Final Idea

I was struck with this vison of a woman dancing (Caribbean style of course) after watching Desmond's on Netflix with my parents, it a show from the 90's about a Guyanese family that moved to London and own barbers shop, and the theme tune gave me the inspiration for this piece im creating .So I am going to illustrate 8 women dancing frame by frame on a plate and when it spins on a turn table it should look like the woman is dancing in Eadweard Muybridge style.

Testing it out on paper first

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Behind the scenes

I luckily had my dad around to help me on the day I was shooting and he came up with some great contraptions for me to balance my phone from so I could shoot what I wanted. We strapped a piece of wood on top of my kitchen bin and then duck taped my phone holder on top of it. It required a ladder to see if I was recording up there.

Another issue I was having was lighting! As it was a pretty dull day there wasn't much good lighting and because my kitchen has awful spot lights it would create shadows. So after figuring out no lighting (through my ipad or other lights) was gonna fix it we had the solution of just taking out the light bulb from the ceiling light that was causing the problem and whala shadow was gone!

The work in progress currently- March 17th

The green plate was my first attempt when I was figuring out my concept, I hadn't measured it which became an issue as it was hard to fit 8 figures in there. So when it came to making my blue plate I made sure to map it out on tracing paper first and I also put in the figures the other way.

Here were my sketches on the steps to make her dance - I used a Guyanese song's music video that my mum loves as reference to the moves- and then figured out the colouring on them too.

Time Lapse of sketching out the figures

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The week after.....

This week had it's up and down when it came to how the video was going. I finished carving and glazing my plates.

Then it was time for the bisque firing and everything went south.....

Yep.....it exploded! I mean I'm not a typical potter that makes dinner ware and this was actually my first time making a plate and I knew it was probably still to wet or too thick when I put it on my normal bisque firing and this was the result. I was GUTTED, this plate was better than the other, it was larger and had clearer details and i'd actually measured the dancing lady's out so they'd line up better but what could I do I knew it was a risk and that's why I made 2 plates. Luckily the other plate did survive so I had one more chance to glaze it and pray it wouldn't crack in the second firing.

This photo always makes me laugh, i'm just holding her broken head!

Before Glaze Firing

After Glaze Firing

SHE SURVIVED!!! I was so nervous opening the kiln but she survived and no cracks! So not all is over and now it's time to get my last clips together and edit the video.

EDITING

I'm having a couple issues with editing, one is that I have way to many clips and im only at the glazing part and my video is already almost 2 minutes long so I need to figure out what I really want to keep in.

The other main issue im having is editing the clip of the plate spinning so it looks like she's dancing. It was so easy when I did it with the paper version that i'm not sure what's going wrong now. I keep speeding the clip up but no matter how much I do it it turns out she only does 2 moves or it's just blurry. I've sped up this one clip more than 8 times and im at the point where it's burry and I can see already she's only moving twice again.

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Continue to see how I bought the video together

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