Adaptation B - Ideas/Tutorial Reflection

Preparation for today's tutorial. 

Last night I sat down, next to my bookcase, and began trying to solve the somewhat big question of "What do I like?" Apparently, the answer was - Too much. And I spent most of the evening trying to ascertain some manor of idea that wasn't simply "STAR WARS".

Understanding that the conceit behind the adaptation project is that the work should be personal in some way, I thought back to my father's old art books he had given me in a recent clear-out. Books that I had stared at as a child, by artists like Frank Frazetta, Chris Foss and Boris Vallejo. Understanding that "High Fantasy" was kind of a no-go for the adaptation project I tried to source the common thread in my interest.

"The fall of Babylon; Cyrus the Great defeating the Chaldean army" - John Martin

Quickly, I came upon the notion that I really enjoyed the simple set up of the books. The often vague title on the opposite page, or at the bottom of the piece. And in more simple terms, I liked the focus on a few subjects in a sort of 'diorama' set up.

This led me to thinking about the artist John Martin, who created large scale landscape paintings that contain various little stories within them, forming a larger narrative when considered as a whole. Traditionally, the viewer's gaze would be led by someone with an oil lantern as they would narrate the painting's events to them.

This bled into that sense of wanting to create a scene, or at the very least, a piece of work that had the story deeply baked into the entirety of it's artifice.

Alongside this, I was also trying to think of other things I enjoyed and how it could work sympathetically with the previously established wants from this project. I thought of what text I could adapt, coming to the conclusion that I am a big fan of 'Pulp'. Be that in it's more contemporary form as Comic books, and right back to the original stories dreamt up in the 20's, 30's from a slew of my favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs etc.

Additionally, I knew that I wanted to incorporate some form of 3D printing into this project, perhaps having a 3D print of a model/series of models/scene etc. form the basis of a sort of 'final' element to the project.

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Following on from this morning's chat with Alan, I've come out of it with some form of direction to go in. Relaying everything discussed up top with him, I seem to have the methodology and pipeline in order, i.e. I want to create a character maquette or possibly an action figure or a scene, etc. It was agreed that I should go in to the Pulp aspect of my ideas, perhaps contextualizing them in another time period and imagining that particular permutation of that character. Alan said that there was another students work from previous years that did a similar thing with "Drive", placing it within the 1920's. It seems like in doing something like this, ideas will come naturally from that decision.

I have a particular interest in aligning the trappings of the setting with the adapted character, be that either an original creation of my own or something directly lifted from the text.

So we're happy with my own goals for the project, and all that's left to do is to find that piece of text, that pulp fiction, that I can use to springboard into the project. I'll aim to do this, realistically, by the end of the week, but hopefully as soon as possible so I can start generating more cogent ideas.