Year 11 Project

STORIES

This project is all about stories and reflecting upon all the different ways that they have been told, shared and interpreted through time.

Before you read any further, I want to point out that this intro was written towards the end of the project as I had many false starts and a major accident during the middle of the project, but more of that story later.

Indeed the whole project has had to be re-presented in electronic formats since IT (the incident) happened, although I do reference some of my original work in places, so .... back to the beginning.

INTRODUCTION

I remember when I was younger, my grandma used to read me fairy tales out of a big embossed leather book. Whenever I think about stories, this is what immediately springs to mind. For this reason, I decided to use an embossed leather book as the background for the introduction to my project.

Whilst I was scribbling away in my sketch book trying to get my ideas out, I had an image in my head of a story book coming to life. There isn't much creative freedom in a sketchbook when you are not good at drawing or cutting and gluing. However once I had transferred my effort to working through the project using computers to manipulate photos and videos, I started to get excited and this image became the starting point for my whole project.

I am both the storyteller and the main character in this project as it is all about my journey from struggle to success. I thought that the best way to portray this was to put myself on the book cover to underline that not only is this a key story in my life, but that I am also the actor, narrator, photographer, editor and technician.  I believe that this approach has scope for exploring a depth and complexity that could become very confusing if not worked through properly, but ultimately has the potential to be very effective, hopefully involving the audience in a way that it will leave them interpreting the messages for themselves.

I really love how this embossed image turned out, and I am really proud of it as I certainly wouldn't have been able to create anything like this by working in a sketchbook with my limited artistic skills. Once IT had happened the various new media options were the only ones I had, so I applied my love and skill with computers to programs such as Photoshop and Sony Vegas through which I have now learned to express my ideas increasingly freely.

So with the idea of a story book coming to life, I set about recording myself narrating an introduction expecting that the red background and shirt would look good against the reddish leather.

                                        

When I tried to blend this with the book it just didn't work at all. I decided that a green screen approach might be the way forward so re-recorded the words and tried again. At first, I didn't realise that the red background and red shirt would be a problem. I spent hours worth of takes to get it all right, then I had to go and do it all again because the chroma key function on Sony Vegas would delete my torso, which although it may have looked cool, didn't fit what I was trying to do at all. I also had completely the wrong angle and yellow lighting which looked really unprofessional.

Having changed shirts, backgrounds and colours and learned way more about the software I managed to get myself on the cover of my storybook. So now I had what I thought was the final edit to my introduction.

As I watched my intro over and over again, I felt it needed something else. It didn't seem to come to life, instead it just started. I came back to my memory of Grandmas' embossed book and suddenly wanted to try incorporating this idea as well. When I showed my parents, Dad said " ooh get ready for a tale of the unexpected" and Mum suggested I use the music from the TV program. So I put it all together and here is my introduction to my project on Stories.

RESEARCH

I started by looking at how some contemporary artists approached the idea of storytelling in their work. Initially I looked at five different artists : Jon Rafman, Tom Allen, Tom Hunter, Tom Phillips and Francis Bacon. Based on their ideas I started to create a mind map of their approaches and some of my own ideas as a start point for my own exploration.

                         





I have put together a short video to show some of the work that has influenced me and discuss some of my reactions to it

Starting with John Rafman's work around Google map images, I picked up a book at random, flicked to a page with my eyes closed and put my finger on the page. When I opened my eyes, I took the word that I was pointing to and looked it up on Google maps. Some of the images were fascinating, but it was clear that only a few really seemed to contain a story with any interest. Rafman however did an amazing job in selecting images that were drenched with story and more often than not unanswered questions.

Two thoughts stayed with me, a picture or very short video can easily contain more content than a volume of text and convey many layers of a story in one hit. I decided to absorb this intent into my final piece, but abandoned a more direct use of Rafman's techniques.

My next experiment stemmed from my original brainstorm about the use of different story telling mechanisms in different cultures. I liked the simplicity of high contrast shadow puppets that hint at the identity and emotions of the main characters, whilst clearly showing the background and environment in which the story was being told. I spent some time exploring this idea, but my struggle to make my own puppets frustrated me and I couldn't see how I could use this as part of my final piece.

                         

My final experiments before IT happened were based around the work of Francis Bacon. I was immediately drawn to the visual impact the pictures had whilst not always making the story obvious. There were so many ways to look at his Triptych work; beginning  middle, end - mind, body, spirit - past, present, future - hearing, feeling, seeing and often many interpretations simultaneously.

                       

The strange deformations and disfigurements were the part of his work that hit me the most so I played around with this myself but came back to the view that this was just his interpretation of the anguish or pain in a situation. I left Bacon to explore my last piece of work, but not before I  linked Bacon's work to physical and mental pain.

Finally I explored the work of John Wood and Paul Harrison who took a very simple visual approach to videos that told the story of their interaction with each other and objects. In some ways this reminded me of the puppet work, but it felt more accessible and up to date. I tried combining the two by creating some simple flip book animations, but again I struggled to find my way with their work or my interpretation of it

My final thoughts were about the open endedness that the majority of these artists showed in their work. Rafman, for example never gave any of his own interpretation of his work or any back story to any of the characters that were shown in his bloopers of Google maps. In the same way that Tom Phillips created his short story and didn't link it in with the book or give a reason for why he chose those words, he just created the story and the art and left it to the audiences interpretation as to what each of his little stories meant. I decided that in my final piece I wanted to have just enough story and just enough gap for the audience to have space for interpretation.

FINAL PIECE

As I started to think how best to create my final piece I became more and more frustrated. I loved some of the work I had studied and admired the ideas behind it, but i really struggled to get a grip on how to create my own work. Despite the countless hours I felt I really had little to show.

Then IT happened, it was a rainy Monday afternoon. It seemed like nothing at first, I even cycled home from school after finishing off my games lesson. It didn't really hit me until I was in Accident and Emergency that evening. It was then that the Doctors words really hit home. "Well that's the end of my Mocks" I thought, and as for photography - well as if it wasn't hard enough already, now I didn't have a hope in hell...

A week or so later it hit me, my pain both physical and mental made me think of a Bacon picture - and then I knew, that was how I would approach my final piece.

The three key elements that I decided to build into this final piece were:

Seeing from the start, through the pain, to the end of a story; all at once - Bacon
Allowing the audience to fill in their own back story and meaning - Rafman
Show change over time and how the new is much like the old - Hunter 

My final piece was heavily impacted by my research on Francis Bacon and his work on triptych. I decided that his technique was the most effective way to present my work as it seemed the best way to represent the idea of telling my story as I could clearly illustrate which parts were which allowing for flashbacks as well.

The core idea behind my final piece is the story of this project and my attitude towards photography before and after IT happened. The reason that there is such a contrast between before and after IT, is because I had my focus narrowed for me by events beyond my control. This lead me down a path I may not have taken, a path where I discovered a way to manipulate ideas more easily despite my problems.

Once IT happened  I had two choices: give up on the course or find a new and different way of doing the project. It was only then that I discovered that I could do a whole project on video which I have found is much more suited to me and a lot easier to create work and express ideas - even in my current condition.

Manipulating and editing film and images is a much better technique for me as it is something that I have much more affinity for. Computing is one of my hobbies which makes the project not only easier, but more enjoyable also. I find the aspect of "nothing is impossible" much more fun than working through a sketchbook and trying to be creative through how the work is presented. I have certainly started to appreciate this technique more and more as I continue to use it.

One problem that I had not anticipated with using video for this project was the amount of things that can and do go wrong. For example, if you have a blue screen and blue eyes, you can end up  cutting out your eyes as well and not realising until the full screen preview! Secondly, if you don't completely control your environment, you can end up with a huge number of mistakes which can lead to massive amounts of files taking up masses of space. All of these problems are elements of working this way which I had not experienced before, so this project has been a real learning experience for me.

The final hurdle that set me back a huge amount was the way I had to edit all of my videos so that they would all fit into the screen in the style of a triptych. I did an early mock up by simply rotating three videos to fit the screen. I managed to forget this and spent days working on good videos that were landscape instead of portrait  Only when I came to the final edit did I realise my mistake and had to throw it all away. The only solution I could think of was to film all the segments that were the wrong way up, again, but film them portrait so that they were sideways when they got imported, and the right way up when it came to putting them into the final film.

So the final piece shows the story of me and my attitude and mentality towards the project before and after IT happened. The layout will be familiar as it is in the style of Bacon. My triptych is Beginning, Middle and End as well as Frustration, Pain and Joy and Struggle, Release and Expression.

The left panel uses Rafman, with the simple poses and blank sheet of paper representing my struggle for ideas, mixed with my fight with my own artistic inability.

The central panel is a very literal copy of Bacon - I even took the background from one of his most famous pieces as the setting for my chair bound agony.

The right panel takes the Hunter approach of replacing old with new. The medium may change, the environment may change, but the story remains the story.

At this point in the blog, I was ready to insert the hundreds of hours of tests, experiments, outtakes and lessons learned, which all contributed towards the long process of the build up toward the final piece. However, upon reflection, not only would this have made the blog tediously long, it would also have let you know what IT was which would never do, because this is after all... A story. So without further a do, let me introduce, my final piece.

I hope you like it. I know I like it, thank you IT.