This project is part of the Alligham festival in Ballyshonnon, William Allingham was an irish writer who’s work focuses mainly on poetry.
The aim is to produce a moving image piece the visually represent the poem chosen.
In my case:
Writings.
A man who keeps a diary pays,
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful then
His busy hands forgets the pen.
Most books, indeeds, are records less
Of fullness than of emptiness.
W.A.
The irony about this poem is that if you live your life fully, you may not have time to keep a diary, witch i find funny coming from a writer. Initially, I intended to build and engrave a wooden writers box, containing letter paper, ink and an old pen. The idea was to create a stencil the text (poem) strong enough to guide my rotary tool as I engrave it on the top of the box and simultaneously shoot a sequence of animation recording that process, reversing it so it looks like the txt is engraving itself on the box…
So i got this old music box for £3 in a car boot sale:
I started taking everything out…
…sand it down to remove all the paint…
Then, I started to test my ability to ingrate and try to find the best way to guide my rotary tool…
I looked into finding the best lay out and font to suit and fit on the top of the box…
…but i needed something simple enough so i could cut it into acrylic sheets building a guide for the dremel…
Laser cut it..
Didn’t really work out the text couldn’t be any bigger and after buying 3 different and smallest ends for the Dremel I had to find an alternative…
That is when pasta saved me, again, I got a bag of theses dry letter shape pasta for kids…
By that stage the place started to look like i was getting busy…
Tried sanding a few down slowly shooting the sequence and it seemed to work well enough
Didn’t look too bad either…
so i went on ahead, glue them on the box and a layer of varnish…
At that stage wasn’t feeling to confident so parallel to this i was working on plan B, you know, just in case…
For that one i wrote the poem over and over on tracing paper until the page was full and unreadable, i filmed it from under.
Getting massy in the van too, here is the set up…
Both of these idea were not going to where i wanted and i was again learning critical lessons. I did get some nice feedback in class and the idea of combining and editing both of theses production into one video came out of it.
dreamboxprod 