Harry Griffin
"We're all stories in the end, just make it a good one"
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
A short brief introduction
My Group:
- Myself
- Will Russell
- Jacob Louro-Lopez
- Millie Gray
- Victoria Clayton
The artefacts produced by you in collaboration with your peers during this project will be displayed at Newstead Abbey as part of the Christmas celebration. The intended audience are children with their families and other interested visitors. The tone should be light, fun, fantastic and inclusive. The exhibition is seasonal, for Christmas entertainment. Alice in Wonderland is known for its strange playfulness, shifting scales and iconic characters.
Mood board 1
As at the start of the last project I have started off with a mood board. This one looks at the different characters and scenes from Alice such as the Mad-hatter and his tea party, the guards painting the roses red, the croquette match with the Queen of Hearts, Absolem, and the White Rabbit. These are all key characters and scenes important and seen in all variants of Alice in Wonderland.
Already we can pick out certain colours that are seen throughout: green, red, blue, purple. And these will all fit in really well with the Christmas theme at Newstead Abbey.
Second Mood board
In this second mood board I looked at different ideas for the project with the laser cut playing cards which are very stylised and could have a great effect with the Alice theme but I am aware that Adrian has got a playing card display near where I would like to have the project displayed.
The other ideas are for the layered silhouette design which is my favourite as you can have such creative freedom with this with the design and lighting.
Research
Here we have some very quick mock up sketches of the designs for the Cheshire Cat faces and the stacked box ideas along with the three different locations I have in mind.
Concept
We now have some fully fleshed out concepts for the stacked box idea which as a collective we agreed on to use as we feel even though its quite ambitious we feel we can complete it to a high quality and it will fit in so well with the event.
There are sketches for each of the boxes we are completing with notes and a Photoshop edit that I completed with the finished piece one of the possible locations within Newstead
Design
My next step was to then design all of the different layers for my box on Adobe Illustrator which can be seen in the picture slides and also what all of the layers look like when compiled on top of each other. I really took the time to think about what to put on each of the different layers and on the last two layers there are large holes around the borders which will allow more light to be let through illuminating the rest of the silhouette layers and not just through the centre portion.
Box Construction
With all of the designs being cut out using the laser cutters it was time to create the two largest boxes which will encase the rabbit hole and Cheshire Cat scene. For this I went down to the workshop and spoke to Albert. I managed to get ahold of some spare pieces of wood that had been left over so nothing new had to be bought. I used sheets of MDF and OSB to create the boxes. To then attach them together I used wood glue and the tack gun and it became extremely sturdy. An arch was also cut out of the back to allow for easy access to the lighting.
Also for safety purposes I drilled holes through the bottom of the smaller box and through the top of the biggest box and placed three bolts held in by nuts to keep it very secure as I was aware children would be at Newstead and young children have a tendency of touching things,
Layer Construction
Once everything had been cut out at the laser cutters and the boxes had been assembled it was time to put together all of the layers. We cut strips of foam board and doubled them up for thicker layers using double sided tape as it kept everything together well and kept everything neat and tidy which is why we didn't use glue as it would have been much messier. Between certain layers we also played LED strip lighting to give a better effect for the lighting as you didn't see a lot of the detail if it was just lit from the back (as can be seen in the images when we were experimenting with the different lighting
Self Reflection
I really enjoyed the creative freedom for this project, I could really let loose with the skills I have already and also gave me a chance to develop new skills also. In my opinion I could be more creative with this project than with the BBC 3 one. I had a great experience with this project. You also get a good feel for other peoples skill sets also and what abilities they have which was very helpful for delegating tasks that needed doing throughout the project to make sure everything was completed on time for the hand in.
Going to Newstead Abbey was probably the most helpful aspect brought to the project as when we went I got so many ideas for the project and possible spaces to use. This is one of the main reasons I pitched the idea for the layer boxes depicting the different scenes from Alice in Wonderland because that concept and finished idea could fit in almost any room, and in the end it ended up going in one of the upstairs rooms which was perfect as it was quite a dark corner of the room on a rather high chest of drawers and the finished project really drew all of the attention of the room with the bright lights and shadows it cast across the room. You get a nice sense of different perspectives also of the boxes as on one of the sides you get the book spine effect going up all three boxes and they were illuminated nicely and then on other side of the three boxes you get the wonderful effect with whole pages from Alice including the chapter titles and a couple of hand drawn illustrations inspired by Tenniel to go with that.
I do feel that I had the biggest workload out of every person in my group however with the multiple different aspects I had to complete such as: sourcing the lighting, preparing all of the different files for illustrator, and also building two of the three boxes in the workshop using various different tools and methods. However, I very much enjoyed this as I feel that it has furthered my practice for the industry later on as I am sure I would have multiple things to do at once while coinciding with a deadline. But some people did pull together well in the final stages of the project when we entered the main construction stage of building up the laser cut layers with foam board and implementing the lighting into that also with the immense experimentation we did with lighting. Everyone in my group had some really good ideas and we managed to incorporate some of them into the boxes which was a really great thing as it means everyone has had some sort of collaborative idea and not just stuck to one person's ideas and designs. There are a couple of minute details I would change however if I were to create these again. I would add more couplings to the rabbit on my box as it wasn’t very secure until we backed it with some black foam board onto the layers behind it; and also add connections between the centres of letters as some of them just fell out, but you could still tell what letter it was meant to be. Overall the project was a great success and I am very happy with the outcome (I also heard multiple people at Newstead say how much they liked it as they walked round).