FICTION: EXPerimental & Expanded forms

Great Expectations

As me and my group start to analyse this classic by Charles Dickens we begin to realise how much of a complex publication this is apart from the simple plot line.

I got to first research about external facts within that complexity including:

• Themes: wealth/poverty; imperialism; live/rejection; good/evil; Pip as a social outcast; moral regenaration

• Chronology: the 3 main plot stages being 1 Pip's childhood in Kent; 2 the time in London receiving "great expectations"; 3 disillusionment on discovering the source of his fortune, followed by his slow realisation of the vanity of his false values

• Narration: written in the first person (being the protagonist Pip - Pip's point of view and thoughts) using "dramatic irony" confering a superiority that the narrator shares

• Protagonist: provides a simplicity that is appropriate for the story while avoiding melodrama

• Style: caricature, comic speech, intrigue, Gothic atmosphere and a central character who gradually changes (focusing on character development - "initiatory tale", focuses on a protagonist who matures over the course of the novel, punctuated with conflicts between his desires and values of established order that allow him to re-evaluate his life and therefore re-enter society on new foundations)

• Genre: gothic novel, crime novel, comedy, melodrama and satire

Of a form of research I got to see the film from 2012 even though there is 2 more filmes and a series based on the book, one film being from 1946 and the other from 1998.

Ideas and concepts for the table top tableau

A visual interpretation of the narrative

My input into group task: table top tableau

As we went through research and had several group discussions about this task we got to the conclusion that we all wanted for this to portray a "trial" of our actual piece on exhibition. For this we started to think how could we depict the focal point of the story itself with something 3D.

So our concept for this task and to present on Thursday 27.10 has to do with how food and actual dinner table display can influence our thoughts in good/evil and distinguish the character development on the protagonist from the rest of the cast.

This references Miss Havisham's wedding table as in the scenes it illustrates a sense of abandonment and cold feeling through all of the rotten food, spider webs and all of its darkness.

As the story unfolds we get to notice how Pip doesn't loose its essence as a man with a good soul even when life happens. As everybody gets "rotten" over time by their actions within the plot, Pip remains Pip.

We want to represent this idea through food and object display/props:

• Healthy/unhealthy food (fried food perhaps) as a contrast between good and evil

• The colour difference between Pip's plate and the others

• Burn marks, webs and rip offs within the scene adding a more dramatic look

• Clocks symbolising the obvious pass of time within story and characters (and how time affects the state of food the same way it affects or maturity within our growing up) but also referring to its opposite as the clocks on Miss Havisham's mansion were all stopped.

For this I looked into The Secret Meaning of Food in Art (web article) and Food as Art: Representation and Meaning (web article).

"(...) food acquires meaning only because of its context, the ceremonies and rituals that surround the serving of food. Food, of course, is richly symbolic. The apple in Eve's hand represents the fall of humanity. (...)"

Table top tableau

I got really pleased with the result of one week worth of work. At the end our presentation conveyed exactly what we wanted it to convey, meaning in food and in display essentially.

Although we added another concept: the apple served to Pip is all severely marked and cut, meaning the various "wounds" within life's impact on a human being.

The other groups seemed to get the core of our idea which really got us much more confident with the direction of our project.

At the end we started playing with video and footage and different ways we could take this project further as for example playing with light and shadows, silhouettes, performance, sound, etc.

Text, script, design & sound

In this task we wanted to convey the idea of layers between Pip's story of life and his point of view as a man to whom happenings keep altering his reality.

Developing from group discussions and previous ideas, we wanted to introduce into this medium a variation of an earlier concept when it comes to the protagonist. We gave a lot of thought into sound as a main guide for this task, making the image as a follower of what the audiences can hear based on the structure of real happenings of the narrative. Most of all we considered dialogue and plot the focal points of our film.

Within sound we experimented with speed, the colour of the novel as a dark, desaturated environment but also played with loud sounds from different scenes and situations and silence from words and speech making the film contrast between those two elements.

As for the making of sound itself we used sound libraries (as for the fire and clock scenes) and the creation of sounds as the twigs and pub conversation recorded live.

I think the weakness of this task for us was the typography as we used none of it in the film but only on our table top display, a last second idea. If I had to reproduce the same task again I would definitely think about text as an element in our motion picture.

Duration, interaction & activation

For the review and proposal form he had to make some final decisions on our actual final piece. This took a lot of group discussions, sharing or ideas and distinct perspectives of what or final piece should look like on the exhibition. We knew that we wanted to work on the idea of having something related to Miss Havisham to portray Pip's view point related to our first tableau task where we used the wedding table as a metaphor for Pip's place in the narrative. Basically concentrating on what makes this a gothic tale giving the spotlight to Miss Havisham's mental state and the darkness and intrigue that this contributes to the plot.

• Text on booklet ready for exhibition:

The idea of our work is to focus on Mrs Havisham’s wedding dress, from our chosen novel Great Expectations, to represent conflict, corruption, defiled purity and innocence’s. By primarily focusing on the wedding dress (representing purity and innocence) and turning it into a gothic representation of itself. The wedding dress and the wedding in itself could be said to be the starting point of the entire novel, this is where the story really begins to unfold from Mrs Havisham’s decline and mentality towards men. This itself leads on to the treatment of Pip. The corrupted trying to influence the innocent. Even though the book follows the story of Pip throughout his life and his journey of development to becoming a better Gentleman, we decided to focus on Miss. Havisham’s contribution to the gothic plot. Visually the tableau was more in line with Miss. Havisham’s development compared to Pip’s and so it was appropriate to develop work around her. The dress is how we wish to show you these feelings towards defilement and corruption within this gothic tale. By changing and altering the dress through the use of film. While showing an actual corruption of something innocent within the viewers themselves or to at least make them understand this ideal.

Testings and exploration of space

Before starting filming our final piece we decided to do some testing within materials (as them being inks, the effect on our dress' fabric, if we could get a mannequin to support it) and space (how could we work with the space we'd been given, what is best composition for our audience to experience the most of what our piece tries to communicate).

The curation for this was clear in our minds as our piece will be really straight forward. Our concerns at this point had to do mostly of how could we show duration within our filming and making the most of the space we had available to us.

• Method and materials (practicalities):

After the dress is painted and filmed we will present a projection of the film as well as a stand-alone artefact of the dried dress. The projection will pour on to the church walls so there is no need for a screen or any boards. The dress will be propped up using a make shift support out of a tripod and coat hangers to give a human shape. The projector will be placed a distance away to shine a big enough film so that the real dress and the film of the dress are to scale. The real dress will be separate from the film but still within an area.

• Exhibition/event installation (practicalities):

Alter space in church, power is needed, one projector. Floor space (unsure of measurements for now) roughly enough for a 5x4 metre projection and the distance of the projector.

Behind the scenes

Final product

RE-STORY exhibition

Overall I got really happy with how effort and passion at the end pay off. The exhibition in its total was fantastic and everyone's work was amazing.

I was proud and happy on how me and my group got along really well and how we were able to have a structured communication throughout the project and how that made it so much simpler and enjoyable. Really pleased with our final product and with our success in communicating the main idea of our piece.

On the left you can check out our instagram page and comment or process ad development and on the bottom there's a sneak peak into the whole exhibition, showing everyone's projects with the respective books and author of fiction.

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	15122934_10154350630324160_431857189596804015_o	Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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