BEYOND BUTTERKIST

As a child I was always very influenced by film. I would say it was actually my number one source of inspiration at that age being a very visual child. I liked books too because it let my imagination formulate its own images but the instant gratification of visual language in film drew me too it instantly. I obviously remember this but sitting and doing this project totally reiterated how important they were to me. I knew that I wanted to include the aesthetic of screen shots from the offset. The slightly blurred feel and notion of something bigger totally appeals to me in a big way. If they had been slightly more legible I might have even used photographs that I took of the film on the screen. I think screen shots carry such an interesting property because they can totally remind you of an entire personal feeling and encapsulate a film but from potentially an arbitrary point in the movie. I knew I also wanted to use screen shots that weren't from those famous classic scenes but the bits in between, something that didn't necessarily explain the movie to someone who'd never seen it. But I also felt there needed to be a strong either compositional or contextual element linking all the films together. So the only thing i could do was watch all 12 films again and look out for something which occurred in all of them. This happened to be a character drinking from the right hand side, obscure I know but a linking feature none the less. I think it brings some uniformity and structure to an otherwise pretty cluttered compilation of varied film titles.

I wanted to get across just how much some of these films meant to me as a child. They were an important part of me and I felt it was crucial that this was spelled out to the viewer. So I decided that I was going to create a book of films which had a short piece of writing about just what I took from each one, how it influenced me and how that related to my work today. I began work on the book and it looked like this:

There were a lot of things which really didn't work about this mock up, however I think I really stumbled across something I did like. There was a warmth in the formality and light heartedness of the way I described each picture and, although I totally messed up the typography of the headings and main body of the text, the text under each picture I'm really pleased with. I learnt a lot creating that which was invaluable. However I decided to go with a slightly different angle in the end in the form of a fold out double sided poster. It would be folded into twelve sections with each displaying a screen shot of a film and on the reverse the corresponding square would explain what it was that meant so much to me/what I got out of it. I seemed like a pretty good way of displaying all the information that I wanted to get across. Logistically creating a a double sided colour A2 print is pretty difficult in that no one seems to do them. After looking around everywhere it seemed that I would have to pay a tenner for one colour print and then make a screenprint of all the laid out text which I'd print on the reverse. I did loads of much cleaner prints but unfortunately the one shot I had at printing on my poster was by no means the best print I pulled. So unfortunately the result is a pretty messy poster. But it will have to do. Thus, its just a prototype. Surely someone in London does colour double sided posters? even after all of this the most effort by far went into writing all the text as I took it pretty seriously. I learnt a hell of a lot about myself both as a child and how that relates to me today through watching those films again and writing those captions. It was an interesting process and one which became very important in my development.