Friday 26th August - Tuesday 27th September

On Friday the 26th of August we got our brief for the next project. Basically, it was to make a CD case for a CD with the sounds on it that we made in our last project. To start I doodled ideas, things that related to the sounds I had to use and the idea behind them. I also drew several doodles of how to open the packaging to get to the CD inside.

From these doodle I drew seven concepts. The idea I chose to develop was linked to movement. It was a pocket, the front which was folded like a paper fan and had the graphics of a stick figure doing a cartwheel. on different flaps. As I developed this idea it went from a pocket, to a box to a sliding case. The graphics also changed, incorporating the sounds themselves into the design. As the sounds where quick, squeaky, little beeps, they reminded me of old school games. The graphics on the packaging developed from a stick man doing a cartwheel into pacman, then into pacman chasing after the little dots.
My final design had two pieces of a half circle. One was smaller and could sit in the other piece. The CD would be inside the smaller piece and to close it the smaller piece would slide out and both pieces would form a whole circle. At this stage it was a flat disk.
At first I was going to use a 3D printer to create me package. I designed the pieces on SolidWorks and sent them off to Olaf Diegal to get a price, and ask some other questions had thought of involving the 3D printer. But if anyone had told me he was not in the country for three weeks I'd forgotten. When he did get back to me he said to contact Andrew Whithell. So I did, basically the same email but changes addressing it to Andrew and not Olaf. The next email I got from him was asking if i was an AUT student. I was and I told him but this delay got me thinking. Was there another way I could make this? 3D printing seemed like taking the easy way, something I had been accused of doing before. So I decided to hand make my cases. I knew that pac-man had come out in the 1980's and that was when the first personal computers came out, and packaging went from being cardboard to plastic. I wanted it to have the feel of that time and the people who played pac-man. I decided to use paper mache for my package because it is reminiscent of something you do as children.
To do this I realisized I would need a mold of something to shape it around. As a had no flat circle dick thing I decided to use my giant M&M as a mold. I was bigger than my original design and was a spherical shape  A quick look on the internet showed lots of recipes and tips. The recipe I did decide to use involved using one cup cold water, quarter cup flour and five cups boiling water, then stirring the boiling mixture till it cleared.
This was an utter failure.
Nothing really happened. It never when clear or thickened. It was like white water. So instead I brought wallpaper paste. This just said to mix with four liters of water and leave for half an hour. Once it was made I used five tinfoil molds of a giant M&M I own to make five pieces. Originally these where going to be the outer pieces and when they dried I would make the other five pieces inside but once I had made them I decided that using them as the lower pieces would be easier. Once again I made five tin foil molds, this time one of each piece and placed paper mache around it.

I made a bobo here, as the outer pieces were smaller than the inner pieces when I tried to pin them together the smaller pieces couldn't spin. To fix this I added more paper mache on around the edge, but without a mold so they tended to flare out a bit more. While doing this I put white tissue paper on the outside. When they had dried I pinned them together at the pivot point and then painted them white.

While the paint was drying I thought about how I was going to keep the CD from moving around inside the case. I decided to use some left over polystyrene we had lying around. I cut out the corners and put a slit in them for the CD to go into. I then got worried that the polystyrene would scratch the Disks so I cut out some CD pockets from a CD holder and glued them in. When both the paint and glue where dry I glues the polystyrene into the paper mache case. I then used white tape to make the edges look smart and used a hand made stencil to draw pac-man and his dots on in felt-tip pen.