Elapse's Preproduction

Synopsis

Short films documenting, through timelapse, the construction of dioramas within architecture.  They will consist of custom 3D printed models, made to recreate a scene taken in a picture. These dioramas will inhabit a public space that juxtaposes the state of the architecture, or represents a message about the space, and how the advancement of technology has affected these establishments. They will be accompanied by the diegetic sound of the scene being recreated in diorama.

 Mood

Detached, melancholic, unbiased observations of establishments over time, thought provoking - meditations on time and the fragility of existence and memory - exploring the nature of visual recall - ambiguity of scale. 

Treatment

These 3 short films document the process of a 3D object being printed, constructed into the larger diorama form, in time lapse to create 3 approx 2-3 minutes films.

The models are semi rough looking, composed of of fine layers of PLA, solid coloured.

At first the audience is not aware of what will occur, the sound provides a clue of the location, theme and objects within the diorama (choral music, pub noise, city sounds.) 

I will then take the models and construct them into the diorama, at the location and film the process using a DSLR on a tripod roughly real time, these will be short films, establishing still followed by a mid shot of the dioramas area, and a tighter shot for the construction timelapse.

Public House- This artwork intends to provoke it’s viewers to think about Britain's recent litany of Public House closures, by juxtaposing the site of a closed pub, with a miniature depiction of a bustling one, through the creation of a diorama. Pubs are one of Britain's many uniquely wonderful things, and it’s a shame to see so many of them close. A factor attributed to this is the beer tax in the UK, it’s what drives the pint up, and the people out, So I thought I’d tag this diorama with the hashtag ‘#axebeertax’. This hashtag, when searched, gives quite a lot of insight into Britain's pub problems.

Waverley Abbey Ruins- I always see the town's church, across Bishops meadow, on my way into town, it’s an incredible piece of architecture, but in our current era, has become more obsolete, with regular church attendance being in decline, I thought it would make another good reflection about the passage of time, and how as technology advances around us, with more and more of it being incorporated into place, we start to see less of an attachment to the things we cannot (necessarily) prove. 

City regeneration site in Birmingham- More of a personal motivation falls behind this diorama. I grew up near Birmingham, and spent a long time there, due to my college being so close, it’s seen most of my growth and development, and I wanted to capture that in a metaphorical diorama. I’m returning there in January, and I’ll be buying my own 3D printer, so I’ll do all the work for this diorama there, too. I plan to lay out a small section of soil, below the sculpture, which will be of a section of the city, the soil will allow for seeds to grow small plants around the buildings in the diorama, though, this concept needs to be tested first.

Idea Research.

This project began as an idea sparked by a Korean street artist, Sanago, who makes small art pieces primarily designed to fill spaces within broken architecture, for example, filling the space brick once inhabited with a bridge that has a man bungee diving off it. 

These sculptures were a really neat way of making natural degradation into art, and almost sort of repairing it in the process. While the short films are great, and the idea is strong, I was never a fan of the way he does commentary. 

The idea really took on a better momentum when I realised that rather than senseless, wholesome street art, this idea had the potential to send a message within a public space, in a strangely hidden, but also very public format. Most of the theory for it came from this, Sanago’s videos gave me loads of tips on methods for using the pen, and even ways to increase the strength of the overall structures. But after spending hours making a stool and a pint, for them to look less than impressive, just due to the nature of 3D pen printing in general, if the shapes were less complex than the interior of a pub, maybe the pen would’ve viable. 

(pen created support structure, too thick, and you can see how messy the results look)

Alas, I moved to making the interior out of 3D Prints from an actual printer, with models being faster to assemble in maya, resulting in more accurate, cleaner models. With help from my friend James, I was able to make the same objects I had spent hours trying to get right, more accurately, in half the time. But, this takes away all of my ability to have the objects adapt to their environment, so instead I decided on a mix, I would print each aspect individually, and use the pen to bind them together, allowing me to keep the ability to place them according to the restrictions of the space. 

(the stool is halved, due to it being difficult to print an overhang)

(two of the models I have printed)

By this point I hadn’t really thought much about the films that were coming out of this. Admittedly, but Jerimiah, and Kathleen both gave me some big strides in the right direction. Firstly, both Jerimiah and Kathleen pushed me to go in the mostly 3D print direction. Jerimiah gave me a link to the ‘Additivist’s Cookbook’, an ebook that gives lots of insight into 3D modelling, as well as containing a large number of free to use models, though, for this, I wanted to make my own, though they very much helped me to understand what you can and cannot print, and how to optimise models for printing.  But they also got me thinking of the film side of this more, Jerimiah showed me an example of somebody using a raspberry pi to run a script that causes the nozzle of the printer to stop and retract after printing a layer, and then takes a photo with a camera set up opposite, so that when the photos are shown in order, rapidly, it creates the illusion that the object is appearing from thin air. And while this is a great idea, I don't think it’s something I’ll be capable of implementing in the first short film. 

Kathleen helped me a lot with the tonal side of the films, encouraging me to insert an air of ambiguity, which is something I hadn’t realised would be so effective, but I quickly realised it was something Sanago’s videos were missing. The interesting bit of his films tends to be the process, but there isn’t much of that in an object that is 3D printed away from the scene, and the idea of taking that knowledge of the final result from the viewer, so they have something to discover, puts the ambiguity right back in. One of the ways of emphasizing this, was to give the viewer clues. To that end, the idea of including the diegetic sounds of these places being created, so they can only guess at what is being recreated, with the audio making more and more sense as it goes on. 

With the projects emphasis shifting its focus to observations of the passage of time, and commentary on technological advancements having more discreet effects, the idea to potentially grow small plants under the model made a lot of sense, but of having a plant grow out from under a model, seem to more to do with growth, that change or time passage, I know those things go hand in hand, but the focus of the first two dioramas had less to do with growth, and more to do with change. I liked the idea, and started exploring different small-scale growing seeds, but I didn’t really have anything in mind to fit the subject of growth. I had thought of potentially picking a spot in nature with significant motifs of time and growth. But a big part of what pulled me into this was juxtaposing elements of our current day. Nothing opposes nature quite the same way as civilisation, to me, so I had the idea of modelling a place personal to me, Birmingham, the city that saw so much of my own growth. 

For a long time, the recreation of the pub didn’t have a whole lot of meaning, it was simply an appreciation of a waning British trope. But I realised quickly that it serves well as a method of getting people thinking about WHY these pubs are closing. A lot of pub closures are linked to the rise in beer tax, as well as the competition of supermarket-bought alcohol, and I think that’s something very few people are too aware of, and while the problem is nowhere near as simple as #axethebeertax, the hashtag is a very easy way to fit all of Britain’s public house problems, into one diorama. Just running the hashtag through a search engine gives a wide variety of opinions and outlooks into the rising closures. 

Crew. 

Dean Wright- Director/Producer 

James Dodd- Assistant producer, computer games art collaborator. 

I’ve been working with my friend James on this project, in order to keep myself from falling behind with modelling, it’s not an easy task learning maya from nothing, so I asked him to help keep me from falling into any deep trouble with the project. In return for this, I’m helping him to understand the parameters required when 3D printing, and what kind of things do and don’t work so well