CPS WEEK 4: PLACE

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WEEK 4: PLACE!!

In response to the theme of Place, I wanted to analyze the character of a place, how places act upon people and things, how I could make a place vital to a narrative and how I could recontextualize a place. Part way through class, I wanted a coffee to help me think, and therefore had to pick up some groceries. I took some photos of the woolworths and the shopping complex near my house and thought about what design ideas had led to the mall comprising the shapes and holes and patterns that it does. 

It seemed to me that the glass sliding doors on the front of both the front and rear barkley square buildings are meant to be about 2 people wide and one tall person tall, but the designers of the 2 doors have a vastly different idea of what size 2 people comprise. As a heavy set person, I often wait by the entrance door on one side as I don’t want the social discomfort of someone having to squeeze around me and physically express how much space I’m occupying. I also found it fascinating the intentional illusion of movement space in shop fronts. The front of Barkley Square, the middle doors, the entrance to kmart, coles and woolworths are all 30-40 feet wide at ceiling level, but are either filled with windows, or cluttered with displays that limit the actual traffic down to a one or two person wide gap. It gives you a sense of the scope, colour and brightness within, while limiting access to those things. In an earlier draft of this project, I flipped my photos upside down and imagined creatures (at that stage, aliens) walking through the wide open doors and sitting on the light fixtures, but dropped the idea when I realised the ceilings were all extremely similar. Instead I turned my mind towards the idea of non-human sized creatures in spaces designed for humans. That way I could reference my own experiences exploring those spaces. 

The first major influence for this work was Rober Lobel’s 2016 “Wind” short which I watched for Animated Narratives last year and brought up as this week’s context example. The short is a non-verbal comedy, centering place as its protagonist while unnamed character’s navigate within it. I also think I unintentionally took sound mixing comedy ideas from Aardman animated shorts I watched a lot as a child, specifically background character interactions in the first “Creature Comforts” short they made. Because of these influences, a non-verbal comedy short came naturally to me, I honestly didn’t think hard to make it something else as the idea just stuck. I chose to work in 2D animation as it is my main practice and I hadn’t done a 2D submission for CPS yet, so it seemed about time. I’m trying to be as varied as possible but I also know where the main current of my practice is and how much time I should be following it.