Creative Arts Relations Project 1 Exercise 1: Alternative Forms

Whilst the new requirements of this degree course encompass various artforms, I still regard myself primarily as a film student. Writing, filming, editing, scoring – these are the disciplines in which I’m keen to develop my skills and are the reason for my taking this degree. So if there’s an opportunity to combine these with anything else I’m doing, that’s a good use of my time.

So when I recently made a new spice rack for my kitchen, using my carpentry skills, I tried not only to make it aesthetically pleasing and in-keeping with the developing look of the room, I used it as the subject of my latest filming practice. I sprayed the finished rack lightly with gold paint, so that the grain of the wood could still be seen clearly, while the gold reflects the light from both the window and the kitchen ceiling lights. Of course, this also gave the rack more cinematic potential as it caught the film lights.

What made me think of filming this at all? I don’t usually film what I make – in fact, this was the first time. Well, I happened to let my family know (via WhatsApp) that I was making the rack and they were all very keen to see it. The typical response from my family was to exercise our shared sense of humour, talking the spice rack up into something that ‘tourists would come and see’. We joked that I would write my next screenplay about the rack…so, pushing the shared joke as far as possible, I decided to make a film trailer for just such a film. (No, I have NO intention of writing an actual film for this!)

So here we are, this is a combination of carpentry, writing, filming, editing and composing. You’ll notice that the music is deliberately derivative. That’s all part of the joke.

I’m not sure that the combination of film-making and carpentry qualifies as multi-disciplinary art, after all, the spice rack is useful, so therefore probably can’t be described as art, even if I had made it with more deliberate attention to aesthetics. But there is a connection between the mundanity of real life (Making something I needed for practical purposes) and the creative practice of film-making. Real life is used here as the subject of an artform, so connects different parts of my life – a blurring of that line between the real world and the world created through film. And is it playful? Certainly, but that was the brief of this exercise.