/ Year two / Workshop: Modern Myth Lab

During this term I also attended a workshop hosted by Sue Platt about image, text and the associated narratives that can be implied through formats, media and process. First I learned how to make a beak book, the task was to create a double sided book to illustrate one of the following subjects; Masculine and feminine, Success and Failure, Reality and Myth, Feel and Live/Touch and Live or Knock Knock, Who’s there? Next I was given an induction into using the stop-frame animation suite, then asked to produce a thirty second animation with these new skills.

For the beak book I went for masculine and feminine as my subject. My idea was to photograph the graffiti that appears in men’s toilets and I asked a friend to photograph the graffiti in women’s toilets. The point of this was so that people could compare the graffiti and look for similarities or differences in the subject matter hopefully making an interesting and comical little book. For my stop-frame animation I wanted to experiment with using computer game character sprites, so I decided to create some sprites of myself and put them into a computer game world made of sweets. Although the animation process is fairly tedious, I had a lot of fun creating it and I like the unique, spontaneous feel achieved using stop-frame. I can see myself using the stop-fame suite in the future.

This workshop took me away from working on the Mac and out of my comfort zone, it enabled me to get my hands dirty and experiment with design solutions that are hand made.