Lighthouse Elemental!

Well after another hectic week in IMedia full of storyboarding, making of sock puppets, filming, editing, flash animating, library reading, trying to understand ethical theory, paper reading and report writing, I find myself sick in bed for the weekend when it's sunny outside...doctor's orders I guess!

Lighthouse Elemental', our latest project for Contemporary Art in the Public Realm (CAPR) had it's 'showtime' last Wednesday, 14th April 2010. It was a rewarding experiece and I gained so much from it. As a class we seperated into 5 groups and each group simultaneously projected their piece on the front facade of U.L's Plassey House. Each group was given a theme. We decided that we would each take one of the 'Four Elements'. As we were the fifth group and there are only four elements, we decided to take influence from Captain Planet, a children's catoon were eac character was named after an element, however they had a fifth character called 'Heart' which was changed to 'Spirit'.

Spirit as a theme was more difficult than I thought it would be because as a group we all had different ideas of what it is. It lead to much brain storming and trials and finally Sophie came up with the 'Lips' which lead to this video being produced.


Sophie's original 'Lips' video

Vinny created some ideas too. This mad me start thinking about how we could use the lips, what they would look like, what sound we could use etc. So I made these two videos.





The 'Lips' idea didn't really stick though. It didn't represent 'Spirit' and it was really hard to storyboard and script. We went back to the drawingboard came up with a story and decided to use puppets(suggested by Mikael) as our main characters.Filming took up a lot of time, as did post-production! But eventually we got it all together.

What was nice about this project also was that we didn't just work in are small groups (Vinny, Sophie, James, Myself and Lucy) there was also big class involvement. There was all the pre-production elements, mapping out the building correctly, the putting together of videos, setting up of projector etc. Aladdin generously did a lot of work to make it possible, and we got to benefit from his talents!I learned many lessons and tips from this experience eg. video doesn't really look great when projected, time management is key to success and group work, it's hard and complicated!

It was a proud moment standing on the grass watching the videos with friends who came to see the show. The same feeling you get when your in a school play and it made it all worth it!

Here are some videos from the day taken


This is our part 'Spirit'



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