Bifröstgirl

Musings of an image-maker.

[bogleech]

When I was a little my parents rented me some weird cartoon on VHS about some anthropomorphic hillbillyish bugs journeying down a river and I’ve never figured out what it was. The designs looked like Maya the Bee or the Gallavants but they weren’t that, and the bugs were obsessed with finding some paradise where there were “beautiful ladybugs.”

For no reason I can recall, the cartoon gave kid-me a surreal nightmare that night where the characters were on the roof of our home but the entire world was covered in purple sludge I knew was also “meat.”

I really want to find this cartoon and figure out if there’s any possible reason it triggered a dream like that. It upset me so much (I was like four years old) that they never rented it for me again.

This would have happened in the 80′s and the quality of animation looked older than that.

[bifrostgirl]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bug_Goes_to_Town

[bifrostgirl]

Three promo posters for Volume Nine of the Bedroom Cassette Masters series. The layers are from vintage magazines and schematic diagrams of synthesizers and tape machines.

The album download is here: https://bedroomcassettemasters.bandcamp.com/album/bedroom-cassette-masters-1980-89-volume-nine

[bifrostgirl]

Finally, a manifesto;  a guide to keep us on the right track...

https://www.facebook.com/whinnymoor/

[bifrostgirl]

"Purely hauntological...”

For the last six months or so I have been collaborating with SJH on a project that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It began simply enough as a small web label for hauntologically-inspired music; that is, music that appears to be haunted by sounds from another era - invariably the seventies. SJH wanted to have a handful of “artists” and he and his musical friends would create the music and I would produce their art and band logos - just like I did for the Bedroom Cassette Masters series.

But SJH got a little carried away with ideas and he inspired me so much that I began to think of more things we could do too so we now have a situation whereby we have sort or invented an alternative version of the 70′s in visual and musical form. The rule was that we would create everything ourselves, so for example when SJH wanted to include references to a (real) vintage magazine called The Unexplained, I created a template for one called The Inexplicable. This meant we could put our own references to the ghosts and mythologies we were inventing onto the cover of a contemporary magazine.

But SJH began to get wilder ideas. He wanted an explanation as to why now - in 2016 - someone was using the name he had chosen for the entire project - which a quick google proved is pretty obscure - so he wrote synopses for a series of supernatural paperbacks published in the 1970s which included the word, complete with author biography and asked me to do the covers and a few of the inside pages. We then found we needed a “book publisher” - something like the Armada Books of our youth, so I did that too.

Then SJH had the idea that for one of the artists in particular, the digital music download would include a PDF with lots of this artwork and each album project would have variations - so that the first musical album (all about poltergeists) would include a front cover of The Inexplicable, a Whinny Moor book, various paperbacks on the subject, a ‘Fuzzy Felt’ box lid, a BBC Time & Tunes for schools book cover, some kind of girl’s comic (like Misty) etc.. And then the second album would have the same elements for the next topic (it’s going to be witches).

So a lot of my time on this project has been tracking down old typefaces - (particularly swash versions!) - and poring over thousands of old book covers and comics and reproducing their graphic style.

For another of the 'artists’ in the project SJH had imagined a supernatural children’s television drama, the music being the programme’s soundtrack. For this I had to re-create some pages from TVTimes (thank so much soundsfamiliar) - so many typefaces in single page! I then had to insert our programme into a 1972 television schedule in a believable way: what time of day do you put on a children’s scary drama serial in a season when the Munich Olympics were on going and how do we explain that no-one seems to remember the series? Well we came up with a nice solution to that as you will see when you read it.

It’s been amazing! And while we still have no release date for this giant thing I know it’s the most complete work I’ve produced yet. Thanks for the endless cajoling SJH!

[bifrostgirl]

Continuing to work on the long-gestating ‘Lunikittz’ project, I have just made some satellites out of tea lights, tin foil, pins and a paper clip. The workflow for getting them into After Effects is as follows:

1) Placing them on a small caster wheel which I had blu-tacked to a table, I placed my DSLR on a tripod (small aperture, long exposure for deeper depth of field) and put some green material behind.  I took around 80 photographs stop-motion fashion, turning the model a little every time until I had completed 360°.  These raw files were then imported into After Effects as a ‘Camera Raw Sequence’, and using the Keylight plug in I keyed out the green background.  Exporting as ‘Lossless + Alpha’ I then re-imported that file to give me a spinning loop and used that new composite to give me the animation I would then add in to the scenes.

[bifrostgirl]

Catkins = spring

[bifrostgirl]

Visual mash-ups & copyright thoughts...

For over two years now I have been working with my dear friend Simon on his musical compilation series known as Bedroom Cassette Masters. Si invites submissions from people who were recording their own musical demos in their bedrooms on cassette players and the like during the eighties and I design a PDF guide to the artists and music as part of the download.  Diving on-line into eighties magazines, photographs and other commercial art I then re-work elements of them to act as promotional material.  Generally I have often used vintage magazine advertisements from the sixties and early seventies, rather than try to create a pure eighties feel.  This is partly to try not to be too obvious and partly because I am not particularly gifted at airbrush art - although I did try copying Syd Brak in my youth!

The latest volume of BCM is dedicated to the nineties and for this Si demanded that I stop using the really old stuff and create a "true 90's look" as he put it.  Well, I am not sure that I know what the nineties look like! Earlier periods seem easy to identify but nineties graphic design seems somehow featureless with very little personality.  It's true that trends such as distressing typefaces came along as well as posters that were only possible using Quark and other early vector imaging software, but I found it hard to pin-point something in particular and say "that says nineties".

In the end I stole a layout from a music magazine dating from 1994 and recreated the graphic elements on it so we could shuffle them around to make more pages.  There was not enough text to go to the trouble of boxing everything up but I think we arrived at something a little nineties.

In doing this sort of retro work I am always wondering about the potential copyright issues.  In music it seems quite easy - if you have used a sample of someone else's work in your own track you should pay for it.  But taking and re-working existing art seems altogether different, especially when the end result is parody which is legally protected from the usual blanket copyright laws.

On the left is a great Sony Walkman advertisement Si found and on the right my re-working of it.  By re-working I do not mean simply vectoring it and texturizing, I mean redrawing all the parts I wanted and even taking a photograph of some metal fencing to then process in. So essentially there is nothing of the original advertisement left - everything has been re-created from scratch. And yet of course it owes everything to that original Sony poster.

Where does "inspired by" become "stolen from"?

[bifrostgirl]

The Lunikittz are coming!

Promotional poster design for the forthcoming collaboration.

For this I made the poster itself in After Effects, using the same Photoshop puppets & backgrounds that are in the actual animation.  This seemed a lot easier than trying to create the same look as After Effects with Photoshop filters, though I did have to create much larger versions of the puppets to accommodate the pixel size allowing for them to be printed at a later date.

[thingsmagazine]

Dreams of Space

[betype]

Helvetica Specimen by Wanda Heras.

[retrogasm-deactivated20161109]

I love my washer and dryer too… I just don’t sit and talk to them on the phone much…

[betype]

TypoShirt One By: Magma Brand Design

Featuring more than 1,700 unique designs from all over the world, TypoShirt One is the first book to focus exclusively on T-shirt typography. 

See more details: http://amzn.to/112JEu6

[bifrostgirl]

Formica menagerie

When I was just a little girl, my parents were having a new kitchen fitted and they ended up with these off-cuts of formica which I immediately began playing with.  I found I could make lots of animals with them (somewhat abstract animals it's true) and they ended up in one of my art drawers.  Years later at Bournemouth Art College I even turned them into a stop-motion animation and later still I one of the fish shapes in a film-poem.

For some time now I've wanted to photograph as many of the animals I remember making and this I have now done - with the intention of turning them into prints or cards.

Over the years the formica has become somewhat chipped here and there but they remain those original bits of wood and so for me at least, they embody something special.

This arrangement remains my favourite though.  It seems to me like a father journeying with his child on a sea-borne raft.

[bifrostgirl]

ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?

Robots.

[bifrostgirl]

Still from forthcoming collaboration with Katr Zaitseva.

[bifrostgirl]

Information Black Extended

  Halfway through this project Katr & I decided on a typeface that will be used for all titles.  I found it on a magazine called "Hi-Fi News" from 1982 and my Rookledge soon identified it as a typeface called "Information Black Extended".

Incredibly - as of 2013 - this font does not appear anywhere on the net (here's a google search for it) except once where it is name-dropped as an alternative to Folio, and once where it is listed in the Rookledge book.

So there was no alternative really.  I scanned in the Rookledge page and built the font using Fontographer & Illustrator.  I kept the quirks that came from auto-tracing what is a very small reproduction in the Rookledge book and had to create some extra characters which were not included (© etc...) but I think the finished face looks great and as always it's a real kick knowing it does not exist anywhere else!

As to why 'Information Black Extended' has disappeared from the enormous font foundry lists, well my guess is that anything called 'Information' is bound to get lost on the Web and so perhaps it was natural selection which has killed it off?

At least future searchers will now come across this very post as a sort of virtual tombstone!

[bifrostgirl]

Promo work for http://bedroomcassettemasters.bandcamp.com