100 Bill Murrays: Part 2.

Okay, another 30 if these damn things out of the way. Less than half left to complete. I've cheated a bit this week and printed off some cut-out element sheets, from images I looked for online. Actually, I thought about this for quite a while and I don't think it is cheating, I'm just "using the available resources". So what do we have?

Rhythm: employing the old fold'n'cut technique.

Humour, perhaps? This is not just because I like Garfield. Bill Murray actually provided the voice of Garfield in the live action/CGI film and it's sequel, Garfield 2.

Texture (though it's not real wood. You have to imagine it is.)
Repurposing? I don't think I've done any of those yet.
This could be Editing, or Composition. Jack Nicholson, of course, from the famous bar scene in The Shining. By this point in the film he had long ago started talking to himself, so it's no surprise to see three Jacks lined-up for a drink here.
Same scene, different cast. Look how similar they are!
...and same guy, different movie. This is Bill Murray as Steve Zissou in Wes Anderson's film of the same name.
Is this wearing thin yet? Bill Murray again, in the same set-up this time, but with better company, in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. I think I've given up for now on deciding which theme to put these under.
Like a well-oiled machine...
Okay, I know this one, this is definitely REPURPOSING!

And the final one for now, the three characters and the beer reduced to RGB blobs.

100 Bill Murrays: Part 1.

So with just under a month to go, and a new project brief breathing down my neck, I've completed barely a third of the number of collages required. I need to either employ some child slave labour or think up a few more ways of creating collages without thinking too much about them. Here's a selection of some I've made so far:

Narrative. Here I've provided a different setting, perhaps altering the narrative of the image. Have they missed their plane? Do they care, given that they appear to be on a tropical beach? Or are they off-duty pilots?

This edited composition amplifies the loneliness of Billy Murray's character.
Surreal head-tentacles...
Rhythm. Rather than cutting and individually pasting each strip, I left them connected at the top, and laid them concertina-like across the backing card.
This collage - a post-it stuck to the backing card - refers to a different aspect of the process of making the collages. Not too sure which category to put this under though. Narrative maybe?
Contrast. Not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear coming from the mouth of a drunk. Or maybe it is?
Composition. Images removed, with cut'n'paste words standing-in, to describe the content of the image.
Composition again, with the key elements of the image presented as a simple formula.
Editing. This image refers to the editing process of choosing the still from the movie.
Editing again. The focal points of the original image have been removed, but the white shapes in their place are perhaps more visually striking.
Narrative. Speculation over the roles of the three characters. Poor Barney Gumble on the end is a nobody.

VCT collage: System

A description of our collage-based VCT session in 257 words:

Briefed as a group to create five newspaper collages in relation to the word "system", we chose to focus upon five different daily publications - The Evening Standard, Metro, London Lite, The Mirror, and The Guardian - and highlight the differences between them. We set aside the most obvious elements of headline, image, and content, and concentrated instead upon the underlying grid systems that define the structure of the page. To expose the grid we removed all content from the page, leaving only the margin and gutter spaces that lie between the text-blocks and images.

We decided early-on that it was important to employ a systematic approach to the creation of our collages, so that our work methods would reflect the theme of the exercise. To this end, we each produced a cut-out from a page of our chosen title, before collaging them one on top of another to create the single image pictured above. Overlaid in this manner the differences and similarities between the grids of each newspaper became apparent.

We found there were more similarities than differences - all the newspapers seemed to use a 5-column grid, with the bottom fifth of each page separated for an advert or body-text. The Guardian, as the only publication here to be traditionally a broadsheet rather than a tabloid, is a larger format and contained a higher proportion of text columns.

To further investigate, we could compare pages from a wider selection of newspapers, and perhaps look at historical examples of how grids may have changed over time.

Conclusion on this exercise:

I soon realised that the guideline of 150 - 250 words in which to describe the exercise doesn't provide much room for waffle. I found that a re-wrote most of the text, opting for more straightforward descriptions - a more matter-of-fact approach, you could say. The 1,500 word-limit for our first term VCT essay is pretty strict too, so I'll bear this in mind...

100 collages: Exercises in Style / Groundhog Day

Matt Madden's comic artists' textbook 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercises in Style presents 99 different interpretations of a brief 8-panel story, an idea taken from Raymond Queneau's Exercises In Style (1947), which features 99 interpretations of the same short story retold in different tenses, and in different styles such as free verse, sonnet, and telegram. Madden likewise retells his story from a variety of perspectives and in many styles, including superhero comic, 3-panel daily, and even as a newly discovered fragment of the Beyeux Tapestry. Here are three examples:

Original template.

Humour.

Subjective.

So, inspired by Matt Madden, and the cropping and image workshops from earlier this term, I've decided to use a single image for my series of 100 collages, and to see if I can produce 100 variations based upon the 10 themes. And rather than take an image randomly from a newspaper or other already available printed source, I've chosen to use a still from the 1993 existential romantic comedy Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again. After watching the whole thing several times I've realised that it's not a great-looking movie, but still I've managed to weed-out a dozen or so candidates. Here are a three of them:

I'm aware that this may end in a snivelling admission of defeat, but I think it's worth a go. 100 is a big number, but 10x10 doesn't sound so bad...

Image & Collage

As this handy diagram demonstrates, THOUGHTS, IMAGES, WORDS, and TEXT are all inter-linked. Sounds obvious, though I can't claim it's something I've ever sat down and thought about. We looked a little deeper into the idea using several examples of collage, and by making some of our own.

In addition to the examples of noted collage artists provided by Darren - Alexandr Rodchenko, John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, Alan Fletcher, Alex Williamson, Sara Fanelli, Martin O'Neil, I've chosen an examples by 10 other contemporary collage artists, one for each of the following themes. While found tonnes of work I liked, it was very very difficult to decide which category to put the examples in. I'm not even sure that my final choices were correct, but it certainly got me thinking. Click on the name for a link to the work.

Collage Themes:

COMPOSITION // James Dawe

EDITING // Hubert Blanz

CONTRAST // Valero Doval (Ghosts)

RHYTHM // Are Mokkelbost

TEXTURE // Hilary Pecis

REPURPOSING // Valero Doval (Aerofauna)

JUXTAPOSITION // Mary Virginia Carmack

SURREALISM // Andreas Banderas

NARRATIVE // Devin Troy Strother

HUMOUR // Anthony Zinonos

And surplus to the list, but worth a mention - Ian Monroe (pictured), Mario Wagner, Seth Curcio, Bill Zindel, and Christiana Couceiro.

Okay, now the work we made during last week's session. Here are three rather creaky 10-minute collages that I created, each one in response to a particular theme:

EDITING: The removal of the central figure from the image, in this case also the focus of the focus of the other figures, creates an ambiguity: are they helping or restraining the figure?

EDITING again: here the removal of a background of limousine interior and foreground details of champagne glasses, combined with the repositioning of the of the two figures nose-to-nose, explores the ambiguity of the celebratory/violent nature of the image.

SURREALISM: With conscience and temptation on each shoulder, here's Top-ranking UK Scrabble enthusiast David Webb. David's top tip - "Qinghaosu", an "anti-malarial medicine made from the mugwort”, apparently.

Finally, here's my series of collages produced in response to a brief of "as many as you can in 20 minutes". To speed things up I chose to create an A-Z series, with each single letter taken from the large headlines of an issue of the Telegraph, and the corresponding words from the sub-headlines of the same paper. With content and layout repeated across each collage, the process became automatic, with my own decision-making limited to the first few few minutes of the task. Even the words chosen to represent each letter were largely chosen according to their availability. The result: 20 complete collages, or 1 per minute. Almost a full alphabet!