Into to Creative Play - Week 8 & 9

In Intro to ‘Creative Play’ my group of three which was created through pairing people up with others whose skillsets will benefit each other, were assigned a brief to create a representation of ‘the city’, whilst considering the theme of old and new. In my opinion this was a very broad brief, therefore it opened many different ideas. I noted down six ideas which incorporated many of the different forms of creation that have been introduced to us over the course of this module.

1.      Create a blank 3D model of a city (either by using 3D printing or modelling), and then using projection mapping, project designs onto the models to change the buildings to appear more modern or older. I felt that this would be a good way to utilise projection mapping.

2.      Use lighting (as demonstrated in the filming session), to represent through shadows the passing of time on certain objects or models of cities, and have the silhouettes and shadows also represent a change in time, such as the style of buildings modernising.

3.      Use the green screen to place two actors (one representing old, the other representing new), and place them on top of artwork of the corresponding time periods, and have them interact somehow with the audience.

4.      Create physical mashups of city related objects and buildings, with half of them new, the other half old. This could also be done with cartoony caricatures of people, showing how fashion has changed over the years.

5.      Create a soundscape of all the different areas of a city, two versions, old and new. This will be created using Foley, a technique which I am very fond of and interested in. These sounds could be activated by pressing a button or by people interacting in any way with the designated areas or objects, this could be done using Arduino.

6.      Have a video play which shows a scan of artwork of city areas all linked up, and the areas getting progressively more modern as the film goes on. This will then revert the traditional cities and the film will continuously loop.

  

To help introduce us to this topic, we were set a task to plan and create a very simple stop motion which represents a city within only 45 minutes! As a group we decided that due to the time constraints, we should keep it simple, so we made dozens of little clay 'blobs' which were meant to be people, along with clay cars, which would all be walking across a backdrop of a city silhouette. The city silhouette came out very well in my opinion, possibly due to the bright yellow windows we cut out, which creates a huge contrast from the solid black buildings, which is why I decided that I somehow wanted to use a similar premise within my actual piece for this module. Unfortunately the beauty of the animation didn't mirror the beauty of the backdrop, however we did have a lot of fun creating it. Due to the lack of planning on the direction and purpose of all the clay civilians and cars, their movements were improvised during the animation process, which is why some inexplicably get run over and squished. The lack of planning is without a doubt what let the final animation down, but I feel as though what we have made during the 45 minutes we had, has made me very optimistic regarding what we can make for the final project with a LOT more planning.

After refining our idea for the actual piece, we decided to create artwork of cities from different time periods (Traditional and Modern), and have them laid out on separate designated A1 boards. There was also the idea to go even further back than traditional cities, and go back to when there were no cities at all, just forest and jungle, before civilisation, to show an even greater variance in setting and style. There will be 6 pieces of artwork for each time period, so 18 in total, and they will be arranged neatly and link together on the board. As for the designs of the boards themselves, we decided to have them neatly with all the buildings or scenery lined up, with a timeline bellow, in order to show the passage of time. We had the idea to have each board consist of artwork which is created with relevance to the time period they are portraying through the techniques used, for example, the modern city artwork will be made digitally, the traditional city artwork will be made using traditional methods such as water colour painting and the jungle will be created out of a collage. This will also help utilise all the teams’ skills and abilities. As for the actual setup of the project, the three boards will be hung out diagonally, thus helping the observer to understand the journey through time, and as the observer travels through these boards, they will be lead to a projector projecting a video onto a wall, which will be an endless loop of all the artwork linked together, as the frame pans through it all, showing a progression through time. This will all be edited and pieced together through After Effects, and the video will go along with some accompanying soundscapes, which we will make using Foley in a recording studio, however for the remainder of the sounds which we cannot accurately reproduce, we will use Soundsnap.

This is our idea as it stands right now, and I think that it incorporates a lot of the techniques introduced to us, and I am highly anticipating how it will look once it has been completed. During this week’s session, we also managed to make a mock-up of what one of the pieces from the jungle aspect of the work will look like, and we were impressed with the look.

A outline of a cityscape was drawn, and using cuttings from imagery of jungle, the positive space was occupied. I feel as though this creates an interesting juxtaposition of two very contrasting themes, the jungle and the city.

My next steps to take in this module is to gather visual research of all three different areas, and create a few of the digital pieces of artwork for the ‘modern’ aspect of the piece.