Plog

For the past few weeks we’ve been helping people at the Emmanuel school work towards their Bronze art award… A whirlwind project, super-quick stencil making, cutting, spraying, and scrubbing paint off our hands.

We barely had time to delve into the complexity of different techniques, but hopefully the whole thing has been inspiring - we hope that some people might have the confidence now to use stencils and sprays in other artwork. It was a real pleasure to work with the year 9 pupils - everyone has worked incredibly hard and achieved so much. We just wish we’d had longer… We’ll add more pictures once the boards are finished. In the meantime, if you worked with us on this project, please tell us what you thought! Leave any comments below.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, be sure to visit the Montana shop - a wonderful world of colours, cans, paints and pens.

This was a Creative Partnerships project and involved 2 more artists, Rachel making masks and Julie exploring set design with other year 9 pupils - we’re looking forward to seeing what they’ve been up to…

Inspired by a post we saw on the MAKE: blog, we decided to make our own vibrating robots with Newtons Walk school…

We’ve been looking for an excuse to get stuck into some electronics with a group for a long time - we do a lot of circuit mashing at home - and as they had all just watched Wallee we thought this would be the perfect time.

Soldering in school wasn’t an option so we just used terminal strip to hold the motor, LED and battery clip together. The weight on the end of the motor was a piece of wooden dowel drilled off centre - all easy for the pupils to assemble themselves with a screw little driver. After a busy morning of designing, making, building, wiring, and gluing, we all put our bots to the test in the drawing arena!

If you want to try this yourself use superbright red or yellow LEDs. There isn’t enough juice in 2 batteries to push the motor and blue or white LEDs too. Pupils used whatever they could lay their hands on from our big-plastic-junk-box, and we encouraged them to try different designs to see what worked - shifting the weight and balance, adding legs or ripping them off. It was a lot of fun!

QUAD employ us to work at Newtons Walk. Keep your eyes peeled for more Newtons Walk posts, and an upcoming exhibition at QUAD in July!

Apologies to our two readers (us) for the lack of any updates for geological ages - we’ve been excruciatingly busy with so many projects. What this will mean though, is lots more photos and videos to add very soon.

Speaking of which:

We’ve been trying to use blogs as a way to document projects and get schools to share and talk about what they’re doing. You can see how the experiment unfolds at the Creswell Roots site and Fountaindale Art Blog.

It’s a lot of work trying to keep everything updated, but it has been good to get things up online right away - hopefully the schools will take things further and we can take a rest!

Recently, we were asked to do something a bit different:

Our friend, David Matthews - whose theatre company VXII writes and directs interactive issue-based plays for young people in schools and youth centres - commissioned us to make a digital backdrop for his new play about cyber-bullying, ‘Toasted’.

We were charged with technical duties - creating animated backdrops of key scenes, as well as texts and instant messages that would appear back-projected onto a large screen to insult and confuse the bullied victim, and enable the audience to read the correspondence as it arrives.

The whole thing was controlled by the cast with a little slide show clicker, so they could respond and interact with the text and scenes as they chose. We had to work in response to how the actors used the images and text on stage experimenting with placement and timing. We were also able to add subtle sound effects relating to each scene - kind of important for the gaming bits, and quite atmospheric.

It was fun to see it all come together, from hazy beginnings and worries that the live action and the projected side wouldn’t mesh - to the point when it was almost seamless. The cast did an excellent job of using the technology. It’s hard to see how the play might have worked without the projected aspects - the instant messaging and texting are so integral to the story - which we suppose makes the experiment a success!

Ah! Unfortunately we didn’t get any video footage of the play in performance, but David emailed us a few photos from rehearsals… The show went on the road in November, a short run at schools in South Yorkshire.

This project was turned around super quickly really, considering how many elements had to work together, there was more than one night without sleep as technical problems and deadlines loomed! But we’re really excited by the idea of doing something like this again, with more time, on a more ambitious scale. Wow, the sorts of things that are possible…

Here’s a little story about Timmy McCoy…

This film was made by Leila Newton-Fox… You might remember her from oooh, our last Plog post. We met her first when she joined us for a few days work experience. We had a really good time working with Leila, and were sorry that we couldn’t offer her some experience of animation - it’s something that she has a real interest in - so we offered to help her turn one of her ideas into a short film… 4 months and one intense weekend later, we finally got around to it.

Leila worked hard at home to put together a simple storyboard and make some exquisite puppets and props, wow! It’s something she excels at, for sure. With some painted backgrounds too she was ready to start.

We soon realised that there was no way the puppets would stand without a lot of re-modeling so, Martin quickly improvised a multi-plane camera setup from some old bits of glass and spare wood that we had in the workshop, so that we could animate with the characters lying down, and simulate depth by layering the backgrounds. This worked so much better than we hoped!

Over the sunny weekend we were all sealed away in a coal black room, minutely moving miniature figures, endlessly it seemed, at times. Leila carefully arranged all lthe scenes, and we helped as best we could, hopefully she got some sort of insight into the film making process, we tried to let her take the lead wherever she could.

With the finishing touches of some guitar squeals, metal scrapes, Leila’s drumming and the voice-over, it was a race against time to get the whole thing edited and burned to DVD in time for Leila to go home and get some science revision done! But we did it.

This last weekend was a lot of fun for us, well done Leila, you can be proud of this!

Just a quick note about something new that happened for us before the summer.

During the last Bang! film festival we were introduced to Leila, a student at a local school, and a talented artist. She was very forward thinking in organizing her own work placement, and one of the festival organizers pointed us out, thinking we’d be able to help. We thought it was a great idea! Something we hadn’t tried before which seemed like it could be an interesting challenge.

So after submitting to an interview for the school, it was agreed that Leila would work with us for 3 days on one of our projects.

Well, we just wanted to say what a positive experience it was for us! Leila was incredibly helpful, thoughtful and typically unfazed by a bellowing primary school class with earsplitting home-made musical instruments. A consummate professional.

It’s certainly something we’d like to do again, so if anyone is reading this (anyone???) - schools, pupils, parents - and is looking for (what we hope would be) an interesting work placement then we would love to help if we can.

We really should have Plogged about this earlier!

We’ve posted a lot about animation and films recently, so here’s something to redress the balance a little.

This was a really short and sweet project with Southglade Primary school last summer. They asked us to help build a tree for the school reception, to be part of a quiet area where children could read and think about their hopes and wishes.

We worked with all of the infants in the school hall (the only room big enough) to make leaves, blossom, and branches using found, reclaimed and recycled materials - plastic bottles, tin can bells, scraps of discarded paper, cardboard, carpet and twine.

The young people made birds and butterflies to sit among the leaves and the branches had pegs attached, for people to pin their thoughts to. Finally the tree was shuffled out by the window, with seats and a table under its shade.

We had a really wonderful time, but it was incredibly hectic! We learned a great deal about working with lots of people - two class at a time, doing multiple activities in the hall together. Piles of carefully sorted coloured materials gradually migrating to every corner. But there was such excitement, and as the tree grew, a real sense of wonder in the air.

Expect more in this vein soon!

Talking of bones (which we were before all the technical problems):

Here’s a short film animated by young people visiting Creswell Crags last Saturday. If you don’t know, Creswell Crags is a limestone gorge full of ancient caves. The Caves are full of the remains of animals and human tools,  and they’re the only known place where you can see Ice Age rock art anywhere in this country! Pictures that are around 13,000 years old.

Well, what an inspiring place! Working outside under a tent, children drew Ice Age animals, hunters and scenes using crayons and charcoal - Afterward animating them really quickly, to tell simple stories.

The changing light in the tent really added to the effect! Like flickering fire-light. Later we added photographs of the rock walls in the background.

The music was made by Newgate Lane primary school on their hand made instruments.

We just had a great weekend at the Bang! film festival. It’s a wonderful, completely non competitive short film showcase at the Broadway cinema in Nottingham. They have a community film screening, young peoples matinee, animation section, films in the bar and a main event, with lots of international work spread over the two days. The website explains it better than we can:

The festival runs 3 times a year, each event featuring a range of films mixing no cash raw talent alongside big money slickness, documentaries and drama, comedy and musical, experimentation and madness!

Bang! is a film festival run by filmmakers for the sole purpose of providing an opportunity for filmmakers to get their films screened to a cinema audience. No one film is judged better than another … its just a chance to see the many small explosions of film talent being made out there …

What’s really inspiring is the local talent on show, and the sometimes zero-budget, gung-ho, grassroots, DIY nature of a lot of the films. It’s important to see that stuff alongside the more polished or established films. And inspiring too for any young people involved to see their work on the big screen, back to back with big budget blockbusters! pffhew…

A few of the films we’ve been involved with were showing too, and some of the young makers came along to see the show.

If you’ve never been before then be there next time, and if you’re a film maker then send them your films!