The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – After working solidly for two days over the weekend, I finally finished the first prototype for the mobile. I felt on the whole it was pretty good. However, the sheer weight of the project even at this scale was pretty bad. Balancing the elements was also an absolute ‘nightmare’. This meant that some of the spacing between the mobile elements was pretty ugly. The short time-lapse video below shows roughly how many elements went into making three quarters of the mobile (some elements were already strung). I always imagined cardboard to be quite light but after this project I’ve come to revise my view. On the whole I do think that the prototype was a success – not because it was perfect or anything like that, but because of what I had learned during the whole process. First Looks Below is a very short video of the mobile. As I was concentrating on the movement of the video there is nothing to show scale. The mobile turned out to be around 6ft tall in the end! I had envisioned something much smaller and lighter. Alternative Music […]
Choosing a Suitable Stringing Method – Choosing suitable materials and a hanging method for my mobile has to be one of the most challenging aspects so far. I’m way beyond my comfort zone with this! Noah one of my fellow students shared a link by the creative force that once was, namely David Bowie. Im going to put what he said here so that when I struggle I’ve got a point of reference to start things moving again. Today, having produced enough mobile elements to explore hanging and stringing I started running into multiple problems. Some of these included: 1). What kind of stringing method would I like to use 2). How do I arrange the elements neatly enough so that the viewer understands them as binary. 3). What materials should I use to actually string and hang the mobile? 4). Will a smaller prototype actually translate into a much larger one? The problems above were to name only a few. I spent the evening trying to source suitable hanging materials. I managed to source a very good older pdf on the subject of mobile making which helped a lot! How to Make Mobiles How to […]
A Day of Mini Mobile Making – In order to help add some weight to my intended proposal for college, I felt I needed to produce something to scale. Today I had a really enjoyable session making some mobile elements with my mum to produce a mini mobile. She was chief cardboard cutter and sticker and I was designer in chief. Between us we managed to produce 16 small mobile units (i.e. pieces for the mobile). Below is a time-lapse video of my activity. The main reason for producing a smaller scale mobile was to decide exactly how I would like to string/hang the larger version. I have been really struggling with the concept of actually hanging my mobile. For example do I take an Alexander Calder approach and have the pieces more rigidly fixed? Or do I suspend them so they are more free to move, or, do I opt for a mix of both? I felt that the only way to answer these questions was to actually make a small prototype. I also decided in the interest of speed, I would only use circles as they were easier to cut. The suspended shapes didn’t really matter, for me […]
