For this exercise I’m including the instructions in full as they are quite specific.
“Create a series of designs that suggest movement in different ways using the following pieces of text and any geometric elements you wish to add. In a similar way to other exercises, generate a variety of options before settling on your final designs.
- Create a sense of speed in your design using the following lyrics:
Going faster miles an hour,
Gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop
From the song Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, 1974.
- Generate a sense of falling or vertigo with:
Falling down, down, down,
My head is spinning around and around,
As I go deep into the funnel of love.”
From Funnel of Love by Wanda Jackson, 1961.
- Design something that feels still, flowing or lightly balanced with:
“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again in the silent water
Under the rocks, and stones there is water underground”
From Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads, 1980.”
I wasn’t familiar with any of these songs so I began by watching the videos on YouTube. The speed of the first song, with its blurry scenery racing towards the viewer, was intense enough to be unnerving. The other two videos were less connected to the themes suggested above. The Funnel of Love video had no sense of falling or vertigo, and the Talking Heads song, being true to its lyrics, was anything but calm. Before watching the videos I read the lyrics as they were on the screen, with no interpretation other than the words we were to illustrate. I couldn’t understand how the disconcerting words which are somewhat suggestive of a slow forced drowning, could be understood as calm. This presented a conundrum in terms of whether to follow the direction of the lyrics or the brief to create something calm.
I decided to make a series of thumbnails for each song in order to consider the frame shape and composition that would work best for each one.
Beginning with Roadrunner I started with curves, then zigzags. I explored using the word ‘roadrunner’ as a compositional element defining the curves, but rejected that idea because many of the letters would have needed to be partly obscured, creating a viewing experience which would be slow rather than speedy. I gradually simplified towards triangles which could be elongated to indicate direction and speed. As I was drawing, my research on slow exposure night photography came to mind, in which the blurred lines of light were very suggestive of movement.
For Funnel of Love I focused on the feeling of vertigo. I began by thinking about the word ‘funnel’, the way that, looking down into the inside of a funnel, it becomes darker and deeper as it goes down. I imagined this to be a spiral or set of concentric circles, which, when stacked, would form a funnel. I liked a tall frame for this as it would create depth, but also had the idea of making a 3D funnel and photographing it, the light and shadow in the image of something three dimensional would give a feeling of depth and vertigo as the eye moved downwards and inwards.
When I started thinking about the Talking Heads song, I decided to go with calm as the primary message, but to incorporate somehow a sense of unease. For calm, I needed a panoramic frame, with horizontal lines and soft edges. I remembered again that I was to use geometric shapes for this exercise - I had slightly lost sight of this as my thumbnails developed. I thought of sea waves being a set of connected semicircles layered over one another. As I worked, these loosened back into less geometric curves. To subvert the calm a bit I considered using the pixelated water images from the video as collage elements for my image.
I did another set of sketches making the designs more explicitly geometric.
I then moved on to making my images. During this course I’ve particularly enjoyed working more with collage. I decided to follow up the idea of using stills from the videos within my designs. I also returned to the work of Ruth Blees Luxemburg and her evocative night photography. I took screenshots of stills from the videos and photographs and cropped and printed parts of them. Due to copyright I’m not showing my photo stream, but only the snippets I cut up and collaged.
Roadrunner
Using a film still as a substrate I added layers of more buildings to the buildings in the distance to draw the horizon closer and add to the confined feeling of an imminent high speed crash. I used triangular pieces from the night photography to focus inwards and add sensations of speed with the coloured blur in contrast with the nearly monochrome image. I also added more line markings in the road to emphasise the direction of movement towards the centre background.
Funnel of Love
I did make a funnel, though of paper as opposed to love! I made a cone of textured heart paper, added drawn over film stills and a spiral drawing towards the dark and deep centre. I cut out a female shape from one of the altered photos and stood her at the top of the funnel. I then set up the funnel to photograph it with an angle of light and shade which emphasises how far down it goes. I placed the person at an angle, rather than vertical, in order to highlight the sense of vertigo and imbalance.
Once in a Lifetime
You may need to zoom in on this in sections as it’s so long and thin. Again I cut pieces from film stills and put them on a background of painted paper. The black and white wave is actually cut from Funnel of Love, while the other waves are from the Once in a Lifetime stills. If I had wanted to create a purely calm image I would have tried desaturating the intense blue/greens and increasing the ppi to smooth out some of the pixelation. However, while I used the format and composition to suggest calm, I didn’t quite manage to entirely ignore my own response to the lyrics, which is that they are disconcerting rather than calming. In a real life situation I would have a conversation with the person commissioning the work to find out whether their aim is for a calm image or for an image more influenced by the lyrics, so that I could gain more understanding of their needs and clear up any misunderstandings before beginning work.
Overall I enjoyed making the Roadrunner image most. I like the contrast between monochrome and colour. It’s interesting that speed can be conveyed by filming a mostly grey urban environment, whereas my instinct would have been to begin with more colour. I feel that holding back on flooding the image with colour, and using colour more judiciously such as for the headlights, was a good piece of learning for me.
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