Gameplay was the last briefed project of the course. I felt that this brief allowed for the most experimental pieces of work as it could be taken in so many directions and for this brief we had the 5 weeks (the longest project) in order to develop the work.
In remaining to want to direct my work in a costume design/construction outcome, I immediately thought of fancy dress/ dressing up as a child. When children dress up it is a game they are creating, pretending to be someone else/ taking on another characters persona. This linking with the brief Gameplay and being heavily costume based. From this I began to think of any literature or plays that may incorporate children and childhood games. The most obvious answer… Peter Pan. I thought this was perfect, “Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up”.
I eagerly began to research the story and its background. I had a few ideas to explore within the project due to differing beliefs about the story. A strong theme being that Neverland was heaven and that Peter was a child forever due to a young death. Alternative ideas were that Peter was a guardian angel to Wendy and her brothers. With this information and the fact that I didn’t want to design a generic Peter Pan costume, I completely transformed the story by bringing it to a contemporary setting. The final idea being that Peter Pan was a gangster.
I came up with this idea when thinking about a contemporary Neverland, the imagination of children during the time that J.M Barrie was writing Peter Pan would greatly differ from the imagination of children now. As well as this Peter Pan is never given a definite age in the book, with this I thought about Neverland as a nightclub. Within this setting I imagined Peter as a very different character, by which in remaining to have a guardian angel type of status, he would give his gang members (the Lost Boys) and Wendy drugs. Peter Pan being a drug dealer linked with loosely with the idea of heaven. I saw it as Peter giving his gang drugs for escapism, as if to take them into another world but not physically as like in the story. I researched the the effects of drugs and slang references to drugs in music. Main affects being visual and audio hallucinations, I therefore thought to include this within my work. I decided that my final piece should be a series of illustrations, I then had the idea of designing some LSD stamps, so that when the designs were repeated the pattern would almost look like a magic eye pattern which would have a hallucinative type of effect. To incorporate the LSD designs into my work I scanned the drawings and then used these on Photoshop, manipulating the size and colour to create the patterns. I then overlaid images that I used as an illustration template, so that the patterns would appear on the characters clothes. Here are my experiments:
From this I concentrated on the characters Peter and Wendy and continued to work digitally in creating a hallucinative effect on the collaged illustrations. I also remixed some music in order to accompany the work, this idea being for a exhibition environment were the music could be played while viewers looked at the work, which would link with audio hallucinations (as the music was overlaid and sped up/ slowed down as to achieve audio that confuses the listener.) Unfortunately I can’t get the track on here at present, but I’m working on it, for now these are the final illustrations.
CharlotteFayeRamsay 