Showing posts with label Manchester. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manchester. Show all posts

Sunday, 29 August 2010

Photogram workshop

Today I went to the 'Noise Lab' in Manchester as a magazine group called 'One Five Eight' were holding a workshop on how to produce photograms, initially I thought I was going to be the only one who turned up as I was sat alone for a while composing my first experimental piece, but when I came out of the dark room after producing my first piece a few more people had arrived.

It was quite fun, there was a good mixture of people my age and also children getting involved and when I was talking with one of the team in the dark room she wasn't sure if there would be enough supplies to last the whole day....in other words it was quite a success.
Essentially we were all sat around a long table with all sorts of items in bowls at its center, marbles, toys, light bulbs, stationary, buttons, and more random things which we could just grab and compose our pieces with and then one-by-one we took our boards (steadily...trying not to wobble the items on top) into the dark room to develop the photogram.

I have done a little work in a dark room before, when I went to college first time around about 10 years ago we had the chance to take a short course from a given list and Photography was one of them. During my time at high school and also this college I had been refused the opportunity to study anything art related because the curriculum forbid both music and art to be studied together and I was forced to choose one....so I jumped at the chance to do some photography. It was a lot of fun taking photos and then developing our negatives into actual prints in a dark room.
Today's workshop reminded me of this.....

As we each put together our pieces we had to wait until the person currently in the dark room had finished before we could then do our own again, I had put together another wreckless piece whilst waiting for my turn again but because the wait was so long I decided to wipe the board clean and create something properly. At that moment when I was looking for things to use I spotted a toy lion and an image from a video game sprung to mind, so I decided to make a piece relative to that. I quite like how it turned out.









Tuesday, 8 June 2010

Starting a revolution

Recently I setup a facebook group for Kung Fu film fans in my area of Greater Manchester, it's something that i've been planning on doing for a few years now. The aim is to get a proper group website organised but I am using facebook to rally numbers initially, if it takes off and quite a number of people join then i'm hoping that people will be encouraged to start up screenings and events. But at the moment the numbers aren't growing and no one is passing on the word.

It is quite de-motivating when you don't see the numbers change at all, and also when fans who do join the group don't tell others about....i've started putting up adverts for it on places like Gumtree and i'm going to hit some of the martial arts film forums and plug it there also. Hopefully that will generate some numbers for it.

However, my brother showed me this video earlier on of why I should persist with it even if the numbers don't grow for a while.....because they will grow eventually.

Watch it, it's quite amazing how the trend catches on after the third person joins in.