FMP — Human Being; or, How To Be Remembered

Posted: May 12, 2017 | Author: eliotsouthwell | Filed under: Field, Field - Year 3 | Leave a comment

We’ll all be forgotten when the world ends. 

It’s finally here! The finally final major final project of the final year of my degree. I wish I could say I was ready for it, but I don’t know who would be, to be honest.

As much pressure as I could put on myself, though, I realise that this final piece isn’t necessarily my magnum opus, the needlepoint by which I sew my legacy into the fabric of time (haha). It’s just the next step on my always-continuing journey to my eventual demise (unless my plan for immortality works). All I can hope for is something better and more competent than anything I would have produced at the beginning of the course. At least that means I’ve learned something.

It’s also an opportunity to express a more realised version of my personality and voice as a designer, just in time to venture out into the real world.

With that in mind, I knew that I wanted to do something both incorporating photography somehow, and communicating a positive, wholesome message. As I mentioned in my Curiosity blog post, I’ve increasingly held the belief that we should not only accept out imperfections and individual quirks, but embrace them.

My initial idea of producing a photo essay of portraits exhibiting typically unwanted expressions (i.e. blinking, yawning, eating, etc.) went down rather well with Ian in the first tutorial, so I felt confident to carry on exploring that particular subject.

We were asked to submit our own creative brief for our chosen topic quite early on, so it felt good to be able to get my ideas down so quickly and be able to get to working straight away.

I experimented with a few different techniques for capturing subjects. One was to have a slow shutter-speed and capture the range of motion of a person during that period of time, but I felt as though it contained too little detail to be quite as effective as I would like for this particular project.

I conducted a little more research, and remembered a particular chapter from John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing that I really liked. In it, he mentions that wealthy people who commissioned portraits of themselves often used the opportunity to document all the great riches that they owned, because they knew that these paintings would likely extend past their own lifetime. The best way to realistically depict a subject at the time was through oil paint, which of course required a painter, skilled enough to produce work satisfactory enough for the noblemen and women, and so not many people could afford the time or money required to pay for a lot of works throughout their lifetime. They had to squeeze as much into each piece as possible.

“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.” – John Berger

In lieu of oil paintings, we now have photography — a marvellous, now ubiquitous medium by which we document ourselves and each other every day. However, it seems to me that there are still a few practices left over from those early days which affect our mindset around photography today.

For one, compared to the era of oil paintings or even the early days of photography, we no longer have to hold still for any substantial amount of time for a picture to be made of us, and yet we still feel compelled to pose ourselves whenever we feel a lens pointed at our faces. Posing was required back then, but now we are free to move and express more of our true selves. Humans like to move, so why shouldn’t they be documented moving?

For two, despite it being easier than ever to capture a hundred images within even a minute and discard the unsatisfactory shots if we need to, many of us tense up and stress out in front of a camera as if we must look composed and presentable in each and every shot. The camera seems an almost magical device because of the power it holds, but it is still under our own control, and I personally feel that we let it control us more than we should.

For three, even though we are now able to record such a wide gamut of scenes and situations with our cameras, we still continuously look for that one singular image that represents us entirely, and deem the rest unworthy. It’s silly when you think about it, because none of us are perfect and not only are we all prone to change, but we do change constantly. It would be unreasonable to expect a single photograph to represent an entire person!

I then thought about ways I could address this dichotomy, and decided to incorporate the traditionally regal colours purple and gold somehow. I bought a roll of purple paper to use as a backdrop for my photos, which would also have the added benefit of helping the images stand out in a unified way. At the same time, I concluded that I definitely wanted my images to be in full colour rather than black & white because I needed to display as much humanity as I could, and real life is in colour after all.

I proceeded to produce some test images using myself as the subject, working on framing, colour balance, lighting, and exposure.

At this point, I was still reaching for intentionally ‘bad’ photos to completely counteract the traditional ideal of a ‘good’ portrait, but I was struggling a little with achieving these ‘bad’ moments naturally and with a willing subject. More on that later.

I also looked at the renowned photographer, Steve McCurry, whose phenomenal book, Portraits, delivers a fantastic insight into what photography can do in communicating the emotions of the subject.

And on the subject of emotions, I also read Paul Ekman’s Emotions Revealed, in which he talks about the universal nature of expressing human emotions and his great study on micro-expressions (the process of betraying our true emotions through milliseconds-long muscle reflexes). It was a very interesting read, but a little too in-depth for what I needed to use for my project.

I was also once again inspired a lot by Dallas Clayton and work by similar artists because I wanted to keep my work fairly light-hearted and loving.

As for the presentation of my work, at this time, I was looking into producing a magazine of sorts to display full-page photographs. I thought perhaps the ability to print the photos in a keepsake would reinforce the idea that these ‘bad’ photos are more valuable than the countless digital posed ones all over the internet, and if I could sell these magazines, it might give reason for people to appreciate them more. However, after thinking about this for a long while, I realised that this method was just too convoluted — might hiding the photographs in a book lessen their impact or general perception of importance? And if I’m selling multiple copies, wouldn’t that effectively cheapen their overall value? Also, would it not be a little bit boring?

Thus, I decided to scrap the magazine idea, although it could have made me a bit of money (such a shame!). Instead, I thought about other options, such as a high-quality photo album (more along the right lines of suggesting the sentimental significance of the photos, but high-quality bespoke photo albums are expensive and once again I would be hiding the photos away in a book) and a handmade box of photographs with perhaps a handwritten note to go with it (similar problems here too).

Eventually, after discussing it with a few different people, I settled on the idea of displaying the photographs in nice, ornate, gold frames on a wall. With this, I would be able to suggest the sentimental value of each photograph (like pictures of family members!) while keeping them all completely visible.

The next problem I faced was the fact that I’m studying on a graphic design course and I have yet to do much graphic design in this project… So, again, I spoke to a few different people to get their opinions on how to approach it, and, after a while, landed on the idea of producing examples of what my portraits would look like if they replaced typically serious or professional portraits, such as passport photos or author biographies.

Throughout this process, I’d also been trying to find people to photograph. At first, I expected to need an almost overwhelming number of subjects, but after a while I realised that having ~20-25 different people would be ideal, because it would mean that there would be few enough to not be overstimulating to the audience or to make each individual photograph less significant, but a large enough number so as to achieve a fairly wide variety of subjects and expressions.

Also, along the way, the focus of the photographs had evolved subtly. Moving from simply ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ photographs, I had learned through photographing each person that a lot of us are more animated and comfortable when engaged in a conversation. When we are caught up in a story or telling a joke, we lose sight, at least just a little bit, of how we are coming across to the other person, and we stop worrying so much about our appearance on camera. I found that a lot of the best, most natural photographs happened when people let their guard down during a conversation. The upside of shifting my focus from simply ‘bad’ photographs to natural candids exposing the movement of a person during a conversation was that a lot more people were willing to sit as subjects! (BONUS!)

After finally completing the photographing-process, I realised, and as it was pointed out to me, that the photographs themselves might not be quite enough to convey my message to the audience. This was a rather sad realisation to me, because I had originally hoped that the photographs could stand alone and communicate what I needed to say on their own, but at least I had realised it at some point, rather than having a frustrated and confused audience on the opening night of the exhibition!

I decided that, since I was already planning to display a few examples of printed media that would typically contain text, I could write a mission statement/essay/manifesto and spread it out across each object, which would also ensure that the audience would spend the time to appreciate each individual piece.

The next thing was to actually write the damned thing. Firstly, I intended to write a formal statement, addressing my key points in a very straightforward, serious manner, but eventually I realised that I didn’t actually have to do that! I could be colloquial and loose and maybe even funny if I played my cards right! Right then, I became a lot more excited about it, and gradually formed some kind of piece involving a form of positive nihilism, which is an approach that I enjoy taking in many situations. Besides, being able to have fun writing it, I felt the piece actually fit a lot better alongside the personality of the rest of my project, if not enhanced it.

In the structure of the writing, I tried to use quite a lot of repetition in order to enforce the idea that the text from each printed object is related to the rest, and they are meant to be read together.

Here’s the text in full: 

When the world ends, everything will be forgotten.

In the meantime, however, it’s quite nice to be able to look back through old photographs and relive fond memories.

When the world ends, there will be no more photographs; no more cherished memories to peruse fondly.

Before there were photographs, there were paintings.

Painters used to paint portraits of people who had a lot of money. It used to take ages. They used to charge more for purple. And gold.

Today, purple isn’t so expensive. All the colours are cheaper now. Now we can each have as many pictures of ourselves as we want, and sometimes more than that. But if it’s all so easy, then why are we so bad at it?

There certainly won’t be any photographs left when the world ends. No, they’ll be long-gone. Burnt to ash by the Sun’s fiery curse. 

We’ll all be forgotten when the world ends. 

The world probably won’t end for a long time, of course, but who knows? We’d best enjoy what we have while we have it. Why bother wasting precious time posing for a camera? Since when is a posed-you the real-you, anyway? You’ll probably have more fun in the long run if you’re just you.

When that big yellow ball melts all our ice, we’ll all be too sweaty to have fun anymore.

Why do we worry so much about how a camera looks at us, and why do we try so hard to exhibit that “perfect” depiction of ourselves? How long has a single person ever stayed still? Motion is an integral part of life, and it’s vital to remember that. No-one’s going to be cherishing their passport photo. 

When we’re having a good conversation with someone, we stop thinking so much about what we look like. If we can relax and let ourselves feel emotions, we’ll all be better for it. It’ll make for a nicer picture, too.

How do you want to be remembered? Is it through artificial approximations of humanity, able to be reproduced countless times; or is it through actual unique examples of your personal emotions?

How disappointed would you be if there were no way to remind yourself of what you used to really look like? 

We’re always worrying about how we are being perceived by everyone else, but if we worry about it so much that we don’t allow ourselves to be unique, then we lose what makes life so interesting in the first place.

When our star’s eventual death engulfs the planet, there’s not going to be anything left to worry about anyway.

If we show our vulnerabilities just a little bit, we’ll be able to understand each other better, and maybe then we’ll stop being so awkward and defensive around each other all the time. Have some fun.

When the warm sphere gobbles us up and nothing matters anymore, we’ll be sorry we took everything so seriously.

Love from
Eliot

As for the print designs themselves, I spent a while working on the typography, but ultimately used photographs of myself as the focal points of each piece (I felt that using myself would be the best option because it’s all my own text, and using anyone else might place unnecessary significance on that individual person).

Now that all of that was done, the final step was to set up my exhibition space!

In order for it to become what I wanted it to be like for the audience, I had to spend a few hours painting metallic gold onto ~20 frames of different sizes and designs, and I also had to locate a nice wooden table in order for the space to feel like or at least suggest a scene from someone’s home. Thankfully, I was able to find a fairly cheap, high-quality table (which I will be taking home at the end of this, thank you very much!) and hang the frames on the wall in time, and now the whole thing is done! Wow! Yeah, I guess this is the end of the blog post! Finally!

I thought it might be interesting to note that I ended up taking A LOT of photos overall…

Over 3,800 actually. I realise now that I was very lucky that I didn’t run out of space on my hard drive.

This project turned out to be a lot of fun for me!!! I got to improve my photography a lot, especially with actual people, and I’ve struggled with that for a long time. I was also extremely happy with the fact that I was able to communicate my opinions and my ethos as a person/designer to a wider audience.

I’m very happy with my final outcomes as well. That might change, given enough time. Actually, I hope it does change, because I’m still expecting to grow and mature as an artist/designer/human from now and for the rest of my life. That given, I really am please with what I was able to achieve, and it’s great to have this be the final project I undertake for my degree because it means that I have the motivation to keep going and keep learning more!

While I’m here, I might as well write down how thankful I am to everyone I’ve been surrounded by throughout this experience. All of you (yes you!) should have complete confidence that you have made a positive impact on my life, and I hope I was able to do some of the same.

Love from
Eliot

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Engineers of the Imagination: Part II

Posted: February 13, 2016 | Author: eliotsouthwell | Filed under: Field, Field - Year 2 | Leave a comment

2016 began just as you’d expect: my willpower crumbled at the thought of coming back to Cardiff to be a responsible human being again, and Christmas food had shut down my brain, but I made it anyhow, and I soon found myself in university, RARING to engineer some imagination!

The first day, we all gathered together with great inefficiency, but once we were finally present, Chris eased us back into the project by having us discuss what the project would be about. Some of the more memorable answers were:

• The meeting-place of the real and metaphorical.
• Whatever! 
  • Whatever you say it is
  • Whatever you want it to be
  • Whatever you want it to do
• The process of ascribing meaning 
• Curiosity
• Rejection
• Acceptance
• Welcoming
• Theatre & non-theatre 
• Ensemble
• Festival
• Autonomy
• Travel 

There were also a few artists mentioned:

• John Cage
• Lars Von Trier
• Marcel Duchamp

So yeah, after all this, I didn’t have any strong idea about where this project was heading, but my brain was definitely on now, trying to figure it all out. For starters, it seemed like another very open brief, which I’m fine with. I’m not so used to that, coming from Graphics, but something like this is always good to work on organisational skills (something I am severely lacking). One thing that was made explicit was that our outcome should be fully portable, so that we can, theoretically, hop on a train to a venue, set up an exhibit, and then pack up to leave a few hours later.

Later on, Chris introduced us to his friend, Richard Parry, who gave us a sort-of dramatic reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His delivery caught me off-guard with its intensity, but it nonetheless made me a lot more interested in the poem, and I read through its entirety when I got home.

After missing the next meeting due to sickness, I came back to discover everyone had collected themselves into groups, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (TRAM) was now the theme of our project. Luckily, my good pal Becky had saved me a spot when organising her own group, so for the next four weeks I would be working with her, Ashleigh Parsons, and Jakub Stromczynski (A.K.A. Kuba). I was pleased to know Ashleigh would be working with us again this term because I knew her organisational skills would keep us all on track, and I already knew Kuba from Graphic Communication. He’s a cool cool guy, so I was happy to be working with him (it was also nice to finally have someone else from Graphics amongst the Illustrator-dominated Engineers of the Imagination).

So, this time, I wasn’t around to help decide what our group would work towards, but hearing about it from them helped me take a step back and figure out what I could do to add to the work and to fit in without disturbing the peace.

Their idea was to create a large (beagle-sized, maybe?) pop-up paper ship. One that would flatten and fold into a portfolio to be carried anywhere easily!

We each drew some pictures of what we would personally like the ship to look like, and regrouped to discuss and find a happy compromise.

I envisioned the ship to be like a classic ‘pirate ship’, so i didn’t get very imaginative with my design, but other drawings, especially Becky’s, were more exciting and futuristic. At first, I didn’t quite understand the point of using a contemporary, futuristic ship to illustrate something with ancient in the title. However, we discussed it, and realised that the themes surrounding the story (i.e. guilt, regret, appreciation of nature, action & consequence) were quite universal and still relevant today.

With that in mind, we agreed to mix things up a bit, and create a whole pop-up diorama of TRAM, with everything set in the sky! Wait, no, in space! Ooh, no, underwater!—…

We eventually settled on something with more basis: the concept of a future Earth with drastically higher sea-levels — where our existing cities are drowned and uninhabitable due to our reluctance to respect and look after our own environment (that’s where the guilt comes into play). The ship is heading towards mountains still above the water, and the albatross was now a drone that was sent in search of survivors and/or new places for people to live.

In the spirit of mixing things up a bit, we chose our favourite parts from all our designs, and Kuba mashed ’em together on photoshop to produce less of a monstrosity than we were expecting.

So far, we had planned to make a gigantic futuristic ship, a stormy sea, icebergs, mountains, an albatross, and an intricate cityscape; all made from paper and all in pop-up form, plus colourful prints on everything to add colour and texture. After excitedly trying to explain our idea to Chris and Amelia, they immediately responded by saying that we were trying to do too much, that it would be too busy, and that we were doing all the imagining for the audience. They seemed to like our concept, but told us to strip it back and let the audience do the imagining.

So it was good that we got them to okay our idea of butchering an iconic poem with a warning about climate change, but now we needed to regroup to think about what we were going to actually do to make the piece a reality.

If we were going to simplify everything, we were basically only going to need five parts to the piece:

• Ship
• City
• Mountains/Land
• Drone
• Ocean

After sorting that messy business out, we were able to assign individual jobs to each person in the group. Ashleigh was to build the ship and make some simple waves to signify the ocean, Becky was going to make the city, complete with traffic, I was to design the mountains, and Kuba was to design/make the drone and to make some pop-up trees to surround the mountains.

There’s not a lot to say about the remaining days before finally putting it all together. It all went pretty smoothly and everyone worked hard to produce something they were proud of. However, the ship itself didn’t turn out very much like our original design because it proved a lot more difficult to design a curved pop-up than we had expected, though we were all still very happy with how it looked in the end.

(Oh, and also we visited the space Chris had kindly arranged for us to exhibit in: Cardiff’s World of Boats! It’s a wonderful space, and we got to see the workshop where they were fixing up a cool-looking ship. I think everyone was excited to be coming back there with their work.)

One interesting thing was that each of us had designed different methods of pop-up for our respective pieces even though we hadn’t planned to. While I designed my mountains to unfold in a more traditional pop-up manner, Ash’s ship was made to be pulled together with string.

Becky’s city was cleverly designed to lie flat when needed, but stood up on its own, and Kuba’s trees had pull tabs used to stand them up. It’s something that showcases the unexpected that comes with working together with different creative minds, and makes the whole things more interesting as a whole.

But back to me — that’s who you’re here for. I tried a number of different methods for my mountains to unfold and pop up, but, no matter what I tried, I always seemed to encounter quite a bit of trouble in making them look perfect (almost cutting my finger off in the process).

Eventually, however, I realised that that’s what machines are for. I’m not a machine (*gasp*), so I decided to embrace my inability to make it perfect (which is not a copout!). I finally put them together just in time, and I am quite pleased with the result.

Once everyone’s individual work was done, the next thing to do was to put it all together and hope it stayed! It wasn’t too difficult, actually, and we had time to experiment with lighting.

This was the first time we’d been able to see everything together, and it was a huge relief for everything to fit properly and, even more so, fold away properly. We took some time to marvel at our creation before packing it up ready for the big day.

And when that day finally arrived, we actually didn’t have a lot to do to prepare. In being so ingeniously creative, we had made our piece compact and portable while being quick and (fairly) easy to set up. In order to display our work, we stole some wooden palettes from The Doctor Who Experience next door, and stacked them so that they would contrast our clean white paper nicely.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to bring the lights we wanted, so we had to make do with some smaller ones which seemed to add at least some of the dynamism we wanted, and there were some disco(?) lights in the room there too, constantly flashing and changing colour, which I think would’ve muddled our original aesthetic anyway.

Next, we (and by ‘we’ I mean Kuba and Ashleigh) hung the drone from a light fixture with great difficulty.

The only thing left to do was to open the piece and check it had survived the journey to the venue.

It hadn’t.

Apparently, we folded it up wrong, so Becky’s buildings were falling off (damn you, double-sided sticky tape). Here’s a video of the mess, complete with Becky getting pissed off with us:

But anyway, we fixed it, and we were soon back on track to being the best (best what? I don’t know, best people?).

The exhibition itself was really wonderful, and everyone’s work looked great among the boats. The musical introduction, performed by The Illustrators, was great, and managed to ease everyone into the evening and out of their stressed-addled minds.

After the wonderful performance, Chris introduced our TRAM pop-up, and we were to open and ‘pop up’ our piece in front of everyone as a sort-of performance. It went… okay.

The unfolding itself went quite smoothly, but I think it took too long, so people started to get bored and it was a slightly anticlimactic finish. If we’d practised a little more beforehand, I believe it would have been a more magical experience — with it turning from a folded piece of paper into a full diorama in maybe thirty seconds.

Nevertheless, we received some fantastic compliments afterwards, so that eased our frustration (as did the free drinks, ever so kindly paid-for by Chris).

After our unveiling, the rest of the exhibition was opened, and the public were led through it by Sandra Gajdosova.

And that was it! All our work was finally done. The rest of the evening was full of merriment and because we were so clever and creative in the planning process, it didn’t take long at all to (with the help of the almighty Becky) fold everything back up again.

Photos!

Review time!

All-in-all, another enjoyable project. I found that Kuba, Becky, Ashleigh, and I worked very well as a team, and it was always very easy to discuss problems and bounce ideas off one another. I really don’t have anything bad to say about them.

The Engineers of the Imagination Field project as a whole was also very enjoyable, and I found working with Illustrators to be very interesting, which I was surprised by because I hadn’t realised Illustration and Graphic Communication were all that different. Chris and Amelia were a lot more free with their ideas, and were a lot less concerned with deciding the outcome beforehand than many other people would be. The entire process was a very relaxed one, and it didn’t often feel much like hard work because the groups were mostly autonomous, and so once we decided for ourselves what needed to be done, doing it was simply the logical next step. It was a nice surprise to see how well we could work without much supervision from staff.

I have enjoyed Year 2 Field even more than First Year’s. It’s always exciting to see what can come from cross-disciplinary work, and it makes me look forward to future group project possibilities.

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Engineers of the Imagination: Part I

Posted: February 12, 2016 | Author: eliotsouthwell | Filed under: Field, Field - Year 2 | Leave a comment

This year, Field is split into two five-week segments, with a lovely Christmassy break in between. There are also multiple classes/projects from which to choose, instead of a single school-wide project.

Most of the choices were only five weeks long, allowing the choice of two different classes, but the one which caught my attention the most was the Engineers of the Imagination project which takes up the entire ten weeks.

Of course, that wasn’t the reason I chose it. No, I chose it because it seemed quite different to what I’d previously been doing. In Graphic Communication, I am very comfortable working in 2D every day, so the opportunity to attempt to make something more 3D seemed exciting. Supposedly, the project was going to involve puppetry, and, like I said, now was a chance to try something new outside my little 2-dimensional comfort zone.

The lecturers running the project were Amelia Johnstone and Chris Glynn (with Amelia leading the first five weeks, and Chris leading the other). Honestly, they were probably the main reason I chose the class. On first impression, they seemed a little crazy (the best amount of crazy), friendly, creative, and encouraging; and I’m not just saying that because they’re reading this (Hi!). Simply-put, I figured I’d learn more if I could enjoy it more, and the teachers are a big part of that.

Aside from that, there was also a proposed musical element, which I was very interested in trying, and also mention of a collaboration with Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama — yeah, that never happened, and I’m not sure why. A little disappointing to be honest, but it didn’t really matter too much and I had a great time anyway. WHO NEEDS ‘EM! 

So! Onto the actual project…

We started by looking at a quote from Roberto Calasso:

The monster does not need the hero. It is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.

We were told to use this quote, in which Calasso is reminding us of our human folly, “as a catalyst to extrapolate humanity through possibilities using perhaps object theatre, shadow puppetry, animation, performance, installation exploring notions of the present, through current affairs and through specific texts, to establish themes which will create verbal and visual metaphors personifying emotions and states of mind.”

Yeah, I found it a little scary confusing too, but we kept moving…

Amelia informed us that, at the end of the term, we would be displaying our work in an empty shop located in High Street Arcade in the town centre. So, eventually, we scattered in order to casually discuss in small groups what exactly we could do with this project. Seeing as it would be just about Christmas by the end of the five weeks, that general theme was thrown about a fair bit.

I can’t remember what the context was, but at one point earlier in the day, Amelia mentioned the lovely little term “happy melancholy”, which I found quite cutely profound, but more so, it led me to a decision about (at least my own input into) the project. I’ve grown aware of the the human race’s general increase in sadness-wallowing around winter-time (see: SAD), and it struck me as a fairly (very) good idea to work towards an outcome rich in positiveness (yeah!) instead of the more common “hey look at this art and see how terrible the world is”.

At the end of the day, Amelia urged us to go away and read The Little Prince, a children’s story that reminds us to appreciate childhood innocence and imagination. We also watched The Color of Pomegranates: an incredibly beautiful art film that I didn’t quite get. I’m fairly certain I just needed some context, but it seemed to be critical of religion quite a lot, if that helps. I really should look it up; I don’t know why I haven’t looked it up.

… Moving on. The next day, we took a trip down to Chapter Arts Centre to take a look at George Barber‘s exhibition titled Akula Dream, and, in particular, The Freestone Drone. The exhibition was very interesting (I found the projection of Shouting Match on every wall in a small room rather hilarious, though I’m not sure if I was supposed to) and The Freestone Drone, a piece which personifies a military drone and depicts it as an innocent child playing a game, made me think a lot about seeing things from different perspectives.

At the end of it, before sending us on our merry little way, we were told to go home and find a video, movie, book, story, whatever; something to show to the rest of the group the following day that could further inspire us. I started the same way I start anything: procrastination; and, in procrastinating, I found a video essay by Every Frame A Painting that gives some real insight into character development and storytelling.

Afterwards, a few other possibly relevant examples of inspiration came to mind:

• Bernie — A very moving story that I won’t spoil because you should watch it, but the main character displays a lot of child-like friendliness and innocence throughout.
• Into The Wild — Another emotional one; the very premise is a common childhood fantasy of running away.
• A Clockwork Orange is an interesting one because it depicts a dystopian future wherein the younger generation is unbelievably nastier than their parents.

Of course, other people’s examples were great too. For example, the book Becky brought in, Illustration Next, was fantastically beautiful, and The Backwater Gospel was crazy and had some of the coolest animation I’d seen in a while.

Amelia also invited Layla Holzer, an ex-student, to come show us her work in puppetry , which was really cool and insightful. I was especially struck by her shadow-puppetry because it looked so simple, yet worked so effectively. She also brought along the actual puppets for us to see just how simply and ingeniously they were made.

Hoo, this is a long post. 

So, the next week, we found ourselves in groups. I teamed up with Becky Watts and Federico Seppi. I looked to Becky to work with by default because we’re already friends, but I’d only recently met Federico. He’s an Erasmus student from Italy, and I’d been getting to know him a little bit, but he hadn’t shown me his work, so we weren’t sure what he could contribute to the group at first. Those suspicions were laid to rest as soon as we started talking as a group, however, as he’d brought in his multitude of sketchbooks to show us. As it turned out he was primarily a sculptor with some really great interesting works, and that was exciting for us because Becky and I work pretty much solely in 2D. If we could figure out a way to mix our 2D work with his 3D, our outcome could become so much more interesting and with a lot more visual depth.

Becky and I told him about our desire to give the work a positive feel and he seemed fine with that, and after perusing his fine sketchbooks, we saw that he’d done some fantastic work with ice, which prompted us to talk more about winter-themed ideas. Eventually we landed on the idea of producing something that could help people remember the nice parts of winter or Christmas-time (but we didn’t want to be political or religious!!!). The main concept was to build a small den (originally an igloo) decorated or filled with things (we weren’t sure yet) that evoked happy thoughts and memories from winter-time. Amelia didn’t seem to hate our idea, so we stuck with it.

I missed a day or two of uni after that, and during my leave of absence, Ashleigh Parsons and Ioan Raileanu (A.K.A. John by our group for some reason I never questioned) joined us. I had no real problems with that because more input can sometimes(?) be good and refreshing, but, really, if they could help increase the size and scope of the project, that would be awesome (spoiler: yeah it worked out quite well actually!). Also, apparently Patrick Lloyd (whose blog I couldn’t find, soz) also joined our group, but ended up pretty much entirely out of contact with the rest of us, and seemed to just do his own thing, which I guess is okay. Maybe he didn’t really want to be in our (very cool) team of (very cool and also nice) pals.

Anyway, as it turned out, we all worked rather well together. We doled out clearly cut tasks for each of us to do from the beginning, which helped simplify things and allowed us to more easily stray later on in order to help each other out, etc. It was nice. Becky, Ioan, and I decided to each create a silhouette paper cut-out of a nice wintery scene — I took tasty winter food, becky, a peaceful forest , and Ioan, a picture of friends and family singing jovially together. Ashleigh and Federico took charge of the 3D(!) aspect of the piece, which would end up being the most exciting aspect. Federico was the boss of the structure of the ‘igloo’ itself, and Ash focused on the decoration and general visual context of the piece.

Oh! Also, Amelia asked me to create some typography as signage for the shop, which you’ll see finished later, but you’ve been without images for a while, so here’s a sneak peek, courtesy of Ashleigh:

When we first visited the shop, we were immediately drawn to the basement (a three-storied shop!) because the natural darkness would emphasise our warm cosy light, but logistics and a lack of space refused to let us set up there. However, we found a closed-off extra staircase leading back to the ground floor, and that brought our excitement back up again. We soon decided to (hopefully) build our structure on the ground floor, ON TOP OF the staircase, so it would be a pleasant surprise for the audience to realise that they would actually be able to enter this mysterious little den that intrigued them so much when they first came into the shop.

Of course, the size and shape of the stairway made a circular igloo-kinda-lookin’-thing quite difficult to work out if we wanted it to cover the entire thing. So, after some thought, we settled on the new idea of building a small house-kinda-lookin’-thing, which turned out to be a much better idea that fit more nicely with the concept anyway.

Oh hey, I’ve actually got some photos. Have at ’em:

We were terrible people, and basically just told Federico afterwards that the structure he’d been planning and testing all this time wouldn’t work out, and we’d changed the idea without him being there. Luckily, he’s a really cool guy and a true artist, so he was actually really fine with changing things up a bit. It only took a bit of planning before we were all back up to speed.

Federico had de-limbed some trees in Llandaff and lugged the branches all the way to town in order to use them for the structure. It was his idea to use them, and I think they work incredibly well in connection to the rest of the piece, as they increase the charm factor ten-fold. I ‘helped’ him put together the frame (yeah he did most of the work), and then went downstairs to be of some actual use with Ashleigh’s stuff.

Ash had taken it upon herself to create something that would be a much more immersive experience leading up to the house. The initial idea was to build a tunnel made from black paper, complete with cut-out twinkling stars, all the way from the entrance of the room. That much black card, we soon realised, is hilariously expensive, so we were stuck for a while, until Amelia came to the rescue with some emergency blankets — the stuff runners wear at the end of a marathon. It was hilariously cheap, and, though not the first thing we wanted to use, it seemed a really interesting idea, so we stuck it up all over the walls until we had a very shiny tunnel that made a sweet futuristic rustling sound as you walked through.

Once that was done, Federico, Ioan, and I worked on the walls and roof of the house. It was actually quite simple to sew giant pieces of paper to the wooden frame, and simpler again to attach the fabric to the roof, but having only one set of hands would have made it impossible. It went much faster with the three or even just two of us. Once it was done, the contrast of the stark white paper against the rustic wooden frame really stood out. We had originally envisioned clear plastic for the walls/roof, covered by some fake snow, but with the way we wanted to use light, it wouldn’t have worked. Looking back, paper was a much better choice anyway.

Here’s us giddily looking at it from the inside for the first time (bonus: I hit my head at 8 seconds in):

So then, with all my procrastination out of the way, I only had all of my own work to do. The idea was to create some lampshade-esque thingies that would project silhouettes onto the inside walls of the house, so, after measuring an appropriate size, I sketched my scene onto some scrap paper to compose everything, then onto a large piece of black card, then cut it out.

I then ingeniously stuck some Quality Street™ wrappers behind the fire, which instantly made the whole thing visually warmer, before attaching the whole thing to a sheet of acetate, which I rolled and stuck together in a cylinder.

Unfortunately, due to both time and money constraints, we were unable to find any lights which were good enough to project the images properly 😿. I suppose that’s something we should have sorted out a lot earlier on, but we live and we learn. Ash went and got some small wardrobe button lights from Clas Ohlson that were surprisingly bright. However, they were very blue, so they counteracted our intentions to make the place seem cosy and warm. That was disappointing, but it wasn’t terrible. We also had some LED candles flickering inside small paper houses that Ashleigh made, which served to create a nice image of inside vs. outside, especially including the paper trees (also made by ashleigh) and fake snow scattered around.

So that was basically it! Our work was done! The show was very much a success, and I was able to eavesdrop on a few positive remarks about our work (maybe they didn’t realise I could hear them from outside our little house). The piece itself sat quite comfortably in the room amongst the rest of the engineers’ fantastic work, and I think it even presented a welcome happy break within the exhibition, as it was all a little less wholly positive compared to ours (which isn’t a bad thing, by the way!).

As I said before, we worked rather well as a group, and I very much enjoyed the process. Each one of us took initiative along the way to do stuff and to help each other out. Yeah. Thumbs up.

Enough of that; here are the images:

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