Rhianna Catt

Knowing I wanted to use typography and textures, I started experimenting. I went into the letterpress workshop and just experimented with wood type, for texture, and ornaments, knowing I was thinking about using collage in my animation and I thought about making flowers out of ornaments would be interesting, or making flowers out of printed text.

I then moved back to the idea of using a song, and I thought I could use a more obvious choice, something which hits the nail on the head a little more than the others. However I like the more abstract and emotional approach. And picked the song ‘When it don’t come easy’ And wrote out the lyrics by hand, I find this helps to understand the meaning behind the words and I can brainstorm out of them.

From here I moved onto gathering ideas for the typography I wanted to use, and I liked the hand I used in the Summer Project and here, but I wanted to experiment with other ideas as well.

I had been working on creating a font for my professional practices project and it was similar style, instead of creating a whole new font I experimenting with adapting it, so all the baselines are different so it creates the up and down nature of my hand drawn font. I may not use the font specifically, but I thought it may help during the planning phase, or if I go down another path.

I then started to experiment with the idea behind the animation. I want to look at the things we are losing, such as fish and bees. But also other animals and food. So I started sketching out line-drawings of examples of these, Cod, Bees and Coffee Beans.

The next steps now is creating a storyboard, and then an animatic. From there I can start breaking down the image and textures I need and work on them. Then I need to start getting reading to start creating my college animation, and making the decisions on how much if any will be digital.

There are two songs from Sleeping at Last which I straight up thought about and I am struggling to decided between the two at this moment, however we were only given the brief 18 hours, so I need to sleep on it at least and explore the ideas for the two.

The First song is “Can’t smile without you.” which is a really simple cover of The Carpenters song of the same name.

I thought of this song originally because of the colours of the single, however listening to it really sparked ideas within me, and the lyrics to me connect to what we are going to loose through climate change.

“Can’t Smile Without You”
(originally by Carpenters)

You know I can’t smile without you
I can’t smile without you
I can’t laugh and I can’t sing
I’m finding it hard to do anything
You see I feel sad when you’re sad
I feel glad when you’re glad
If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile without you

You came along just like a song
And brightened my day
Who would have believed that you were part of a dream
Now it all seems light years away

And now you know I can’t smile without you
I can’t smile without you
I can’t laugh and I can’t sing
I’m finding it hard to do anything
You see I feel sad when you’re sad
I feel glad when you’re glad
If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile

Now some people say happiness takes so very long to find
Well, I’m finding it hard leaving your love behind me

And you see I can’t smile without you
I can’t smile without you
I can’t laugh and I can’t sing
I’m finding it hard to do anything
You see I feel glad when you’re glad
I feel sad when you’re sad
If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile without you

If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile without you

The next song is “When it don’t come easy”

This wasn’t the first song in my head however I love the feel of the music, and it is another cover, however it is not as obvious for Climate Change, which I like the idea of, I don’t like hitting the nail on the head. I like some of the imagery in the song, the idea of what we have had before and crying for what we have lost, and that really resonates with me and excites me for this project. And the idea that this isn’t easy, to fix or to deal with.

Red lights are flashing on a highway
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight
Everywhere the waters getting rough
Your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight

But if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

I don’t know nothing except change will come
Year after year what we do is undone
Time gets moving from a crawl to a run
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home

You’re out there walking down a highway
And all of the signs got blown away
Sometimes you wonder
If you’re walking in the wrong direction

But if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy
When it don’t come easy

So many things that I’ve had before
They don’t matter to me now
Tonight I cry for the love that I’ve lost
And the love I’ve never found
When the last bird falls
And the last siren sounds
Someone will say what’s been said before
It’s only love we’re looking for

But if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy
When it don’t come easy

I am going to be honest here, I can not sleep, we is usual for me, and I find getting ideas and thoughts out my head either personal or creative can help me relax and sleep. I also want to get my initial ideas down about the brief before they get lost in my head.

After today’s workshop and briefing with talks of thinking of demographics and audience it made me think of food, especially as a chef, and food and its surronding subjects is something I have wanted to explore in my image making and I wanted to think about how my industry affects the environment.

In my industry there was so many things I could think of which have a negative impact, such as unsustainable farming and fishing, pesticides, but also how kitchens run on high energy, and I have worked in a lot of restaurants with charcoal grills. But I also wanted to think of issues I am passionate about.

I support climate change, I have mixed feelings about Extinction Rebellion, which I will go on to into a bit. I hate plastic. At the moment I am using single use plastic bottles as I am finding them the easiest to drink out of after jaw surgery, but I am still using the same bottle over and over. I have a reusable coffee cup (I know not plastic waste, but the same idea). I always take my own bag when I do my shopping. I try not to use wipes, because I know they contain plastic however they were a must for me after my surgery because I know not a lovely thought but I constantly dribbled for the first 3 weeks after surgery, I still am dribbling now not so much. I use a bar of soap, plus bars of shampoo and conditioner, I don’t buy aerosols, where possible (spray paint on the occasion may be the only exception). I use refill shops where possible, I hate food waste (I think that is also partly the chef in me) and all my left-over food I turn into lunch the next day, and I carry my own cutlery around when I remember.

However when it came onto the idea of creating an animation my mind went onto another subject I am passionate about, sustainable fishing as we are killing our oceans. We are killing the bees which is so important for crop growth. I knew straight away these were the kind of topics I wanted to focus on. For many reasons and not just because I am passionate about them, I thought I could make a creative animation and film around these.

Last year, when the last project was Through a Lens I wasn’t happy with the outcome. I never felt like me, and I was so worried about being actually able to create an animation to a high standard I forgot who I was. This time round, even though this is a bigger project I want to create an animation again, but this time reflecting who I am and my ideals.

I know I am setting myself up for a huge task, but I want to create as much of this animation through traditional techniques. I am not a digital artist. I can use the programs to a good standard, and I do sketch and draw digitally on occasion but it is not something I am passionate about. I felt last year I found myself but drifted away from who I was at the same time.

Last year I fell in love with printmaking and I want to use this in my animation. My idea is to use a mixed print-making approach to create textures and imagery and then make the animation through collage. Therefore wouldn’t have to draw frame by frame as that would be impossible in the time, and even though I want to push myself I really need to think about my health still. Especially as I am still recovering from surgery, but I am also playing catch up from missing the first project. Therefore I need to consider my mental health.

I also have fallen in love with typography and it has started to strongly affect my work and I want to integrate it into my animation, and more so than I did in the project last year, I want to use letterpress to create texture and when I collage the frames, I want to cut up the words and text to create imagery.

The animation at the moment is to be about losing species which we rely on, such as fish and bees. These I want to print using either dry-point or hard-ground because I love the fine lines I can create and I think the juxtaposition would be beautiful and interesting.

Recently I have been inspired by the single covers of a musician called Sleeping at Last.

Sleeping at Last is a musician which inspires me not just with beautiful cover design which mixes the digital, traditional and typography. Recently I have been finding the colours stunning in the designs. But the music has been an inspiration for me for years.

I have loved music since I was very young. I started learning the violin when I was 7, and taught myself the piano from an age I can’t remember. When I was 9 I started to learn how to play the Viola. Musicians will tell you their instrument called to them. The viola was that to me, the deeply silky and sultry tones, which had so much more depth than the violin could ever. I have such an eclectic taste in music from Queen and Fleetwood Mac, to Classical, Jazz and I adore folk plus much more. I find Sleeping at Last grasps the two ends of the spectrum, I love the way classical and orchestral instruments have been integrated with more popular music.

Even after today and the mention of copyright infringement, I want to use their music in this project because I always feel this music can convey so much meaning and visually I am wanting to integrate the traditional printmaking and other techniques with the digital and moving image, and this music to me represents that in audio.

I was going down a route and kept hitting road blocks, and I felt like I had to keep bashing through them instead of finding and entire new route. I think I felt like I had to follow this route I had spent weeks going down, researching and putting time in, but it didn’t feel genuine.

During my 1-1 tutorial with Karl the day I returned to Uni something was mentioned which stuck with me and for some reason I kept thinking of.

“Food means a lot to you, it’s a big part of your life.”

I am a chef, I have been for a long time, and even if I decide in the future not to work in kitchens, food and being a chef is a large part of who I am. I haven’t embraced that part of me for a while, probably because it made my life hard for quite a while. I lost friends, lost myself, worked myself nearly to death, had relationships fall apart because of my career and I pushed people away because of it.

Now though I feel a bit different about it. Probably helps I don’t work 85 hour weeks any more at one of the most popular restaurants in London. Also I am now with my boyfriend who as I have stated before loves me and I do in return, and respects and looks after me. (Which after everything I have been through never thought was possible.)

I have a connection to food, and honestly I applied to University to run from my old life and that includes kitchens and being chef. So at Uni I wanted to forget that part of my life. But here I needed to embrace it.

Chicken Tikka Marsala is the UK’s National Dish. It is a Bastardised version of a proper Indian Curry.

I decided to look at this project a different way. I was fed up of thinking about what was expected and what was wanted and started to look at what I wanted, and what I wanted to explore, even if that meant going back to the beginning and starting again.

Over the last 2-3 centuries Indian and Asian food in general has become ever so popular, however food had to be developed from the English taste. Originally curry in UK was made by the British from what they learned and brought back from India however they had very limited spices so as the world became smaller with the invention of steam boats etc. Spices became more readily available and cheaper, and where brought back with also Indian Migrants and Curry was born (This is a real simplified version of the history).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8370054.stm

Food migrates as well and with people. To me food is a huge part of individual culture and community.

For instance, Kingsland Road in Hoxton/Shoreditch has an insane amount of Vietnamese restaurants there and they all appeared when we had a influx of Vietnamese migrants into the area introducing new food to us. Food is still migrating now. I work in an Israeli restaurant. A culture and food not many people know about, but I love. This food has become more and more popular over the last couple of decades. Think of the boom of hummus, and falafel. And of course we have always had the kebab (not specifically Israeli but Middle-Eastern) but more and more places are popping up introducing this country to it’s food, it’s culture, the country’s soul.

So my idea…I want to create a graphic narrative of the UK’s national dish – Chicken Tikka Marsala.

After I completed the previous 5 sketches, I was beating myself up. I was expecting so much from myself. I was only a few weeks post op, I could only really draw on my iPad as I had to lay in a specific position and if I ever leaned down at all I started dribbling every where. Plus I didn’t feel myself, and honestly as I am writing this weeks later at the point of being 5 weeks post op I am only feeling like myself 50% of the time. How can I make my best work, work which represents me when I don’t even feel like myself.

I was still beating myself up when creating the next stage of work, I was so determined to not be behind when I returned to Uni, but I couldn’t work out an idea which I was proud of.

So I did what I do when I am having a rough time, and I started writing, something I am not very good at but getting all the swirling thoughts out of my head always helps. When doing the Son of a Glitch workshop I received 3rd Person Tragedy. For some reason this reminded me of journalism and news articles. But I also thought of all the stories I heard when travelling all over Asia. So I started writing it all down and created it in a style of a newspaper article and I started over laying sketches and ideas to create a mock-up.

Even though I decided I wasn’t going to go down this route as in layout for my final outcome, just getting an idea out was helpful and this idea developed.

Here I started to go down the route to create a zine or a small book in the style of a travel journal using the storytelling through text and imagery, however even though I liked this idea I just wasn’t sold. I think I felt like I had to follow this route I had spent weeks going down, researching and putting time in, but it didn’t feel genuine.

Once this question during my research popped into my head during my research I couldn’t get it out. It made me question myself and the world around me.

I haven’t had the easiest of lives however I am extremely grateful for what I do have, especially now. I have a family, and education, a job, a boyfriend who loves me and I love in return, I have my sight (something I am thankful for every day), I have the NHS, I have been able to travel, travel a lot. I have a lot. And one thing for sure I have opportunities.

So because of how my brain works, and what it needs, I researched statistics. I like numbers. I learned of many horrors from around the world. I decided not to look into war, and still so much came up. Women in Burkina Faso not having basic human rights, being forced to marry and not having access to contraception. In Somalia only 10% of the population have a primary education. In Laos, a country I love, 60% of children are malnourished or anaemic. 23% of the country lives in poverty. I learned much more on top of what I already knew as well; such as in Malaysia it is illegal to be LGBTQ+ and you can be sentenced to 20 years in prison. I created works based off these facts.

With these images I wanted to integrate typography as that is something I have really wanted to experiment with.

Even though I like these images, that’s it, I only like them. I am not inspired by these images, and was trying to push them further, I struggled and struggled until I had an idea which I experimented with to create a mock up.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/burkina-faso-urgent-need-to-protect-girls-from-and-forced-marriage/

https://borgenproject.org/tag/literacy-in-somalia/