design

why is it taking me soooo long to blog!!?? im going to try and bang this one out... here goes...

Having been assigned to the design team, we had our first meeting with Tina last week where we began to discuss possible ideas for costume. the main issue that arose is the fact that there is no chance of us being able to design individual costumes for the 3,000 or so people that are going to be involved. Instead we began thinking of themes to use for costume. Colour was an idea as we felt it was nothing personal to a specific community group like country for example would; everyone can relate to colour, and it also sticks to the idea of a carnival which is what we imagined this event to resemble.

We came up with vision of a rainbow making its way towards Ham House. Different colours will be given to different groups within the parade(colours shall be repeated further down in the parade)which they will base their costumes on. We are going to have an undercolour of white, as it will be bright in the darkness and it is a popular colour resulting in people being likely to own some white clothing.The colour they will be given will then be added to the white e.g (green- scarfs, hats, masks, flowers, karate belt etc). The white will also bring the whole parade together as opposed to seperating the parade through block colour. During one of the last meetings, we have also decided to use colour as the given theme for each community to base their project on. colours have strong enough connotations with things to get ideas for the project, yet it is not specific enough to restrict these ideas.

It has recently been discovered that Ham are trying to win the reward for being the best eco friendly. As a result we thought we could incoporate this into our design and use recycled materials as a way to create costume and props. As the costume will be fairly simple we thought we could use props as a way to make the percession visually attractive although the colour of the costume will support this further. Combining this idea with using recycled materials, we have decided to do workshops with the different communities to show them how to make objects which they can use during the parade. This week Tina demonstrated the many ways in which masks can be created. The most effective would be to use masking tape which is layered over a mould of a face. Eventually it becomes thick enough to be used as a mask. This tactic is cheap and unmessy and is strong enough to have other elements attatched to it, such as hair etc. Next week we are learning how to make flowers.

A good start to design i think!!!....