Mirrors

This project was all about our Home. For me my home is where I live, and for the past 4 years that's changed each year. Some people make this big deal about how somewhere else they arn't living is their home, but I think they're idiots. My mom and dad's house is my mom and dad's house, their home. It used to be mine, but I have my own house now, and that's my home. This information upsets my parents, but the thing is, where do you draw the line? Why say that Birmingham's my home when I was born in Croydon and spent the first few years of my life growing up there? I haven't lived at my parents for 3 years now, I just don't get why that'd be my home.

Anyway, so I based my project around my current house. I started off by trying to make a book that catalogued all of the objects in my house in a Victorian style . This is because I've got quite a good memory when it comes to attaching stories to items and with my 3 flat mates I'd learnt the history of the items they'd brought with them, and knew the history of all the things that had been bought whilst we'd been living here. However, after tea staining all of the pages of this book and doing a few items I decided that this book was development work at best, and it felt like such an insurmountable task that it ceased to be fun, so I stopped doing it about 10 objects in. The reason I was going for a Victorian style is because my house is Victorian. This book has since gone missing unfortunately, one thing that I didn't get across was how filthy my house can be. Here is an example of the living room at the moment:

And that's how things like my catalogue of objects book go missing. I tend to be pretty on top of tidying the place up, but we had a party last week and since then I've been too busy to sort the place out, Jack's always hidden in his room, Grace doesn't believe she has any responsibility to the mess (she doesn't, it is mine and Chloe's) and Chloe's too busy to tidy too, she does fashion design and that's why there's fabric shit everywhere.

So I needed a fun way of documenting my house, and I thought what would be better than a video? But what sort of video is good for explaining things? Childrens' tv! So using the puppet Rabbitpuss (a fantasy creature made out of a real rabbit that me and Grace imagined was our cat once cause we missed not having a cat each, it's also an odd way of allowing us to touch one another because my 17th century morals forbid me from touching people or something in my brain isn't wired up quite right) I filmed the kitchen, with descriptions of all the things that stand out in the kitchen to me as well as an interview with Grace. I started with the kitchen because where the dinner's made is sort of where the heart is, Chloe only cooks for her boyfriend (/ex-boyfriend? she doesn't know either, silly girl's just being mugged off by him if you ask me) and he isn't round that much any more and Jack only eats cereal and take away pizza, so the kitchen always kinda felt like mine and Grace's space anyway, and that's why there's an interview with Grace in there.

It was aimed at about 4-5 year olds, with a few tongue in cheek moments (like Gracey with her knife) because I like to pervert things.

After putting this video together and seeing that it totalled about 6 mins I thought to myself, this is already a long amount of footage to watch considering it's me talking to a puppet about objects in my house. Would I really be adding anything other than just filler content by doing the rest of the rooms? Would anyone want to watch another 25 minutes of this? I didn't think so, so here is "My Home", because Grace making dinner for me is my favourite part this home anyway (she's a good cook amongst other things).


One thing a lot of people forget when it comes to video is that editing things out is the most important part (by this I mean those people from the first year project near the end, the public drawing one. Go back in time on my blog a bit and you'll a more detailed account of my thoughts regarding those idiots). Editing all the video of my house down to just one specific room is good editing in my opinion, I couldn't have had it any shorter than this I feel, and the video is quite a good descriptor of my stance on the people I live with as well I'd say.

There's a lot of extraneous information here to the untrained eye, but really it's all about my home and my outlooks on life, so it makes sense as a Mirror in my mind at least, just quite a text-y reflection!

Disaster waiting to happen!

In this project we had to invent a disaster of some sort, make something to spread hysteria about it, then make an 8 page landscape booklet with solutions to the disaster.

My idea was the biblical rapture but for people who don't believe in god.

I decided to make a terrorist-esque video message but from the antichrist, who had risen up out of Angela Merkel. I did a german accent but in the video the audio's distorted so it sounds more devil like. I also wanted to have a couple horror movie bits, to expunge the idea that this was an evil video message, so I reused my Justin Beiber mask and Madeline McCann mask doing some weird things.

For the words I was going to say in the video I took ideas from this Paradise Lost quote:

"2:880-884

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound

Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook

Of Erebus. She opened, but to shut

Excelled her power; the gates wide open stood"

and combined it with some ghost buster inspired stuff (from when they're fighting on top of the building at the end of the first one against Zool), and then I added the german accent to get:

"Ze Great Tribulation iz upon you!

For I am ze Anti-Christ, Und I am rizin!

Zer shall be harsh tunder, Und ze ground shall shake

Fire vill vrain upon you, as plague Und vor vrack ze peoplez!

Hear ze trumpet cry, to ziz cocophony I, ze vurld chancellor, shall lead you!

Ze Infernal doors are open, Und ze Beast valks among you!"

I tried to get as many Ws in as possible and swapped commas for ands so I could pronounce things that sounded out the german accent more.

I made the Angela Merkel mask, adding horns in Illustrator, then printing it out, sticking it to cereal box cardboard and punching some holes in either side, each one gets a pipe cleaner through it and then you tie them up at the back of your head. You can also see the Maddie mask that features in the video (this mask was made for last Halloween, I felt like it pushed the boundarys of halloween masks, as did a few other people, one polish woman attacked me and several people shouted at me, I had to take it off at the request of someone I was walking with who was fearing for his life).





I made the flame background out of 3 sheets of A3 paper, stuck landscape to landscape to landscape with thick black tape so they were in a loop. Then I drew out the shape of fire and painted it with acrylic paint, the advantage of using the black tape was that I didn't have to paint half of each join. I put bottles at either end then, whilst I sat with my head in front of it, my house mate Jack (who also plays Justin Beiber) pulled at it so that it moved round. After messing with the video on the computer this made it look like Angela Merkel was moving about in front of a flaming background.





Here's the video:



After that I put together the booklet, I found out what the actual effects of the rapture according to the book of revelations from the bible.
-water turns bitter
-large increase in the number of snakes
-plagues and a general increase in illnesses
-endless thunderstorms
-raining fire
-locusts formed into charioteers
-demons marauding around (including the four horsemen of the apocalypse)

and then learnt what the practical solutions to these problems were.

Here's the 8 pages of the booklet:





























The criticism I received was about the quality of paper it was printed on, and it wasn't double sided. If it was double sided I'd have to rearrange half the pages so I had the text on the left and the picture on the right. Also it was said that the Impact font and Garamond didn't go well together. But I wanted a shouty font for the titles and a more refined font to describe what to do in each situation. Surviving through the rapture is a very survival of the fittest time, and I tried to get across this idea through humour that the chance of survival was minimal. The last point against was that on the hunting snakes page the text comes to close to the bottom of the page.

I showed it to my friend Rosie the next day in illustration and her first thought was that it was a real publication from the uni until I said that I'd made it, which was pretty cool. I think that if I had got it printed double sided and on a better quality paper it would look really authentic.

I've reworked the booklet now so that the pages in it are double sided, it looks more professional as a result, as well as shortening the text in the Snake page so that it doesn't run so close to the edge of the page.