Three Hours

I don't want to regiment this project to the extent of its predecessor. This investigation into observation and documentation should focus on those things without being bogged down by the details of how I reach the places I end up in. However I should develop some rules to ensure a common structure to the journeys I make.

I was listening to Nick Drake's Three Hours, a song about escape and the eternal seeker. I thought how far one could travel in three hours, then decided this could be the guiding principle to this project.

Electing at random a number of different starting points, I will travel away from each one for three hours. I'll employ similar but less stringent practices to decide how to move away from those places, to maintain the element of 'the unknown', but essentially the concern in each case will be observation.

Three hours is needed
To leave from them all
Three hours to wonder
And three hours to fall.

Next step: select the random starting points
Following this: get moving.

Oh, to wander free...

Faced with the opportunity of effectively doing whatever I wanted for the final few weeks of term, I toyed with a variety of ideas that probably wouldn't have been sustainable/possible for that length of time - illustration & art direction for the band Hush the Many (Heed the Few), a photographic series based on the depressingly repetitive interiors of chain fast food restaurants, even the construction of a ghost ride.

A recurrent theme in my work is making observations of the world around me and my recordings of those observations. In the first term I designed a game of chance based around travel in London, allowing chance to dictate my route and developing a complicated system by which to document my movements.

During these prescribed journeys I saw and heard and experienced a huge amount that was not possible or appropriate to document within the confines of the brief. This always frustrated me.

Therefore I propose to revisit the concept from which I allowed myself to deviate, the concept that interested me the most - the idea of setting out on a journey at the mercy of the unknown and learning from the environments in which I end up. The proposed outcome will be a boxed collection of short documents, taking various forms including illustrative, photographic, typographic and perhaps even filmic. The structure will be inspired by the Sagmeister 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' publication.

Researching:
- Hamish Fulton
- Richard Long
- John Cage
- Fluxus
- Situationism (in more depth than before)

Think on.

Film: TRANSIENT PROJECTIONS

So this is the finished film, Transient Projections, by me and Gemma Rhead. In the end, it all went a bit 'differently' to The Plan, but I think we created an interesting piece of work.
Music: 'Violet Tree' by M83

Building blocks

For one week only we had full run of the biggest workspace at Chelsea, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our strongest idea for the motion graphics project involved building a miniature city so we started with that in mind and decided to see where it took us.

We collected a large number of cardboard boxes which we subsequently assembled into some form of representative city.


The next stage was to play with projecting imagery onto the boxes to see what effects we could achieve. One successful test involved hooking up a camcorder to feed back live the image of the 'city' against the plain background, to give the impression of it being endless.



We decided to see if it was possible to project a different film onto each of the different surfaces - to resize video clips and have many playing simultaneously, through the same projector, from the same master file. This way, we could create a moving miniature city.

We collected over 35 individual minute-long clips of London scenes, featuring both moving or static subjects. Having connected the projector to a laptop, we used Final Cut to create a composite video file with most of the clips arranged in sizes and positions that allowed each one to marry up with particular boxes. This was painstaking but by the end we had 25 clips projecting onto 25 boxes.

Paper pictures, bits of string

We're planning a collaborative project that will rely mainly on hand-generated production. Our collective view was that we favoured the idea of building and constructing, on any scale, for this brief, and this theme should underpin the designs we came up with at the outset.

PAPER CITY
The original concept was to construct a purely paper city, a scale model of either a known or an invented metropolis; we would film its construction and then destroy it somehow, to the soundtrack of members of the public talking about their concern for the future of the city. The model is exemplified by this installation produced for the cover of an album by 'The Non', the progress of which is tracked here.





TRICK
We then thought of creating everyday objects out of plain white paper, life-size, then placing them in the urban arena and filming them. They would look out of place due to their colour, yet appropriately scaled and suited to their location. This was inspired by the work of Peter Callesen, a strange genius with too much free time who can make anything out of paper. Regard.




CUT OUT
The third and so far strongest idea lends itself most successfully to the moving image brief. After seeing the album artwork for 'Destination Anywhere' by Wheel, we had the idea of creating sets and characters in the 3D cut-and-paste style adopted by Viveletuning.





We could animate cut-out characters literally moving through the layers of the city. We could record sounds from around London appropriate to the sets in the animation, play with lighting for different moods and basic effects like panning shots, stop-motion etc. We could use AfterEffects to extend the boundaries of the city and assist with the animation techniques, but the emphasis would be on physically moving the components ourselves.

Doom Puppet

The dangers of letting A Big Idea take hold of you became apparent this weekend.

I set my little heart on designing and staging a puppet show based on urban living with custom-built marionettes telling the tales of the city. I researched puppets. I researched ventriloquism. I accidentally applied for a job at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in America. I made outrageously high bids on eBay to obtain a puppet (£15.72) and a vetriloquist's dummy (£34.22).

Thanks to the combined efforts of '3dwerkstatt', 'phillipmorton' and 'leeroyking' I have lost out on not only a 1960s Magic Toy Shop Socco puppet but also a fabulously hideous Mr Parlanchin dummy (with detachable moustache) which sold for a piss-taking £45.00.

So it's back to the (still somewhat blank) drawing board...

First/Last Magazine

The brief: To illustrate across a double-page spread the first and last lines of a randomly-selected book. The images could be drawn, constructed, photographed, written...anything goes, as long as it was black and white and represented the text somehow.

My 'first and last' were taken from Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, a book I have never read. We weren't encouraged to research the books we chose if we knew nothing about them, the idea being that we created an original untainted response.

(Click on the image below to enlarge)



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