Monday: In the beginning...

Monday was my first experience of the 'Moving Images' project, save for a few emails, as I hadn't been able to attend the meeting. It seemed like an interesting concept; take an image, make it into movement and then turn it back into an image, but I had no understanding beyond this idea - and no idea how I would be involved as a musician...

Monday morning was spent created collages of inspiring pictures. As I looked around I could immediately see stark comparisons and contrasts in everybody's choices and interestingly each collage had a theme or a colour palette running through it. I guess that makes sense on second thoughts - seeing as we were instructed to pick things we liked.

So for the beginning, at least, I still felt shrouded in mystery - not a bad way to start a project at all! And was looking forward to see what would happen next.

Once everybody had finished their individual collages, we all put them up on the wall (something we were swiftly reprimanded for - apparently thats not allowed in Laban..) and then took them down again. So we had our makeshift 'gallery', if you like and as we all like to think, and proceeded to wonder around umming and aahhhing over the recurring themes and stories that the photographs illustrated.

We were then given some background about the pictures by each member of the group, who explained why they had chosen them (to which many of the answers were "I dunno, I just really like it"and who's to question the validity of such a statement? We're not critics) and then promptly broke for lunch.

After the disappointing discovery that the only place located limping distance (serves me right for falling down the stairs, I guess) from Laban can't even bake a jacket potato we headed back to the studio for some in depth discussion. The next task was to choose a selection of the photos that we had collated individually to form a 'group collage', consisting of the images we would then base our piece on. Hours on engaging and energising conversation then ensued, which is interesting seeing as most of us had probably previously had little or no interest in photography, beyond that of dutifully wondering round the upper floors of the Tate every year or so and, let's face it, we're all more comfortable just playing over rhythm changes.

The conversation spanned religion, nature, humanity, light, dark, escapism, freedom.... the list goes on. But eventually we all managed to tie the majority of the pictures to the theme 'NATURE', whether it meant some forest untouched by people to nature's war with humanity to human nature... The point is everyone was happy.

We then went on to debate how to structure the piece. I won't bore you with the details, but we settled on the idea of choosing a handful of pictures to use in order to focus our creative energy. Further debate was had on which pictures to use, but again, it didn't really matter. Every member's input was considered and thoughtful and any would have done.

These made the cut:

Atomic bomb: Destruction of nature!

Overgrown corridor - nature fights back!

Stairway - to heaven?

The passage of time - tick tock!

There were a few others too but for some reason Blogger won't let me upload them! Go here if you want to see.....

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1418554138383398/