Introduction
After second years final project and with a little help from everyone around me, I found my passion for sculpting and liked to get my hands dirty, so I decided that third year would be sculpture themed. It’s not what I intended on doing when starting this course but through, what I believe to be failures, I made to the other side with an idea of what I actually enjoy. It uses my craft skills more than computer skills, yet still uses the sound editing skills I learnt from second years professional toolkit. This way I could point all my focus into creating something big.
Adfectus
Adfectus is my only project that I tackled on my own, to bring, what skills I had learnt and testing newer skills, into one big final piece about a topic that has effected not only myself but most of the people around me.
Before third had even started I had obtained an idea from a moment I had once at university. I wrote it down and had my heart set on it, the idea of an interactive animation that had themes of mental health issues being depression and anxiety. After going through all of first semester with this idea in my head and all the preproduction work based on this, I was devastated and struggled to agree with the concept of changing the idea a little. The reason behind this was that I, myself, had no experience with animation, which I tried to counteract by asking animators around university if they could help me out, but then came the topic of what would I be doing work wise? Yes, I had done all the preproduction and concepts for it, yet I was passing it on to someone else to do for me. With a bit of guidance I realised that I was being a bit ridiculous with that idea and pointed me back in the direction of sculptures, which it only then hit me that that is what I should do for my project?
Luckily I already had all the concept art for the animals, I just had to figure out how to make them and what to add to it for the cherry on top. That’s where I came up with the instead of drawing them, I’ll make them out of wire and paper mache, as I had experience with once those before. In second semester I started to gather the materials for this project and got down to testing what materials. The wire I found was both good in width but strength wise could be a little stronger however it still holds itself up once all put together. It was the paper mache that caused a lot of problems, when wet and applied to the wire it seemed fine, but once it dried it became tight and bent the wire in whatever way it felt like it. So I quickly had to find something else to cover it and give the animals some skin. I thought that tissue paper would be a good substitute and that if I added a light inside it would add a cool effect to the room that they were displayed in like a lantern. However, after covering half of one of the sculptures, the tissue paper was found to be a little untidy with the corners being roughly done due to the difficulty of cutting the paper and then attaching it. So once again I was back at the drawing board thinking about what kinds of fabric could use to give these sculptures skin, as it had to be in a certain colour and not be too heavy for the wire. This took a long time to find as I had little access to fabric stores, and the ones in which I did visit didn’t help all that much with helping me find the right ones to the point I gave up and tried Amazon in which I bought some Navy blue Polyester cotton to see how it felt weight wise and how it looked, as I was under the intention that Polyester cotton was shiny.
The next major change was when I had a realisation that I may not be able to get seven get larger sculptures made in their certain style and covered with fabric within the specific deadline. So I changed up the idea a little to reduce the amount of animals I had on display and would only present the main three given me more time to work on them and make sure they weren’t rushed causing them to look bad especially as they’ll be presented in a Grad Show. This change in plan also helping the way of storing the sculptures as each one would be around thirty inches high and twenty inches wide which I wouldn’t have been able to keep in my room and I couldn’t store anywhere else.
Then I had a tutorial a little too close to deadline, whilst I still had a lot of work to do on the sculptures, finishing building them and attaching fabric to them. However everything changed once we discussed the issue of how the sculptures would look finished and came to the conclusion they would look to crafty as even with the polyester cotton fabric the edges and corners were still a bit rough, less so with than the tissue paper yet it still didn’t look that great. Instead with help the idea changed into the sculptures having there wires bodies exposed yet their faces covered with a veil of fabric that hits the ground. The transparent like look to seeing what it’s made from gives them a raw feeling and more interesting to the audience eye, however I didn’t really like the sound showing the insides of the animals as I felt they were quite shabby looking compared to being covered in fabric but due to time it would have been impossible to get them done in time. Also with the veils I enjoyed the idea it meant that I didn’t have to rush with applying a full coat of fabric to all three of the sculptures. Now it was the issue of finding another fabric that fell in a certain way that looked nice and fall neatly over the faces of the sculptures as for the fabric to fall nicely across the detail of them. After some research about what fabrics draped nicely I came to two conclusions, silk satin and chiffon. With none of the fabric shops that I could reach in time having any of the colours I wanted I had to look on Amazon again, with orange and green chiffon coming on time and only the silk satin blue coming on time as well. Hoping they all would come earlier, of course they didn’t. After receiving the fabrics I found that the chiffon was a better fit for placing on the sculptures as it fell with weight but wasn’t too heavy the only issue was that I was missing one the colours for one the sculptures. So to fix this I used the silk satin I had received as a substitute until I got the Chiffon to complete the set, sadly that was out of hands.
However I managed to finish the wire body of the sculptures on time with the only issues being that if moved too much the wire will start popping out of the joints. I also had problems with how the wire would come in a roll which then required me to sit and straighten out long lengths of wire for hours and hours so that when it came to putting together the sculptures, I wasn’t interrupted in having to straighten more wire and I could focus more on them. The other issue is with the hot glue that I used to put them together, as much as it is strong enough and holds them well, it only does so for a while as they can pop out, I did think about using a soldering iron and then put hot glue on top, however the thickness and type of wire I got seemed to be too thin to solder together and would be just as weak as having just the hot glue. Also, if I had realised this ahead of time I would have tried to solder it, just too see how it would affect the overall look as well as the strength of all the joints and if that would have helped them stand up more and resist more weight of the fabric. I also couldn’t test certain things at home, such as making sure the length of fabric was good enough and that they all stood up on their own without falling over. However, I do know that two of the sculptures can stand up on their own, only one falls forward which I can only fix with a possible bamboo stick hidden under the fabric to keep its chin up. Overall the sound piece was the easiest as with the help from professional toolkit in second year I knew how to record sounds and edit them on Pro Tools and Audition. This meant that when it came to recording, and especially because it was a scripted sound piece, all I had to do was record the lines and edit a few sound effects to make it like internal thoughts with some ambient noise and they were done. I didn’t choose doing just sound because it was easy, I chose it because I knew that the sculptures would be my main focus and would take most of the time I had, therefore with the sound, I could add something to the sculptures with little effort and still keep most of my focus on building them.
I still feel that I have learnt not to think too big about what I want to do, project wise. I have these big and wild ideas from nowhere, but either don’t have the talent or time to make them which is what I found out over the course of this year with this project, as its overall size went down more and more to the point where I feel like it’s very minimal work due to its original size yet what I’ve done is a lot, especially for one person. And sadly if it wasn’t for the issue with my dissertation and problems at home I would have had an extra month or two to really sit down and put all I have into make these, possibly making them even bigger, or better quality, but I am pleased with what I have achieved this year. Also thanks to this third year project, I have learnt what I really want to do with my life, job wise and even finding myself through a series of ups and downs over the past three years, I have learnt that as I need to limit myself to what I want to achieve, again project wise and in some cases real life, there is also the fact that I can be easily disrupted from my motivation to do something that I enjoy. I find that I get too attached to my ideas which makes it harder for me to see the smaller and better outcome to said ideas, and the fact that I have no sense of time in as time management is still one of my down falls.
