"Develop a short piece of moving image work based around the notion of the city and its many narratives."
The first thought that came to me on considering the city around me, was my experience of public transport on my journey to college on the morning of the brief. It had been a particularly unpleasant journey on a very crowded train, with dozens of people pushing and shoving... I started to think about the way people behave when they're travelling. Generally, they're in a rush, and their main concern is to get themselves to their destination as quickly as possible, at the cost of anyone else. There is also a convention in our city that no one talks to anyone that they don't know when they're on public transport. They don't usually even make eye contact... If I were to strike up a conversation with a passenger I'd never met before, no matter how friendly my words were, I would be considered eccentric. This depressed me. Why are people so unfriendly when they're travelling? In fact, why are they so unfriendly most of the time.
I decided I wanted to make a moving image piece to express how alienating and unfriendly the city can be. I would stick to the theme of travel, and try to replicate the experiences I've had travelling on crowded trains.
I started by taking my camera on my next train journey, and taking as many photos as I could. I also took some film, but after looking back at the images, I preferred the effect of the still images taken in succession creating jerky, disjointed movement.
I would need a protagonist - a character to experience and thereby express the alienation I'd felt... I didn't want to use a real person, so I decided I'd work with a hand drawn character, creating an animation of him to lay over the photographic moving images I'd created. I liked the idea of a very small, cartoon-like character trying to travel on a train, and having a hard time - being jostled and pushed about. I also liked the idea of no one paying any attention to this strange character - I thought this would express people's apathy to each other quite well - they're so switched off they don't even notice a tiny animal trying to make a journey on the same train as them.
Here's a photoshop file I made to show how my character will look in the photographic world:
He's sitting on the station platform looking dejected.
