update

I started work on my first song a couple of weeks ago and was hoping to have it finished by now but the adobe after effects trial i was using ran out :O so the 2 weeks we had off college i couldn't do any work towards my final pieces. I had been thinking about buying the full adobe cs5 master collection for a while but didn't have any money until easter but luckily my grandad decided to save the day and lend me the money. so i ordered the programs last week and they arrived saturday morning but because it was the student edition i had to send off some information to prove i was a student so i couldn't install the programs this weekend but the verification number came today so when i get home i am going to install them and i will be able to get stuck in to both projects.

blink-182 - First Date

song choices

I have looked through the blink 182 albums i own and have listened through them a few times this week. I have narrowed down the list of potential songs but i've still not completely decided ... i have already chosen 'first date' as my first song but i am still thinking about which one to use for the second song

update

i've finally decided on a band to choose for my project. after asking everyone i know and posting the question a few times on facebook i had a lot of responses so the other day i sat down and looked through the list of possible bands. I ended up choosing blink 182 because a lot of people suggested them, they have a wide range of songs and sounds and i have a lot of their albums so i have a lot of choice about which songs to use. I am also going to see them live later this year so its a good excuse for me to start listening to them more often.

Kinetic Typography - Fight Club

first example ive found with video used in the background

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Little Sparta is a garden about 20 miles outside of Edinburgh in the rolling, romantic Pentland Hills made by the late artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Or rather, it is not a garden so much as an artwork, a poem, even: it is arguably, in fact, Scotland's greatest work of contemporary art.

Hamilton Finlay, who died in 2006, described this garden as not much a retreat as an attack: it is a rigorous yet romantic acreage that plays out his obsessions - the French Revolution, Virgil's Eclogues, the battleships of the second world war - in poems, inscriptions and sculpture. He plays with and transforms the idea of Arcadia; the idea of the English landscaped garden; the idea of the ideal Virgilean smallholding as poeticised in the Georgics.

Walking round this garden is a delight to the senses. Water gushes into pools, a golden head of Apollo glints through a birch-grove, poems carved on rocks rise up through the grass - it's sermons in stones and books in brooks... It's one of the loveliest and most intellectually rewarding things you could do during a trip to the Edinburgh festival.Transport is provided to Little Sparta from central Edinburgh for the festival period: take advantage of it.

Guillaume Apollinaire - concrete typography

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: [ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; Rome, 26 August 1880–9 November 1918, Paris) was a French poet,playwright, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.

Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.

Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing, was published.

diesel project update

okay so last week i did the experiment in after effects and made a minute long video of the kinetic typography i am going to use. for my final 2 songs though i am going to add a lot more interesting animations for a few of the words to make them tell the story of the song more. over the past week i have regularly been posting statuses on facebook asking people for suggestions of bands for me to choose to focus this project on and then i can choose 2 songs by that band. today i posted this status again and got a lot of responses with a very wide variety of suggestions. using all these suggestions and looking through my own itunes library i am hoping to have made a final decision on a band and 2 of their songs by tomorrow. this will mean that i have a month to create both pieces of work in time to enter the competition.