On Monday we had our first breifing for the new unit. I immediately got very excited about two things. First, was getting a chance to develop an idea I had been toying with for a few months, and the other was attemping to create a more immersive experience for an audience using projection, performance and sound.
The general idea is to have a full room projection and soundscape of little vignettes of a circus show, ending with space for the viewer in the center of the ring to perform a little talent if they wish. Each vignette would contain performances or interactions with my characters. My brother goes to music school and I know serveral amateur voice actors that I believe would be willing to help out, on the sound side of my project.
For a while I’ve had this bubbling idea of one day being able to pitch a Nightcrawler show to Marvel. He’s my favorite X-Man and his origin story has so much potential for exploration. However after a conversation with Darren, wherein I realized I should work on original concepts to establish myself, I put that project on the back burner. A few months later I went to the Tim Burton exhibition at the Design museum and I realized that the aspects of Nightcrawler I wanted to explore, tied with the darker themes, aesthetics and influences, all pulled from a fascination with the carnivalesque and circus arts.
I wanted to draw influence from Tim Burton’s work but I really want to dedicate effort to inclusion in my character designs and stories. Primarily, because of Tim Burton’s notorious statement, films “don’t call” for black people (and evidently other people of color) and repeated instances of racism in his casting and story-telling (there’s only so many times you can try defend yourself Tim). I think the circus and particularly clown arts are a perfect medium to gather a wide variety of characters of all different backgrounds with distinct designs, while leaving room for audiences to insert themselves into the narratives and connect with “masked” characters.
This new idea combined with the original concepts and influence from my Nightcrawler series idea turned into a world I slowly began building over the last few months. I think in the future I’d like this idea to be developed for TV, but this project gives me a great opportunity to create a portfolio of concepts for these characters and settings as I continue to work on over arching stories. I combined my list of references from both ideas as a way to start building my vision, drawing from animated media as well as music and literature.
On the technical side there are a few things I need to explore including:
- What space will I have to present my project?
- Who can I work with to produce sound?
- How do I go about creating a full room projection?
- Will I need to learn any new software?
On Wednesday, we presented some of our initial research. In all honesty I forgot about this until the morning of so I very quickly threw together a presentation. Luckily, because I wrote the above section of the post on Tuesday, I already had a clear idea of my references. Below are the images I showed
Su-Lynn liked the direction I was heading and established that we could talk further about the installation medium in a tutorial. Through presenting I distilled that I’d like to focus on color and composition in the context of a 360 animation, dynamic, action focused character acting, and atmosphere and audience integration.
On Friday I went to Mario’s toolkit session. I mostly spent the class doing the abstarction excersise, but Mario also came around to offer individual help on personal/other class projects. I told him about my idea, but since it’s still very early stages there was not much concrete we could work on. He did however, offer some clarity as to what I would need to do, and agreed that my first steps should be to write and storyboard the narrative idea. Then I would work on design and conceptualization for the projection, and then later learn and try out projection mapping. He emphasized the need to think about why I wanted to use the intallation medium and to weigh the value of using this method against the cost of producing something of this scale. Essentially, I have to come up with a good rationale for this medium as well as just the narrative idea.