Human Landscapes

This was the first and only collaboration project of the year with people from other disciplines. We had to brainstorm the idea of 'human landscapes' and what it meant to us, in groups set by our tutors. We started off in our own disciplines, researching our own ideas and coming up with initial reactions to the brief that was set for us

"The Brief...

Over the first week we will ask you to individually collate a body of research in response to the theme ‘The Human Body’. At this point you can enjoy casting your nets wide in terms of gathering material, exploring, drawing, interviewing, photographing, filming and finding potential themes and ideas. In the second week we will assign you all into small groups (mixed from each department). We would like you all to use your research material from week one to aid a creative discussion towards creating a 3 minute film (minimum), that is centred around the human body. We make no stipulation about the type of film, only that it has at its core the human body in some form.

Your films can be works of fiction, they can be documentary, they can use the body as an environment, they can focus upon bodies en masse, they can focus on an individual, they can focus upon the body in a clinical, technical way. Something that is driven by the mechanics of how a body functions, or something that is driven by perceptions of the body as being a container or a trap, perhaps the body in question is used as a canvas to project films on, perhaps costume and adornment of that body/bodies, embody concepts of stricture or of movement. It is up to you to decide, as a team, what film you want to make..."

I also did some research into painting on myself to look at the idea of body art and manipulation, and research into artists like Jaume Plensa and Alexa Meade

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Everyone wanted to use animation in some form so it was my role to teach them how to animate and use my knowledge, which I enjoyed doing. Our group struggled to come up with a strong idea behind the visuals we were producing, as all we could think of was what we wanted it to look like - not a storyline or idea linking everything together.

After a few days, we decided on the idea of 'the absurdity of human dominance over nature'. We all went away and came up with our own visuals for this, and then came back the next day and decided how to film it all. Some of our ideas included leaves climbing up somebody's legs, ice pouring from a boiled kettle and a jumpers wool taking over a person. All of these challenged the usual and typical way that humans interact with objects, which is exactly what we were going for.

We met up at Molly's flat and began filming straight away. We set up a projector on a blank wall so we could show images and film footage during the filming of our own short movie. We decided to get film footage which contrasted to the idea being presented by our actor, to further emphasise the struggle between humans and nature.

Our actor was one of our team members, Molly from Performance Costume. We found this to be better than using an outside person as it was much easier to organise and we didn't have to work with an extra person's schedule. She was also happy to do it, which was a bonus.

I took a photo of us filming the leaf scene to show how we did it. All we did was stick leaves to Molly's legs and take a picture, then add more leaves and take photos until her legs were covered. This was a very simple form of pixelation which worked well in our film.

Overall, we worked well as a team, and all contributed well to the discussion and decision making. i really enjoyed this project and would like to keep in touch with the girls from it.