Well...the multiples in Edinburgh brief I was working on has come to an end. I had a lot of research material to work my way through and in the end came up with the idea of re-creating a sandstone Edinburgh tenement (like a set background for stage), then, projecting 6 different stop motion films I had made onto the window spaces on my set. Like this piece, My Favourite Track (1994) by artist Gillian Wearing, my stop motion will have all 6 videos playing at the same time.
I started the creation of my tenement by making a small maquette of just one window, complete with tracing paper glazing and blue curtains, this one also has a mixed media type outer wall...
I then went on a hunt for some materials and was lucky enough to find in the sculpture room at college, this very tall (approx. 6 feet tall) and thin (approx. 1-1.5 cm thick) piece of board...perfect! I started to measure out where each of the 3 floors would be and where I wanted windows cut and the position of the front door...
Here is the top section of the board with windows cut into it...starting to see a tenement flat in there somewhere.
After the windows were cut, I popped into B&Q to buy some emulation paint, after some experimenting with textures I decided that mixing sand with a tin of paint would be the best effect on a student budget option for me! I was able to source some free sand from the very kind people at Historic Scotland, I also added some window sills with off cuts of wood from the sculpture room and secured them with a glue gun and some thick layers of sandy paint...
Again a bit of modifying some off cuts of wood I was able to create a door frame and some detail on the front door itself. I positioned the front door so as it appears to be open by glueing a small wedge of wood on the wall, behind the door. By bending a piece of wire I was able to hang a little led lantern and a brass incense burner fond in a charity shop worked out really well for a door handle along with a couple of tiny measuring cups for the window sills, which I went a bit overkill with so scaled them back a little before the hand in.
Here is a photo of the whole thing in the sculpture room. It's not completely finished in this photo I just liked that it had a rubbish bin outside it. You can't see them in this picture but a vital part of this piece was the inclusion of 2, white security cameras positioned on the building. Through some more research I had found out that Edinburgh currently has spent the most on and has the most surveillance cameras of any Scottish City. I decided to try and create an Orwellian view of Edinburgh through the use of cameras and film.
The final stage of my set once the windows were on was to project the stop motion films I had made onto the back of my board. Unfortunately I couldn't manage to match up the position of the films with the windows on the board and was at this point I relised I should have projected the films onto the board first, then drawn round the projected windows to get the correct positions...oops.
And finally, here is the stop motion film I projected as a separate piece onto the wall next to the Edinburgh tenement. The puppets on the videos are made from card, black ink and small sections of wire to joint the arms for easy positioning. The puppets were moved bit by bit on a white sheet of paper and photographed every time, the blinking light was made by swapping the white paper for black, and the camera was positioned on a tripod over the puppets. The separate photos were then edited together for a certain length of time and when played the puppets look like they are moving. Like the previously mentioned Gillian Wearing piece My Favorite Track I too have decided to play all of my videos simultaneously.
