Box mounting!

It’s been a while since I wrote in the exhibition journal now. Although the project is finished to some extent, I just wanted to add some final touches.

First off, the second year students did an absolutely amazing, brilliant, fantastic job on constructing the flats, the hub, the plinths, the everything! We carried the plinths to the studio a few weeks back, and they’re perfect! It was really nice being able to take some money out of the budget and reward them with pizza (not to mention feasting on the leftovers!).

Yesterday we had a session gluing boxes, which was nice. It was a good break from all the stress of finishing for the deadline, for some peculiar reason. Henrijs painted the boxes today, and I cannot believe how nice he made them look! I mean, seriously, they’re used KFC boxes, and he made them look like canvases!

Robin brought in all the pillows she made. Meg helped out with the build on the day she got back. I’m super excited to get started on exhibition stuff once we finish our assessments. It’s going to be a genuinely beautiful exhibition, and I have had such a great time being part of the development process. I can’t wait to see it all come together.

Sketch: Little Dino crushed his bunnies

Graphic ideas

I’m thinking about the graphics for the observatory interior. These have to be few, and explain two versions of the prologue (excluding Shadow’s actions which hadn’t happened yet at the time the carvings were made).

Storyboard poses…

I am officially struggling with my storyboards. I have this scene where Plant, the Lonely Monster, helps Lumi stand up. He reaches down a branch, pulls her up, and swings her around like a ballerina. The problem is, a swinging ballerina is frickin’ difficult to draw! At least for me, haha…

I’m using the references below, but it’s taking quite some time to understand how these poses work. Maybe I’ll try acting them out (though my body might break from that).

Image source

Type me…

I went up to WImbledon Village this morning to get a change of scenery. I wanted to fix up my script a little (a lot), but it was too hard to focus at home. So I sat down at a coffee shop. As always, Twitter opened up as my start page. I wanted a picture of a typewriter for a tweet, so I googled typewriters, and discovered Michael Mullan’s work (first image below).

Vintage Typewriter. By Michael Mullan. Check out his website –here-.

I was really inspired by Mullan’s illustration. When I got back home, I noticed my own typewriter sort of calling out for me. “Draw me, draw meeee…” And I didn’t want to be rude, so I kicked open Photoshop and made myself a little sketch. It’s not my finest work, but it was a nice inspirational kickstart.
I’ll leave the “how?” up for interpretation. It’s pretty simple to figure out.

Original drawing. The paper looked a bit too out of place with nothing on it, so I added the “How?”.

Here’s just a little experiment with a different background.

Sketch: unfinished

I saw the cutest short film in the history of my cinematic memory. It’s called The Dam Keeper. I made a sketch inspired by it, but didn’t have time to finish it. Might as well leave it like it is.

Thoughts on my script…

I read over my script last night at the airport. It was bad. Not horrible, but bad. The story came across semi-clearly, which is not good. If I combine my visuals, script and notes, I can read the script. What I need to do now is get everything into the script.

I also want to re-write the dialogue. I remember worrying that I wasn’t getting the story across well enough, so I added a lot of it, even though I didn’t like it. The thing is, I hate dialogue. I love early animated features, as well as the Pixar film, W.A.L.L.-E, just for this reason: they did so much without dialogue. What I hate even more, is monologue. I think animation is a brilliant medium for avoiding both of these, it’s like dance in a sense: you tell stories and express emotions through movement. It’s astonishing what some people can accomplish through movement.

Presentation of exhibition project

I met Jack at 10 by the AV shop to pick up camera equipment. Everyone were getting in early to rehearse the presentation. I think people were a bit jumpy in the beginning of the day, but as we got on practising, the tension somewhat wore off. It was a fun day, everyone seemed really excited to show off what we had come up with.

For the sake of grading, here were my chores of the day:

• Pick up camera equipment
• Bring in supplies for drinks (me and Robin)
• Get ice (more tricky than it sounds when you don’t have a freezer, haha)
• Mount concept art onto foam board
• Mix drinks (me and Robin)
• Hand out concept art and popcorn during the presentation

I was very, very, very happy I didn’t have to present. I was so impressed by how organized our presenters were, I think they appeared extremely professional. Perhaps Lucy the most, since she wasn’t actually supposed to present, and had to step in last minute.

I’m confident that this project has been a great experience for us as a group. It was a shame that not everyone participated, but those who did all helped us get to where we are today. It’s been busy, chaotic, annoying, entertaining, hysterically funny at times, but most of all: simply brilliant. I’m very proud to have been part of it. Douglas was an amazing and truly inspiring teacher for us during this period, and he really helped us get to what we have now. This project has been a really good experience, which I believe most of us really enjoyed.

The best reward from the project came straight after the presentation, presented by dead silence in the room. This, followed by feedback we had only dared to hope for. It felt really good, I think every single person in that room felt on top of the world for the rest of the day. Our little corner of the studio was filled with the essence of world conquer. It was truly brilliant.

Presentation practice run

The people who were presenting started rehearsing early in the morning. I had a meeting in Bank, so I didn’t get into uni until 3pm. They had obviously done a lot of work. We stayed for an hour or so more, and divided up some tasks that had to be done for the following day.

Mine:

• Bring drink supplies
• Pick up AV equipment
• Let Robin know I had signed her up for filming the presentation
• Print and mount samples of concept art for the presentation

Once we heard that the Jellyfish talk tomorrow had been postponed, we decided to meet up at 10am tomorrow.

Projection try-outs

Me and Sophia met up today to test projection for the screen installation (which may not be a screen installation anymore). We tested out the interview footage and some videos of our work onto different surfaces: brown cardboard boxes, white foamboard, thick watercolour paper, some kind of thin, grainy paper roll, and the white plinths from the studio. I personally love how the projection looks on the brown cardboard boxes. The danger with having a brown background is how people’s work might change colours as it is projected. But we can prevent all that by just testing it out first.

I have to be honest, I don’t understand what some people were saying when they claimed projecting onto foam board would look like shit. It looked better on watercolour paper, but foam board was still nice. -And: it’s cheap and will shrink our workload oh so much. A3 sheets of white foam board can be bought for £0.74 per sheet. We need 6 sheets per box. That equals £4.44. Say we’d make 20 boxes, this would add up to £88.80, which is way less that the £600 screen installation. The sheets come in packs of 15. We’d need 120 sheets in total, which divides to exactly 8 packs. No waste!

We could also get different sizes, all pre-cut, so nothing would look shitty. Then all we’d need would be pins. We spoke to Henrijs this morning, and he can get nice cardboard boxes for free from work. We could use these to make a skeleton for our foam board boxes: that way they’d be sturdier.

Henrijs also has experience constructing sets with cardboard boxes. He said he could make the installation sturdy and safe. Safety is another matter: no one’s going to get injured if a foam board box falls on them. All we’d need to do is fireproof them.