LA DISTRIBUTION

eep! Thursday sell day!
Well, in actual fact there was little for me to sort out other than putting up all the advertising for the sale of our products and placing my products out nicely and neatly:

On the left you can see a demonstration version of the product so people could see inside the booklet so they could get a feel for it.
The booklets were priced at £1 without a badge and £1.50 with.
In all, 8 were sold, with the badge-ful ones being sold out, which I think is a decent amount!
Even though I made about a tenner, considering I only spent 10p on the Gaga badge printing and nothing else, a tenner is a healthy profit for what I was selling! And overall, we sold about £90 worth of stuff as a graphics group. Go us!! Supertastic!

Now with the remaining 8 or so (with a couple left over for giving to some of my friends who are Lady Gaga fans) I went to the Friday gig with the intention of selling them. This intention quickly became giving them out for free as I felt a little bad doing a hard sell in the hour-long queue of vexed fans waiting to get into the arena.
Then as I got completely engrossed with the show itself, I couldn't give Gaga a copy of the booklet personally despite being very close to the stage or give out copies personally to fans, so I threw them into the air on the last chorus of the finale number (skip to 1:15 on this video and watch the booklets fly. That's where I'm standing.) as I promised myself that I had to get rid of the the rest of the booklets at the gig.
After the gig and when people had left the exits, I could see that there were none of my booklets on the floor, so obviously people had taken them and must've liked them.
In fact I remember a 14-ish year old girl picking up quite a few and showing them to someone who looked like her dad.
I wanted to say that I was the one who made them, but I knew I had to keep it secret in order to create a mystery about them.

But a secret it is no more! I made them!

A Fanatical Product

Much as I wished this project would go die since I got so overtly stressed out over it, there would be one more week of fanatic-related work.
But this time I was a little more relaxed I think.
Basically we had to create a product from our obsession. I already knew I wanted to do something with the overlapping drawings of Gaga and thought to do a full-sized long length replica of the jumping drawings to sell as a poster/booklet, but found that there wasn't a sufficiently long enough piece of paper to reprint the images, and sewing or sticking pages together looked kind of clumsy and tacky.
So I decided instead to scale down the images by scanning them onto the computer, combining them all together into a continuous image, and then having them printed onto A4 paper.
After trimming down and choosing the best paper weight for the job, this is the result:

The phrase 'GAGA'S GOT IT' has been used because that's how I felt when I watched the film from where the still shots come from. Like, she ruled the world or that she knows what she's doing.

20or so editions were printed, and each pencil-signed and numbered with my main blog (conglats.blogspot.com) written in the back, so that when I'm famous, people will be so happy to have bought one of my super old pieces of work, duh! About 15 of these editions have badges attached to them in order to add value to them (a premium product perse). These badges were created when one of my tutors brought in a professional badge-maker and so I tried it out with the picture (which was chosen as you cannot mistake the picture for anyone but Gaga) that you can see on the badge, and the badges came out looking super-awesome! For some of the badges, I decided to colour in parts of Gaga's face/hair in orange and yellow (those colours as they were the only ones I had at the time!) which added extra impact to the greyscale badges. The number 15 wasn't chosen specifically, but just because at 15 badges, there weren't anymore badge-making materials left and I'd have to buy them from the German manufacturer in Germany and I didn't have time to do that. Initially I wanted to have badges on all the booklets, but this restriction worked to my favour, being able to charge the with-badge booklets a premium price than those without.

The neutral-colour string was used to cleanly keep the booklet folded before purchase, as well as to give the booklet a more attractive and professional-looking feel.

So this booklet was simply printed using an inkjet printer. The combination of premium paper and inkjet gave a more screenprint feel even though it wasn't, which also upped how professional the product looked.

The pictures show the first side of the folded out booklet.

I like the blank space to content ratio, which I think gives the imagery more impact, more vivid even though they are simply line drawings.

This is the last page on the first side.
The booklet was made with a concert programme in mind: lots of pictures, fewer words, simply a souvenir of being there. Fortunately, Lady Gaga's concerts in London coincided with the Fanatical Product week, so I kept in mind that I wanted to make this for the fans and then take the booklets I don't sell at college to the concert on Friday in order to resell/give them out freely and  to give to Lady Gaga personally (I was standing 5 metres from the stage!). For this reason, I typed the London tour dates on the reverse in order to make it into a souvenir booklet of being at the gig.

The reverse page was made by simply reversing the front side of the booklet and sending it through the printer once more.
I felt that I couldn't keep the reverse page blank, so I added the 'slap' images onto the back as they were the second best images in my opinion.
In addition to the images and unique signing of every copy, I added the lyrics for some songs at the top of the booklet:

The lyrics, in my opinion, gives the booklet a more functional role as fans do crave for the lyrics of their idols. I wanted to have 5 copies of each of the song lyrics heard at the concert on diferent copies of the booklet so the booklets could be collectable and/or exchangeable, but copying and typing and manufacturing would take too long to do, so I whittled the song numbers down to some of her most iconic songs:

• Just Dance
• Poker Face
• Bad Romance
• Dance in the Dark
• Glitter and Grease (few of these copies were made as not very many people have heard of this song)

That is the product run down!

(simulpost on conglats.blogspot.com)

Evaluation...

Kinda disappointed (no, in fact very much disappointed!) that nobody went onto my blog at the alloted time of 15:30...
so as a replacement, I shared the video on Youtube and friends saw it and liked it! that can only be a good thing! so thank you very much to whom it may concern.

This project has frustrated the hell out of me (especially when nobody got the message to look at the video when asked to. I love my graphics class too much but...super serial you guys, you can be wet flannels at times), but I think it was worth it.
It's now one of my top viewed videos on Youtube (50 and counting...not a lot but still!!)

So despite not getting what I want, I think I made the most out of what I had.
For the Final major project i will fucking get what I want, no matter what!

Watch this

Dear person,
Please watch this link:
LINK
Put your headphones on and put it on fullscreen.

Disclaimer...this film has flashing imagery...

Woops...

the links to some videos will have been broken now.
this is due to me accidentally leaving somebody's name in videos with text and I don't want them to be irritated by potential nutters scouring videos for Gaga-stalking names.
By all means bother me, but I won't let anyone bother those who don't want to be.
i am currently archiving these videos, but they will not be available online, however a new version of the final outcome is available here:

LINK

sorry..

PS: if you really do want to bother me email me at conglats@gmail.com. Seriously, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The Obsessive's Conclusion

I think this has been the only project I have become seriously obsessed with.

This project has turned into such a monster for me.
Day and night I have thought about it, worrying at how I can perfect it further.
I think this project for me has been more about an obsession of perfection. There are so many faults I can see in this video. And I think I have to have a cut-off point in order to stop myself from going madder than I already am.
Here's the final outcome:
LINK
I think I've become crazy with perfection because I admire Lady Gaga and therefore want to make it right from the off. But getting there has driven me to frustration.
So I'm stopping here before I kill myself.
Enjoy :)

There's deo in my hair and hairspray everywhere..

Seriously I'm suffocating my family and goldfish with hairspray and deodorant.
And I don't think it's doing any good to my health either since I'm asthmatic and have a check-up in a month..
"So why do you have a thick lining of hairspray and lynx in your lungs?"
"I don't know..."
That's what I'll say but what I'll say to you is that I was experimenting today in prepof the preparation for a re-enactment of the video.
I finally came to the conclusion that print publication would not be a suitable method for promoting a video but instead I'm justifying that a video published on Youtube is a publication...it is published!
I was also contemplating on a half video-half live performance piece as if I'm willing to re-enact it live (with thanks to C.J. and Ness for encouraging 'the tortured artist'), that shows my passion and admiration I have for the video and the Lady herself.
But as I started preparing the video I realised that a performance AND a video may be too confusing as to where to look and the video itself was coming together quite nicely.  Luckily I found the audio (maybe not legally...) from the concert so I could play around with it in the video.
The premisis of this video is to show the process of getting the video from the record company. Much to my disappointment I failed when I got back to the product manager. She said that Polydor don't have the video (or something like that) and if they did they wouldn't be allowed to distribute it anyway to anyone. Which I think, fair enough. But she did wish me good luck with my project, and although I felt like 'fuck you, bitch' at the time as I couldn't get what I want which wasn't really her fault, she's on my Christmas card list for a thank you for actually taking some interest in my project.
So I wrote down the dialogue I had with everyone on the phone up to this point and thought that it'd be a very effective alternative to the 'countdown numbers' which flash rapidly on-screen. The effect of this creates a disorientation and confusion and anticipation as to what will happen, similar to how I felt when watching it for the first time.
This dialogue flashes up on the screen and speeds up until the point when in the original video Gaga jumps down with the words 'FUCK IT I'LL MAKE MY OWN'. And this is what I did. If I don't get what I want, I'll find a way of getting it! And I did! It's just it's my version of it.
Wanna see the first draft of it?

LINK

Also I guess I used static images predominantly in this film as that was what I was working with up to this point (as you can see from the previous animations). Putting the research and ideas leading up to a final result literrally as a final result is an interesting one: I guess you never really see the initial ideas in the final piece much, so I'm putting them forward first.
The first images are just of me experimenting with the 5 photos at a time effect on my webcam and they do work well as they are very dramatic, nearing on spasticated, shots. The next set is me imitating the slap. As I have no way of getting a slo-mo camera (I asked a company how much it'd be per day and they said £1000...that's not in my budget!). So I just imitated the current style of 5 photos at a time, although I feel that part needs to be cleaned up a bit.
The dialogue will be a recurring feature of the video - similar to the numbers in the original. But the inversed version of the text adds to the confusion of the video (it's also another experiment I liked).

This is the next bit of the video:
LINK
It's not quite ready yet, but it's to mimic the hairspraying section of the video. This is a proper video recording now as the static shots sometimes don't quite cut it at recording the sweeps of my hair, so I tried with video and it comes out better!
I'm currently editing this bit and will probably have the whole video ready and uploaded by tonight.

Wish me luck!