentences with various hippie slang, and soon enough, it becomes a habit for her.

While Rita does like to look good and cares about her appearance, she is not very experienced when it comes to putting on make up and doing up her hair, and normally needs someone else to help her out in that area. Deep down, Rita has an incredibly low self-esteem, especially after those incidents of being called a pig throughout primary and secondary school.

Millie the Goth (Millie Maslin)

Age: 20 Years Old
Nationality: African British

Raised by a very well off family, Millie is actually the most level headed and passive of the three. Elegant and well mannered, it is no surprise that many admire and/or even adore her. While dressed in the fanciest threads, the young woman is actually very modest, if not shy most of the time when around others. Her hobbies include basket weaving, flower arranging, painting, reading and baking, she is also a bit of a technophobe and neat freak.

It is no surprise that Millie however still gets scorned now and then by some due to her association with the Goth subculture, but with friends like Zara, any serious bullying are kept at bay. Seeing that these people are apparently only familiar with the stereotypical portrayals of Goths presented by the mass media, Millie tends to get insulted for not dressing up as the same way the 'Goths do on TV'. At times, the girl finds herself conflicted over whether she should dress more subtly to avoid such confrontations or to continue being who she is and carrying on with her life.

Despite all that, Millie still gets the most admirers (With Zara coming in a close second), and as she continues to politely decline them, a part of her also feels encouraged about staying the way she is. She hopes however that others will learn to be less prejudice and will someday learn to accept her like everyone else does.

Text Analysis

The Subcultures Reader Edited by Ken Gelder

Girls and Subcultures (1977) by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber

Chapter 9 titled “Girls and Subculture (1977)” in Ken Gelder's "The Subcultures Reader" questions the lack of proper focus on the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in not just ‘subcultural studies, but also in pop histories, personal accounts and journalistic surveys of the field’. Authors McRobbie and Garber question why this is so by examining various examples of subcultural research from different researchers.

The first issue that is immediately addressed in this chapter is the stereotypical image of women in most studies, such as Fyvel’s research into the Teddy Boys where the girls are only vaguely mentioned as background companions to the boys themselves. It is already interesting to note that when girls are acknowledged in the literature, it tends to be in terms of their sexual attractiveness, which is particularly notable in the biker youth culture where the females were focused on mainly for their looks and treated primarily as sexual objects by the Hell’s Angels groups, or took on the role (Which was still rare) as the ‘Mama’.

This issue however is also difficult to interpret, especially when examining Paul Willis’ study into the motor-bike youth culture, the lack of content around the girls is apparently due to their unwillingness to respond to Willis’ questions as compared to the boys. It is not to say however that this issue occurs with every subculture group that gets interviewed, and while there have been no confirmation as to why they behave this way, there are hints that they behave in such a docile manner due to their position within a rather male dominant youth culture, where they do not feel as powerful or as important as their male counterparts.

Another important aspect that was included in this discussion are the different classes within these groups, it is a critical variable in defining the different subcultural options available to middle-class and working-class boys. The classes for both genders would most definitely impact the two quite differently from one another, especially during the 50s to 70s. The structuring of needs and options must also work at some level for girls. Some subcultural patterns are therefore true for both boys and girls, while others are much more gender-divergent.

For such subcultures as the Teddy Boys in the 1950s, while girls did participate in its culture of escape from the claustrophobia of family much like the better known male counterparts, their wages were not as high as those of boys. Teddy Girls do not tend to hang around the streets as much as the boys do, so to avoid assumption from others they were ‘promiscuous’, the Teddy Girls hence had to be much more cautious and subtle when it came to their actions as compared to the Teddy Boys.

While females are most definitely present in subcultures, there is a much stronger focus on the male-focused subcultures (With the popular press and media concentrating on the major incidents involving them) as compared to the girls’ subcultures of teeny bob stars and pop-music. it was the violent aspects that caught the attention of the media, which the girls lacked as compared to the boys.

In conclusion to this case study, the female participation in youth cultures can be better understood by moving away from the ‘classic’ subcultural terrain marked out as an oppositional and creative by numerous sociologists. Girls negotiate a different leisure space as compared to the boys. While each subculture has progressed differently when it came to its females, it is notable that the later ones soon began taking on a much higher profile (Especially when comparing the empowering Hippies to the normally sexualised Bikers).

Overall, there were a lot of interesting and insightful points that were addressed in this case study. The authors having considered each case from several different angles, while managing to refrain from being too bias when discussing such a topic.

Subcultures - Character Design Progress 1

There has been a lot of progress so far with my character designs, so I figured that it's only right to begin writing a little about the going ons in the past few days. While I was initially going to go for a more realistic art style (With Neko Showgun's works in "Lollipop Chainsaw" being my main inspiration), during my visual research, I realised that a more cartoony style would actually be more suitable for this project.

After doing some really quick sketches of both styles, I then shared them with some of my peers to see which style appealed to them more, in the end a majority of them also believed that the latter would work better and will allow me to play around with my designs a whole lot more. And so the first thing I did was to make a rough sketch of each character, while intending to make sure that each of them had particularly distinct silhouettes from one another (At least when it comes to their faces).

Left to Right: Goth, Hippie, Punk.

I then started off with the Goth and her colour scheme, whom I had based
heavily on a friend of mine.

From the very beginning, I was very intent of breaking away from archetypes when it came
to cliques and races by giving her more bright make up and hair (Based also on various
references that I gathered) while still showing that this character was still part of the
Goth subculture without having to conform to a more stereotypical look recognised
by the mass media.

I did the same with the other two, while also considering the fact that one
of them should at least have an outfit simple enough for me to animate later on.

I then sort of went backwards and erased and sketched out what their
body shapes would look like for the other outfits later on.

I then finally started working on their clothing.

A friend however said that she couldn't really see this character as a Goth, due to her
fiery orange hair, and so I decided to momentarily change it to something more typical...
While the hair now made it seem more obvious that she was a Goth (And actually matched
her makeup better), I still felt unsatisfied with it.

I would however return to this issue eventually...

The Hippie proved to be a lot more enjoyable to design, especially as I could play
around a lot more with colours as compared to the Goth.

Having given her slightly different hairstyles with each outfit, I then realised that
I would also have to do the same with the Goth.

This was where I realised that my layers were in a complete mess
(By having accidentally deleted the very last outfit), and so after painting
in the 5th outfit, I then started organising and labelling all my layers.

Same process with the Punk, I gave her a slightly more mohawk-ish
hair style for the last one just in case (While making sure that it could
be styled with her normal hair).

Returning to the Goth issue, I then went to another friend for some helpful critique.
Being a really experienced concept artist with lots of experience, she gave me some advice
on how I could make the orange hair work (While also assuring me that she has
known Goth friends with hair colour as bright as this).

Obviously I will have to polish all of these up further, once I finish the last few outfits that is, I am also intending to give the Goth a few different hairstyles (Like the Hippie and Punk), while also adding more accessories to her clothing to break away from all of that black.

Also, aside from one turnaround animation, I do believe that I should also add in some sketches of how each character would look from the side and back, as well as give them an expression sheet each (At least some basic ones so to show that they actually have some personality as compared to what is shown here), thankfully it is not necessary to fully colour those as well. Hopefully I can get these done over the weekend.

Subcultures - Character Design Reference

I just wanted to get a rough idea on how I should go about the process of character designing, instead of simply diving right into it, and so I decided to look into various examples that have been used for more professional means. It was no surprise that I soon enough gathered an ample supply of references and tutorials, just by going through several animation-focused blogs alone.

See how important moodboards are?

There were some incredibly detailed ones (Even for characters that would just wear one type of clothing throughout the entire show's run), so I tried picking out the simpler ones that I will be able to apply to my own character designs (Again, I should really try to avoid going overboard with this visual response). 

For animated works, it is no surprise that these model sheets would focus a lot more on how far a character can express him or herself with both their bodies and faces, sure they are given one page where they are roughly shown how their outfit, but there seems to be a lot more focus on their facial expressions and body language than anything else.

I will be doing at least one turnaround animation, so it's no biggie.

Perspective and Expressions

They probably extracted these from a much larger collection of model sheets.
Note how each character is shown how they look from the front, side and back
like the Sailor Neptune character sheet, as well as the an assortment of expressions
to distinguish each character more from one another.

As I am planning to design some extra clothing for each character, I felt that it was necessary to also look into how fashion sketches are normally displayed by fashion designers. I am sure there is still so much more to look into when it comes to how they professionally display their concepts, but I believe these rough concepts are already good enough for displaying each of my characters' own unique wardrobe.

I will most probably also be reusing the same character model for every outfit, instead of attempting to redraw each character in a variety of poses (And this is excluding the various perspective shots of them in their main outfits).

Not surprisingly, while character model sheets focuses more on the characters themselves. 

These fashion concepts of course tend to focus on the clothing themselves, though
they do get extra points if they actually bother giving these faceless models
some extra personality, hehe.

Speaking of that... while these are only colour block exercises, there is already so much personality seen in these faceless models (Which is not surprising really since these were done by the talented cartoonist Tiffany Ford). If I were to go for a simpler art style, I might actually have more time to draw my characters in more poses and so on. It will definitely give the overall visual response a more lighthearted tone to it, which would make it so much more entertaining and interesting.

Subcultures - Fashion Research

My Pinterest Boards

Aside from listing down what fashion elements are normally associated with these subcultures (As I had done in my previous research posts), I have also begun gathering together bulks of visual references for when I start designing each character's wardrobe. 

I started picking up the habit of putting together Pinterest boards when it comes to my visual research for recent projects, and this is all thanks to my Applied Animation 2 teammates. While I still prefer properly putting together moodboards on my own (As it allows me to relook through these images that I have collected and put them all properly together for stronger focus), this does make the process a lot faster.

While I cannot say that this will make the designing process easier (Or maybe it will, we will just have to see), I do believe that it will make it much more enjoyable. There is just such a wide variety of clothing and accessories to choose from, that I will surely have a fun time mixing and matching them together.

The boards can be viewed here:

Hippie Board
Punk Board
Goth Board

There are also other sites (Such as online shops) that I can refer to when it comes to what these subcultures would wear, that have already been listed in past posts.