After the attending ten weeks of research and communication skills lecture and writing responds to each lesson, I found that my research skill and reference skill have approved a lot. I became able to think more deeply and objective while comparing and narrating.

Starting from the first task, we were shown a show film—Terminal Bar, and we need to analyse it after watching. This was the first time for me to watch this kind of documentary film, unlike some perfectly made documentary video, this one is made in a more simple way. However, I think this style fits with the image of Terminal Bar and I found out sometimes imperfect can make something perfect.

In Task 2, we were told to compare two select work by ourself. Since I always like to search for interesting graphic art on the internet like Instagram and Pinterest, so I choosed two art work from this two social media and try to compare them. Even I love to look at those beautiful art work, I do not really think deep when I look at them, through this analyse process, I paid more attention on the values and the way how the artist produce the work and I think the way how I look at an art work is changing.

In Task 3 and 4, we were asked two theoretical question, the first one is asking about the influence of internet on art and the second one is about the possibility of being truly authentic. This two issue has always been an unsolved problem in the art world, everyone has their own points of view and while I am doing the research, I can see there is always different voice from different groups of people so I think having an ability of respect others’ idea.

In Task 5 to 7, we watched a Netflix documentary video on each lesson and I really love those videos and got so many inspiration from each of them. The artist in each series having a strong personality and showing their confidence through their work and I think this is what made them became successful and special. Moreover, the way that Netflix made the videos also impressed me a lot, they group the information with a lot of visual effect and made the videos very compact.

Overall, I have tried and learnt a lot of new things from this first semester RCS lecture. I can really push myself to look and analyse things more deeply and also learnt different issue and style in the art world, so I found I really did improved in my research and communication skills.

The works that I choose to compare is an illustration and a poster, they were choosed because I am most interested in illustration and graphic design. Since I always look for inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram, there is a lot of artist that I admire with, these are two example out of them.

The illustration was created by a Japanese illustrator (@ryu1_origin), she had a fantasy style in her work. Most of her work are young girl portrait and she always mixed with several colors but harmonious at the same time. The reason that I choose this work is because I like how the bright and dark color react to each other in it. Moreover, I like how she draw eyes in an unusual way, the eyes were drawn with yellow, green, pink and blue and make it really eye-catching.

The poster that I choose to compare with is made for a huge electronic music festival. Having a same feature with the illustration, a lot of attractive colors were used in it. However, they were not blended which shown a plentiful and alive style. To add more, the theme between these two are very similar too, they both having a fantasy and fictional style.

Overall, they are both inspired work for me and make me think more about how colors influence audience’s thought. Also, thinking out of the grid while matching the theme can make the work become more unique and attractive, be able to communicate more completely with the viewers.

(Instagram: ryu1_origin, 2017)

(Connie Van, Nocturnal Wonderland)

This twenty minutes short film was mostly constructed with black and white portrait, which taken by Stefan Nadelman, the boss manager and bartender in the bar for ten years. Because of this amateur, the original history of one part of New York street in that decade has been well conserve.

Throughout the whole video, the portraits flow with the rhythmical background music, which can attract audiences to keep their attention on it. In the same time, the producer also added the interview of Stefan between the stories and used his voice to narrate to photos, his could give it a more realistic sense from the video.

For me, there is a part of Stefan interview which shocked me a lot—- the people will just step on the bodies that lied on the street. He said” you gonna see these bullies people disappear from the street, the street eats them alive.” This can clearly show how the place with people of all kinds and people just live for themselves. I think personification is an influential way to show a message because it is a much easy way the explain the situation compare with the complicated sentences. It also kind of reflect my inspiration of my work because I always believe that simple things can have big influence.

To sum up, I didn’t watch this kind of film a lot but it change my expectation of it at some point since the music and the story match very well, which gave me the motivation to find out more about the history.