BackDrops

Just thought I'd maybe show evidence of my backdrops and their separations for when they're taken to woodblocks.

This one as far as I can think was not used in any of the storyboard scenarios but was probably the most complicated of the lot, wanted to show it's breakdown at the very least.

These last two I didn't spare time to create separation pages but did also produce myself

This, I was so happy with the turn out for I ended up using multiple times, as many as I could really loved the water effect.

(For influences of each of these backdrops see earlier in the blog)

 The Spares

These were all spares for the Dumpster I won't spend much time talking about these as my plan for the dumpster has drastically changed I'm hoping I can get photos uploaded in time for hand in but will show what I mean soon.

 The spares 

The Phone Box storyboard I struggled with least, again as mentioned in 'the spares' for my Utility Pole, I think because I'm currently surrounded by very natural landscape and scenery and have been trying to get out for a walk most days. 

On top of that I had most fun with these images, I think because this storyboard was mostly influenced by comedian Frankie Boyle and his outspoken version of the future. With certain slides, like the one of the phone box in a desert, I didn't spent much time on them, they seemed fairly nihilistic and yet funny without loads of work. I will be the first to admit though some of them could maybe use a slight finessing, not the desert one though, perfect as is, like low budget Doctor Who.

(See lower in the blog for finalised storyboard)

I love the work of Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle. He challenges where most others don't dare, pushing the more important subjects in modern society to the forefront of his routines. a lot of his more modern work sees him talk about the challenges we face as a society going forward and so I thought it couldn't hurt to maybe look over some of his 'New World Order' series on BBC.

The wealth of quotes I could choose from here is extraordinary, though I will try to be selective.

"I've a message for young People, dont be afraid of the future, it's going to be... so brief!" - NWO Series 4, mid Covid Pandemic

"Its impossible to know what it'll be like to die in a nuclear explosion... maybe you'll get to see your family melt before the blast picks you up and your finally memory will be of their faces devolving into cubism" - NWO, little art based.

"People say the best thing you can do for the planet is veganism, I don't think so. I think the best thing you can do for the planet is cannibalism. If you can eat one other person, you've managed to reduce your carbon footprint by 100 percent"

I think it is fair to say that Frankie Boyle's outlook on the future is, to say the least, bleak. Though, that said, it did really help me to imagine my own, I think because in the larger sense, I agree with these views and feel humor is necessary when trying to visualise a harrowing truth.

 The Spares

When I first started making the scenarios for my storyboards I fell victim to thinking I had more time than I did. I began with the utility pole scenarios and spent most time on them, it did help me get to grips with using photoshop to put these together but I wasn't decisive enough at the start and kept going over what I had already done.

This was the first, I tried to blow up a sketch I was fairly happy with from my sketchbook and use the photos I had taken to create a landscape in the same composition of the rough but lost interest half way through.

I then set to creating landscapes from photography but using only single photos to create the landscape and throwing in descriptors of what I imagined the space around to look like.

I played around with this idea and began retracting sections and removing whole areas, I got this idea from an album I listened to where the artist had changed production style, previously he would loop sounds and build one on top of another layering dozens of strings until he got tired of this style of production and so instead started removing whole sections of sound in order to suggest violence and destruction. I wanted something similar for this scenario and so thought to try it out for this slide

album = Public Speaking- Caress Redact

I wasn't a fan of the album but the method of creation I found fascinating. discovered through 'Perfect Sound, Whatever' mentioned in earlier blog post.

This was the first slide I began putting custom backdrops in, this is what I meant by thinking I had more time than I did. Each of these took quite a long time and not even all of them were used in the final storyboards (e.g below). They are all still quite nice though, I will show layer breakdowns of each of these later as I have planned each one for print too.

The bush here too, was ultimately not used in the utility pole storyboard, I was so happy with it though I ended up throwing it into the phone box instead, I felt the windswept look of the leaves really helped to suggest the idea of movement.

All of these were made before realising I wanted the U.P to follow a timeline that led to Philip K. Dick, Cyberpunk inspired efficacy.

This was where I realised I wanted it to follow a more William Gibson/Phillip K. Dick inspired style.

These last two show that I really struggled with creating such a feeling/aesthetic, I think not being surrounded by a built up city effected this, being in the outskirts of Glasgow, surrounded by rolling hills and lochs I didn't have much room for real life inspiration here, to the point that the last slide (below), really isn't anything just a collection of images almost none of which are mine.

After a long struggle though, I managed to get something I was happy with for the finalised storyboard and actually, the two last slides in the U.P storyboard are two of the ones I'm most pleased with.

 I mentioned Philip K. Dick as a huge influence on me earlier in the year, he tried with his work to describe a future setting, though in all of his work he described a human presence in the futures he postulated, now we wonder if there will even be one.

 Dick described future society's as mass consumerist populations controlled by advertising, mega conglomeration companies that owned all the wealth upholding social divides and influencing the population and the planets surface destroyed by war and radiation with animals dying out. With today's world having reached almost all of these criteria, what would he have written about now?

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Philip K. Dick

IF THIS IS THE ANSWER WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

265 MILLION

"Is it.. when the machines finally take over. How many humans will die in the first 24 hours, that the machines will later refer to as.. The Great Adjustment?" - a quote from Frankie Boyle in a popular segment from Mock the Week.

Films helped a lot with this storyboard. To name a few;

The Stalker- Andrei Tarkovsky

Blade Runner 2049- Denis Villeneuve

Fahrenheit 451- Francois Truffaut 

(See the finalised boards lower in blog)

References and Influences

Thought I'd create a post showing any influences on this body of work I feel I may have missed out in the rest of the posts!..

looking at the webpage of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. On their page I found several essays that had been written as critiques of their work and explained the qualities that made it stand out. I found a great deal of very useful info and several passages that really helped me understand what it was I was trying to do with my own work.

 Lori Nix clarifies that she is a photographer above all else, although is only behind a camera maybe once or twice a year, with each miniature taking around 6-7 months to build, Nix did not see herself as a sculptor, in fact, after completing each model she scraps them entirely, this would also come to be an important discovery in my work as I intend for these models to be viewed only through print when completed and slowly aged step by step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZh3Oi7d0q0&t=56s

http://www.lorinix.net/essays-1

"Pictures enable us to imagine some thing as something – in the sense of a scene. This is made possible through the alternation of closeness and distance – and is also valid for experiences in extreme situations, such as a disaster or even the Apocalypse"

As I like to use photography and with my study in to the Japanese sense of space earlier in the year, this was a great passage to come across.

"Scenarios are neither forecasts nor visions of the future, but analytical explorations of possibilities" - Eva Horn

 This is written in to the same article but is a quote from a German author who is a lecturer at the University of Vienna, from her book 'The Future as a disaster'. It helped me realise I wasn't trying to be factually accurate but just descriptive in my understanding of a series of possibilities.

However these were images of a future setting that looked at the city after humans had gone extinct, I wasn't so interested in this as a root study/focus and so deepened my search still.

I also found that another British comedian was a great help, James Acaster. He wrote a book called 'Perfect Sound, Whatever'. About the music from 2016, which he names as, undeniably the best year for music ever. He proceeds to try and prove this through the course of the book by naming overlooked musicians that released an album in 2016 and describing the processes some went through in making their work. Beyond finding some amazing background music to work to, I also found these descriptions of processes quite useful in some cases, so much so that I tried playing around with similar ideas in my own work, I'm not sure anything concrete came from it but it certainly helped with productivity in a time that I might've struggled otherwise, so grateful for it all the same.

This was brilliantly helpful, at times when I was getting disconnected from what I was doing I would read a chapter and find similarities between what I was doing, how I was working and so many of the artists in the book.

Other Artists Work

Amy Bennett, I won't say that this work was a driving inspiration throughout the project as I was only introduced to her Instagram @amybennettstudio a short while ago by John but it is a great example of what I'm trying to do here, build miniatures to be viewed in 2-dimensions Amy Bennett works with models to then paint from.

Animation is something I do love and how space is built in it fascinates me. This is some background art from a recent release called Dorohedoro. Was super helpful to see how sci-fi cityscapes were built in a 2-dimensional format.

A lot more films but thought another worth mentioning was Andrei Tarkovsky' The Stalker was really worth a mention. Not my usual taste in science fiction cinema but knowing it was filmed almost entirely in an abondoned factory site I think somewhere in Estonia, it did help me realise that wires and far fetched futuristic imagery isn't all that when creating a convincing science fiction setting.

Dumpster Storyboards

The Dumpster follows a slightly different course of events. Instead of describing a series of possibilities that will lead to a future that is a version of extreme circumstances, I wanted this one to follow a course of events that suggested time will progress exactly as it is now. Again, I will clarify, all evidence and influence will be surmised in slides after this post.

I personally see this as the most depressing set of events. The thought that the future will progress with nothing ever changing from current times is to me a frightful one.

If pollution build up and climate disaster does not change societal values or wipe us out from this planet I'm glad I won't be there to see it.

It is a terrifying thought, to imagine what the world may look like in this circumstance.

These Slides may appear under developed but that is as I intend them, for them to become less developed and refined as time passes in this series.

 

Utility Pole Storyboard

As mentioned in the previous set of annotations for the Phone Box, after a tutorial, it was suggested to me that it could be useful to add figures to my images to give further description of the scenario.

I started all storyboard images with this one and so thought I had slightly more time to play around with backdrops and such than I actually did. So, for this one and the next four I have a unique layered backdrop for each.

I've always had a strong connection to graffiti and really enjoyed what it does to a city, strongly believing the claims, that it has no intention or context therefore little more than unpleasant mark making to be misguided.

Graffiti, or the lack thereof, tells you everything you want to know about the area you are standing in.

I gravitated toward a Cyberpunk style set of scenarios for this series. As again, I previously mentioned, all influences will be shown on separate slides later but with Bladerunner and Philip K dick having been mentioned in my work earlier this year I thought it right to try for myself.

This one I'm really happy with.

This is close to printable, though again with time running out I cut a couple of corners and would likely struggle to reproduce some of the 12 colour blocks I used to make up the mock up in woodblocks.

 

Phone Box Storyboard

For the Phone Box, I chose to create a set of scenarios that would lead the phone box through a climate disaster.

Each set of storyboard images will be joined by a slide that shows all reasons for/ influences and general back up after I have displayed all storyboards on the blog.

I created all the storyboards using as much of my own photography as was possible.

I played around in this set of images with the idea of adding animals to assist in building up the scenes. After advice in a tutorial on how much figures can tell a viewer about what is going in an image, I thought with this one it would be good to use animals in place of human figures as I did not want to suggest a human presence throughout this set of possibilities.

I also attempted to create each image in a fashion that would allow for me to take them straight to print so as not to waste much time in Unit X fretting over how they would be printed.

I used certain pieces of work multiple times through the storyboards, to save time remaking several water scenes, I had gone to the effort of building up layers for one oceanographic design and was happy with the turnout.

Some images were not my own, unfortunately I've never had the opportunity to see a desert and so had to take the image I used here from online.

In this image I struggled to build it up in layers that would be easily printable and so must admit that this would likely need editing before taken to print, though that said, it's also likely one I would not be interested in actually taking to print without extra work anyway.

This one I'm happy with.