RSA Student Design Awards

I'm entering again this year into the RSA Student Design Awards in the Moving Images criteria. There are two amazing soundbites available to create visuals for, one on climate change and one about education. Both are so relevant to what I've been researching this year that I've decided to try and create an animation for each.

Living with Less

This one is about climate change. Richard Sennett talks for a minute about how people need to start collectively being less consumerist and actively seek out simpler lives, in order to make a change to our endangered world. I've chosen to animate this using a simple, hand-drawn style in pen and watercolour of recognisable imagery associated with climate change to reflect the need for simpler lives.

I'm hoping the end result will be a fluid, beautiful animation.

RSA animate revolution

I watched this discussion last year when applying to the RSA student design awards, and it really stuck with me. I loved the scientific approach of testing the benefits of animation, as I think all too often the sciences and the arts are segregated from each other, when in fact, they work very well side by side. I rediscovered this in researching for my dissertation, and I think it was actually the springboard that got me interested in how people process information, and how alternative methods of communication, such as animation, can be really beneficial.

Irrational Fears...

I've started animating the irrational fears that people have told me about as 10 second shorts, which I hope are quite funny because people will relate to them. As I was collecting these little neurotic thoughts, I was struck by how many people shared similar ones. Some are just peculiar though... Like this one about ducks. It's a real phobia called Anatidaephobia...

Observational Illustrations

Whilst I've been waiting for an interview with the charity I'm animating for I've been investing some time in making illustrations observing human nature in (what I hope) is a comical way. I figured this was good practice for capturing character and a more interesting way of 'life drawing'. I've been questioning friends and family about their weird, irrational fears, what makes them happy and what little things reeeeaalllly annoy them, with the intention of documenting them all as small collections of illustrations and animated shorts.  Some of the illustrations have just been fun little notes on my own life; things that I think/hope other people can relate to. I'm trialling them out on my instagram feed to see how people respond to them/ whether they think they're funny or relatable etc, and hopefully encouraging people to send me their own weird fears so I can make even more content and have a broader range of contributors. 

Alternative Map of the Human Brain

Flatmate Life

The Papercut Theatre - Slides

For my papercraft workshop today, I made a powerpoint slideshow to introduce the concept and plan of the day, and provide a bit of inspiration with links to other papercrafters work. I showed them clips from the lovely stop-motion films of Lotte Reiniger and Andersen M Studio to inspire them that paper can be magical when well lit and given a story. I even included some mini sets I'd discovered online that were created inside toilet rolls, to show that even the most bog-standard (pun intended) materials can become magical worlds. I made my slideshow into a small movie below.

The Papercut Theatre

So today I ran a workshop for MMU's Saturday art club about papercraft and shadow puppetry. I led a group of around 13 teenagers in a 3 hr workshop, with the aim of creating several finished mini shadow puppet plays by the end of the session.

I followed the standard design procedure when planning my workshop so the Sat Clubbers had the experience of following a real design process in miniature. Normally these processes could take days, weeks or months, but they only had 3 hrs!

My lesson plan was as follows:

•       10 – 10:30am : Briefing   BRIEF & RESEARCH

We’ll look at examples of shadow puppetry and papercraft art. Separate into groups of 2-4.

•       10:30 – 11am : Storyboarding  DESIGN

Plan out your backgrounds, characters and basic story. Can be your favourite story, a new twist on an old classic or something completely crazy from your own brain. It just needs a beginning, middle and end.

•       11am – 12pm : Making  CREATE

Design and cut out your characters and sets from the paper (sometimes it’s easier to draw with your scalpel rather than sketching out an outline first). Practice your performance.

•       12pm – 1pm : Performing  PRESENT

We’ll project and perform our shadow puppet shows using the overhead projector and film them.

The session went really well I think. In spite of the limited time for each task, (not helped by the usual slow start in the morning)  the Sat Clubbers managed to create characters, backgrounds and storylines in the time. Admittedly this session could be more successful if it took place over an entire day because then there would be more time for developments and practising the performance side. This type of workshop could even be extended into several sessions over the course of a week, with whole days dedicated to RESEARCH, DESIGN, CREATE & PRESENT.

This seemed to really capture the attention of the whole group though as there was something to appeal to everyone, from the designers to the story-tellers to the makers and directors. I think it works well as a group workshop because it requires cooperation, encourages them to talk creatively and share their work, whilst still being light-hearted and fun enough not to be scary. It touches upon lots of themes from childhood, which seemed to put the Sat Clubbers more at ease. They seemed confident when I told them that they could reimagine a traditional fairytale rather than invent an entirely new story themselves, and although shadow puppetry and using a scalpel does take dexterous skill, the pressure to draw something 'well' is reduced when it is just a silhouette. Folk art seems to have this uniting, unintimidating effect on people and it's lovely to see it happen. In the end, it was all just a bit of shadow play and fun.

Timescale Issues

When most people pick their projects for third year in Art School, they focus on their own experiences, their personal stories, and things they know about. The advice for writers is to "write what you know" and I guess that applies to illustrators too.
I didn't want to do this though, and chose instead to make something for a charity based in my local area. This comes with a series of complications that don't necessarily arise when you work independently on a personal project. One such difficulty is balancing a timescale. For the past few months I've been struggling to match my own uni timescale of deadlines etc, with that of a busy charitable organisation and another family's hectic schedule focused around their sick child. A word of advice for anyone taking on a project like this is not to expect it to be a quick process; and patience, flexibility and communication are key.

Things are starting to get off the ground a bit more now and hopefully I'll be able to start storyboarding this animation soon after a meeting next week with the chosen family.

As a back up though, so I can dedicate a longer time-frame to this charity project, I've decided to enter the RSA Student Design Awards again this year as the deadline's correspond quite well with the uni authorship deadline in February. The RSA animate shorts are part of the inspiration behind both my dissertation and authorship project this year, so it makes perfect sense to get involved again this year. Not to mention that one of the talk options to animate to is focused on education and creativity (my dissertation topic)! It's nice when a problem actually leads you to something better than before!