This was a little sci-fi comic I thumbnailed, scripted and did layouts for, but it ultimately wasn't accepted into the anthology (we've all been there, I'm sure). So I've tucked this idea into my back pocket for now.
I opted to not make a website in Adobe Dreamweaver or Adobe Muse like the majority of the other students did (why do Adobe even have two different web design programs anyway?), and as someone who isn't a programmer, I don't have the skills to do it the old-fashioned way.
But I had a really ambitious idea and realised it wouldn't have been achievable if I'd devoted my time to learning coding and inevitably screwing up a lot before I got it right, and I knew I wasn't being too ambitious because I found my copy of Adobe Flash, which I remembered playing with years ago, so I decided to animate my idea instead. I made a .gif, with a hard 'G'. It simulates how I'd produce a working website, without the need for you, the viewer, to actually do any work. Take a look and I hope it'll be pretty clear why I chose to do it this way. I'm currently on a first year Graphics course at Loughborough University, following on from my foundation year.
It's good. There's a lot of work to do, but it's good work. That's why I've not updated this in a while with any new projects or thoughts, which sucks because I enjoy doing this, but doing the work is the priority. One of the many, many briefs I've had recently is a 4 page Web Design project (which I'll talk about a little more in my next post). Maybe I'll just stick with this site to document all my STUFF and THINGS and things, and stuff.
I've got Eddie Van Halen telling me to jump in both ears, and I can say without a doubt that I have never been more hyped to write an essay about how and why I did an art project. So enough with trying to find a funny title and intro, I am so ready. So. Fucking. Ready.
It's now or never. I ain't gonna live forever (to clarify, Bon Jovi's playing now. My playlist is SO MUCH better than yours). OK, so for the past couple of years, my friend Oli and I had planned on doing a sci-fi summer project, but that never happens because you're sixteen and you want to breathe after the stupidest exams you've ever done, and then you're seventeen and you want to breathe after the stupidest exams you've ever done, and then you're eighteen, rinse and repeat, and you have festivals to go to, fuck summer projects, you have a Foundation Art & Design year to do that stuff. And that's exactly what we did - he does the same course at the same place. Convenient. We heard the idea of a group project being thrown around as an actual possibility, so we took our chance to actually do this thing. My other plan was to continue with my comic and actually publish the first chapter, which in retrospect would never have happened because I got pretty ill, so I'm glad I had this project to motivate me to continue in spite of that - after all, the show must go on, inside my heart is breaking, my makeup may be faking, but my smile still stays on (thanks Freddie, truer words were never said. You're the man). Initially the plan was to make a short animatic of a sci-fi world, not quite fully animated because that would be a massive amount of time to sink in to something that we knew our audience wouldn't appreciate for a few seconds of film (something more like the Titansgrave intro on Geek & Sundry) so we somehow ended up being inspired by story-telling in video games. Not the narrative as such, but world building, providing a sense of place, character... all the unsaid things that turn a script from a shit sci-fi film to Blade Runner, or a generic fantasy game into Dark Souls:
Blade Runner, Dark Souls, Alien, everything Pixar makes: it's the mark of sophisticated story telling in set design.
So we set about producing a series of early designs for posters, magazine covers, adverts, songs, clothes, toys, commercial nick nacks... parts of the world. And then we realised we were being stupid, because why the hell wouldn't we actually just make a part of the world. We sat down and had a group crit, someone chucked out the idea of making a newsstand, 1920's style - but in the future, obviously, all neon and sci-fi and cool. And yeah, we both thought it was great.
stuck to magazines that line the front of the stall for people to buy, a series of postcards that hang to one side and a cork board sign to the other. Above, using EL wire, we made a glowing pink and blue sign that alludes to METROcorp, and we decorated the back wall with more designs traditional to the aliens (also made with EL wire) and mirrors which, from a certain angle, reflect a futuristic shotgun hung just below the counter. This is a dangerous world for the person who works in the shop - a child's drawing hanging on the wall shows an alien family and their alien dog, and graffiti covering the stall spells out "Xeno go home".
sluggish, intense black metal tune. I then changed the EQ of my track in Audacity to give it that slightly tinny radio sound - not because in the future, audio clarity wouldn't have improved, but because it reads better as 'radio' to the audience, who wouldn't see the radio (especially since there wouldn't be one visible, the plan was to play it on loop from an old iPod connected to a hidden speaker).
One of the other ideas that we got really excited about but then scrapped due to our time constraints was the idea of leaving a dead body in the hallway. So the plan was to potentially build the side wall with a false door that could be removed and flipped to show a broken side with a green blood spatter on it. There'd be a body covered in a freshly bloody sheet lying on the floor, and through the way the sheet clings to the form you'd see that it has four arms, and a large, flat, conical head. "POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS" hangs across the hallway, ripped in the middle and hanging so it's not a safety hazard. In theory, we'd bring the body out after everyone has passed through to the rooms that contain everyone else's final projects, because ours is the first that they'd see, they'd glance across it, take it in and move on. And when they go to leave, we grab their focus as they step back out into the corridor and see that things have changed. Then we have their attention. They look at our project in an entirely new way. The issue, however, was that we just didn't have the time and it's something I'm kind of disappointed about because I think if we did it right it could be brilliant.
As part of my research I ended up thinking about using language to make a magazine cover rather than the focus being the image, and I somehow recalled old 1800s Serials, like The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens or Great Expectations. Originally, they were released in a weekly serial format, chapter by chapter, and serial storytelling has developed from that point: looking at the state of film franchises and the growth of the new era of TV (with Netflix and Amazon Prime), the serial has developed from soap operas and comics. It would be interesting to see that come full circle in the distant future, so I conceived of two competing magazines, one called "All-New, All-Different SERIAL!" and one called "Flyleaf", which would take very different approaches - Flyleaf would be formal, black and white with dingbats for decoration and small text to save on space (a logo in the top left corner of both magazines would be the symbol of the "Paper Conservation Tax" which would be reminiscent style wise of the Comics Code Authority logo), and SERIAL would be flashy and colourful, but also with minimal use of images - its language would be more obvious, but still as concise as possible, with the story starting on the front page. So I guess in conclusion, we did a lot of stuff that I think was really successful, my playlist has been motivating me to write all of this, and I don't have something witty to say to end this. I'm sure I've missed things, but everything is evident in the final piece itself if you're insightful enough. It occurs to me, I need to get a nice short film of the installation. Pics or it didn't happen. So I edited together a video relating a brief history of funny comics with the use of comic relief in superhero films and comics, and how Edgar Wright's use of humour in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World achieves a very similar fun tone to Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic, but by using the tools of a different medium. I have a few more ideas I'd like to discuss, like the history of the 12A rating (which all comes down to Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones, and Gremlins) and the development of comedy in Superhero films in terms of Tim Burton's Batman, Batman '66, and how not to do it - George Clooney and the Bat Credit Card, anyone? So maybe I'll get around to it, but this video is long enough as it is. I think I sound stupid in it, but that's probably because I do. So for a little context, a while ago I produced a project that was an exploration of identity, character and uniform and I recently found this essay I wrote about Conor Harrington and his exploration of those things. Or rather, what I thought he was trying to achieve in some of his art. If you know nothing about him, check him out. It's edgy and grungy and generally pretty rad all round. Anyway, here's my essay, let's go. Identity: The amalgamation of those questions, an existential abstraction that enables our entire perception of the world, and here I am trying to express it in words and pictures.I suppose I chose it as the core of my project because for 18 years I've been leaning what my role in society is, learning how to play it. To fit into and inform our cultural identity, our world identity. But my identity, how I see myself, is inevitably different to how you see me. How you see yourself is different to how I see you. So that's what my project was all about. What identity means to me. In other words, it's the conflict between self and other. It's Uniform versus Character, how Uniform informs Character, how it suppresses Character. How, when everyone becomes their Uniform, Uniform becomes their Character. It becomes their identity. It's that conflict that my project is about. It's about who we are and who we present ourselves as. Self versus Other. Personal Identity versus Social Identity. Uniform versus Character. Identity versus Identity. The conflict of who we are. The conflict of knowing who we are. I happened across Conor Harrington a few years ago, when I was digging around to find an artist for GCSE art. When I started looking at Uniform and Character as the title for my project, one of the components for my idea was to have people wearing uniforms as the subject of my work. I conjured up some costumes and as the next step I started thinking that perhaps I should consider war artists or artists whose work examines uniform, because analysing their work might inspire something brilliant. That's what brought me back to Conor Harrington.
Strangers On A Train is a very tense film; Guy, a famous tennis player, meets a fan who proposes the perfect murder: what if they could each swap, each kill the person the other wants dead, and the only link between them is a chance meeting on a train. Naturally, the tennis player brushes it off, but the fan, Bruno, murders Guy's ex-wife and starts to stalk him, trying to worm his way into his life, with his friends and family. The resulting tension comes from the fact that only the two men know what has happened, and that whilst Bruno is trying to convince Guy to commit murder, at any second he could easily persuade everyone that guy was in fact the murderer, since he is the prime suspect. Every conversation becomes a careful balancing act, with Guy trying to find a way to remove Bruno from his life, while Bruno tries not to expose his motives. But the conflict of interests is only part of what makes the film so tense. Not only do all of the interactions between Bruno and Guy rest on the edge of conflict, but in the film's climactic finale, Guy must race against time to complete his tennis match and intercept Bruno before he removes all evidence left at the crime scene. The high stakes help to build the tension, but what really captivates throughout the film is the fact that no character entirely knows what is going on, and whilst we think we know what's happening, Bruno is unsettlingly unpredictable enough that every scene with him in commands our interest. Hitchcock famously said about building tension: "There's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't..." The root of tension comes from the anticipation that something is going to happen. The art of suspense is building the atmosphere for that tension to thrive in.
And here, in this one shot, Hitchcock sums up everything that makes us feel uncomfortable about Bruno, giving us just enough time to notice that something doesn't look right before we zoom in on exactly the anomaly in both the shot and Guy's life: Bruno is hidden, amongst everyone else, unmoving, emotionless, but always visible, always there.
It makes a great gif, too. As part of a new project, entitled Time, I've been working in a group to source ideas and media to create a short one minute film inspired by the high concept ideas of sci fi films like Snowpiercer, The Matrix, Planet of the Apes and, of course, Blade Runner - again. I can't say I'm a fan of the process of group projects. Shedding parts of all of your ideas to incorporate everyone's into something that would have been much different individually. But you get there in the end, with an idea nothing like the one you started with, but better developed because of it. What I'd hoped to explore, the relationships between tradition and change, evolved into an exploration of the memories we leave behind; what a legacy means in a modern age where we cultivate a digital impression of ourselves, made from moments that no one will care about in 80 years, when Facebook is a directory of dead people oversaturated with indicipherable moments in a million people's lives. It's certainly high concept, and it opened up so many options for presenting those ideas visually. We collected visuals of error messages and loading screens, the digital hunt for things that refuse to be found. But then I stumbled across an SD card that I'd meant to return, full of other people's discarded photographs, visually as interesting and as obscured as their history. I didn't know where they came from. I didn't know their context, outside of what I would use them for. That's exactly why it made so much sense to share what I'd found with the group. Those images formed the core of my film, alongside a photo that I'd taken of two statues in contrasting states of upkeep, and one of a balloon, ephemeral by nature, obscuring the identity of the person stood behind it. As we'd decided to make four separate edits between us, using the same set of images, I found myself drawn back to Roy's speech at the end of Blade Runner, about the ephemeral nature of moments in time, to use as an audio accompaniment to provide much needed context to the images, especially considering that the first set of images are almost too fast to register (intentionally of course, but having lost that clarity, I felt that the meaning would be too obscure without another layer of meaning in the form of that audio clip). That combined with Panic At The Disco!'s Far Too Young To Die (which I used for it's name, mostly, and the way it just seemed to fit the video) made up the audio track. In my edit, at least. Which is this one here. So the difficult thing about trying to develop something to go on a person is the fact that it has so many practical constraints, especially after a week of just doing random shit with cardboard (see previous post).
Trying to bring that exploration of shape and form into a coherent final result that has the added requirement of needing to incorporate a person is difficult, especially considering that I'm using mirrors to bring forward what I've been doing in my shape project. I've started to develop an idea for what I want to achieve, and if I can sink in the time to get my angles correct to project video onto walls to reflect it into the mirrors, it should look great. It's potentially too complex, but that's no reason not to try: I'm hoping to project my fire video onto a corner wall, so that there are two different angles from which the mirrors can reflect, and position a camera in the correct position to film the fragmented video through the mirrors on a person. There are a lot of ideas going on behind that, but with all the mirrors being squares and the video itself being constrained to a square, I feel it enhances the whole concept of this geometric construct turning into an organic form, and the geometric shapes on the body help to accentuate that idea. Filming those projections should also work well to capture the concept that these cardboard structures are ephemeral, since there comes a point at which the film ends and the fire burns out. Depending on the frame rate of the projector I use as well, I might try to double the speed of the fire video and project it at 60fps, film the projection at 60fps while my model wears the mirrors and moves with them in an organic way, and then half the speed of the new film to 30fps so that the fire video plays at full speed but the model moves in slow motion, to smooth out any movements and highlight the contrast between organic motions and the perfect square shapes. So, for the last week I've been building things out of cardboard. I've been cutting layers from them, building geometric shapes that feel architectural and other ones that feel decayed.
I've played with their form, with no interest for what the purpose of those objects is other than to play with how the structures are made and how those shapes relate to each other. What started off as me folding pieces of cardboard to see what would happen ended up as me, well, folding pieces of cardboard to see what would happen. But it wasn't just that any more. What started as an exploration of folds and cuts and techniques became an exploration of how shapes relate, and what those relationships can mean. A lot of my structures were designed to use light to add another layer of subtle depth, highlighting areas of glossy, aggressive paint that are covered in reflective film to add more dynamic contrast to them. But it got me thinking about how the light I was casting on my shapes made very solid, blocky highlights on the very solid, blocky sculptures. I wanted to carry across the work I had done the week before when I played with line quality in 3D and 2D drawings, in which I explored the contrast between organic lines and more mathematical, perfect ones and how they influence each other. I wanted to look at that same thing here, with my sharp architectural sculptures and the more organic curves of paper and card; with light, how it can be blocky and harsh or dynamic and emotive. So I used tissue paper stencils to spray natural, imperfect patterns on my geometric shapes. I dripped and scraped ink over them, I painted in acrylics and scratched it across the surface and covered it in scrunched up film to catch the light. And for the last one, I decided to burn it to the ground. I filmed it in a mirror, so that I'd be able to pull back outside of a geometric shape (that's why it's a square composition, too) to reveal the wild, natural motion of the flames and the organic texture of the ash. The flames start in the middle of the structure, which was bold and solid, before growing, turning the blue sky and blue in the shapes into orange, and after I panned up out of the mirror, turning the black of the burning cardboard into white ash. It was that contrast of shape and colour that was the culmination of what I'd been playing with, moving from harsh natural light to the inconsistent motion of the flames trapped in the geometric shapes. I thought it was pretty neat, it burned faster than I expected too. |
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August 2017
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