At last I am proud to present Exit Grom Stage Left. I think it’s my best piece to date. I absolutely love it!
Exit Grom Stage Left from R Britton on Vimeo.
Explores the stage in a surfer’s life when they leave the grom (a young surfer until the age of 16/17) stage and move on to become a fully fledged surfer. Some people make it, some people don’t but one who definitely will is Conor Maguire.
I think the environment in which you edit does have an impact on the final piece. I always get frantic and stressed when my editing suite looks like this:
So, for the Exit Grom Stage Left edit I did a clean up until it looked like this:
The most important thing on that desk is water because we all know how long the editing process takes!
I got in touch with Maura Logue at the Abbey Arts Centre near where I lived to see about getting access to a stage for the piece. I got the full tour of the 3 stages and went with this one.
Aaron Dees came along to check out what we up to and did a good job hiding from the camera!
We also took the opportunity to sit around and chat about the voice-over. Definitely not Conor’s favorite part but he couldn’t put it off forever!
It’s amazing all the different places you get to shoot at when you’re doing surf film pieces. Mostly I shot at 3 different surf breaks in Bundoran.
Tullan
The Peak
Blackspot
All the stage stuff will be done at the Abbey Centre in Ballyshannon (more on that to come). Then there was the voice-over. Getting hold of a dedicated sound equipment from the college was like waiting for the ocean to form a cliff arch so I actually videoed it with my Canon 7D and pulled the audio from that. I did all that back at the ranch (aka home sweet home) as best to control the environment. It wasn’t Conor’s favorite part…
Conor at the Ranch
First step in creating a film piece (once you’ve got the idea of course) is getting your hands on all the necessary equipment. I’m lucky enough to own my own gear, so here’s a shot of what I used:
There’s the ever beautiful Canon 7D which I use mostly for the surf shots, the Panasonic SD90 which is handy for grabbing all those on the go moments and of course a Manfrotto tripod with a brand new swivel-head on it. Ah the nerdy bliss of some beautiful gear…
I have taken inspiration from many of the different surf pieces that have been put together by some of Ireland’s talented surf filmmakers for Exit Grom Stage Left. I also got Conor to recommend some as the piece is about him and I think how it is edited and shot should reflect his personality as well as my own.
Some of the pieces are:
Relentless Energy Drink Super Series UK Pro Surf Tour: Stop 1 – Thurso from Relentless Energy Drink on Vimeo.
MODERN COLLECTIVE – youthful dalliances from Kai Neville Studio on Vimeo.
Under the Sun Moments – Sea Movies from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.
The First Swell from Tim Boydell on Vimeo.
I also have taken into consideration my desire to stand out from others with my own style of editing and also by using the metaphor of the stage. There are many similarities between the stage and the sea. Stage left is the same as a left wave, a wave is our version of the stage, we use it to showcase our abilities, etc.
Well folks, over the next few weeks before Christmas, my blog is being turned into a ‘behind the scenes’ diary for a new piece ‘Exit Grom Stage Left’. So first of all let me explain the title to you. The ‘Grom’ part is a reference to grommet which in the surf world is one of those young hyperactive surfer dudes that surfs anything all the time no matter how good or shit the conditions maybe and believes it to be awesome. It’s a stage of surfing which we give out about when we’re not in it. They’ll tell you it’s awesome and you get there and don’t even want to get in, they act like a yoyo out in the water constantly catching waves and generally driving you crazy. But in the end we all wish we were there again getting excited about every little wave and getting stoked at the smallest moments.
The whole exit stage left thing came from my good aul imagination or at least I like to think it did…anyway, I wanted to look at the stage in a grom’s life were they are beginning to make that transition to just another surfer. It’s a critical time not only because you need to decide how to work surfing into the next stage of your life and where you want to take your surfing, you’re also trying to decide where to go to college, what to study and usually studying your butt off to get there while all you really want to do is surf your butt off. So in now that I’ve explained that and you’re still thinking, ‘eh, hello?! What’s with the stage?!’ I’ll get to the point. I’m using the stage as a metaphor. Surfers also have a stage to show our talents and our true selves, the wave. It’s where we live in the moment, where we try to show the best of ourselves and where we let go and become something else. The exit stage left refers to the transition period in a grom’s life I want to explore. It’s the stage were they either become surfers and leave the grom behind or were they try to hold on to the grom and the surfer fades away.
I am hoping with my piece to capture a little bit of this and also showcase the talent that will either develop or disappear. The grom I’m following is Conor Maguire who is oozing with potential and skill. He has the grounded-ness and will-power to take his surfing anywhere, but the question is to where?
Finally, here they are! 100% finished makes me 100% happy! I am delighted how they turned out and I’m actually looking forward to presenting them to my lab group tomorrow. I think they turned out really well and it was worth every minute I spent on them.
Box 1:
Box 1 - Complete
As you may remember from the design blog this is an introduction to universal design and all the areas of our lives it effects from cars to what we wear.
Box 2:
Box 2 - Complete
Box 2 is a reminder about another important aspect of design which can be forgotten. How does the product feel? A blind person for instance may rely heavily on this. For example the feel of the “f” and “j” keys tell them where they are on a keyboard. Also, how something feels can be a personal preference as well. For instance, I love the feel of my mac laptop more than my PC so I’m more likely to use my mac.
Box 3:
Box 3 - Complete
Colour is another important aspect in design. Not just in our personal tastes but also when we are designing with say the visually impaired or colour-blind in mind. High contrast can be very important for legibility.
Box 4:
Box 4 - Complete
Box 4 deals with usability on the web. It has bits of code that are important to usability and then the sides have tips in order to make your work on the web more usable and accessible by all.
Box 5:
Box 5 - Complete
This box raises 2 important questions around the effect technology has had on universal design as well as examples of all the assistive technologies one has to take in account for when creating products and web-based products.
Box 6:
Box 6 - Complete
How usable is this box? Especially seeing as it’s Velcro-ed shut?
Box 7:
Box 7 - Complete
It’s always important to catch those glimmers of pure genius and this demonstrative aid can do just that!
Well, I hope you have enjoyed following my process on this blog and hey maybe it’s given you a few ideas! Hopefully get to put this blog to use again soon, but for now this me saying toodles….
Now, I had to translate the design I had done onto the boxes. Of course, as always, a few changes happened along the way. So these boxes are totally had made using all the bits of arts and crafts supplies you can find in your local shop along with magazines.
Implementation of Design on Box 3
You can see my workspace in this picture while I was in the middle of doing the third box. The changes occurred in simplifying the inside of the box to contain less information. Also because the boxes became so small, I changed from doing the 4th box which was ment to be a day in the life to splitting the 7th box into “How usable is this box” and a “feedback” box. I used lots of different things to design the boxes such as:
In the next blog you’ll get to see the finished boxes so watch this space!
Well well, didn’t I bite off more than I could chew! Making the 7 boxes by hand did take a good bit of effort and mental capacity to get all the measurements just right so one side wasn’t bigger than the other but it was worth it and I’m very proud of them. Although my hand is killing me from all the cutting out! I can proudly say, I made each box 100% all by myself though which puts a big smile on my face.
This is what I started out with:
Sheets of Cardboard
So next step was obviously to draw out the shape I wanted and cut them out. I also had to bend the sides of the box along certain edges so I used a blunt side of a knife to make an indent along the line which the card needed to bend at.
Mapping out the Shape
But, how professional does the end result look like when you’ve made them yourself? I’d say pretty darn good!
The End Result
Each cardboard box and lid were cut out and made separately. I then clued them together using UHU super duper glue. The gluing ment a lot of sitting around holding pieces of cardboard together! They are exactly what I wanted with one variation with the two smaller boxes being the same size and fitting side by side in the next box down.
I was limited to how big I could go with the boxes due to the dimensions of the sheets I got and this was why I ended up with the 2 smallest boxes being around the same size. I couldn’t go any smaller either because they would become too hard to make.
|
