Today I was on campus for two reasons. Printing experiments and a tutorial.
Printing.
Today was a chance to work on the colour printing that I started a few weeks ago. And having spoken to Matt in the print studio about it, I was armed with a new process of working that should give better results. I think the only issue I had in the set up was that I didn’t put the contrast up on the digital prints from the copier. This meant that a couple of the prints were a little too grey and not contrast’y enough to get a good screen from. And meant that the yellow screen didn’t get enough ink down to give the paper a good cover.
I think all in all, this was the most successful I’m going to be with colour screen printing, which I will admit, isn’t very successful for what I need. The project I’m working on is about the detail of the design in the parks and shining a light on that. Which doesn’t work if you can see what the detail is! So I think I’ll stick with monochrome screen printing for the posters.
Tutorial.
I sat down with Mike this afternoon to talk about where I am with the project and where my experiments have gotten me. And I think the main take away is that I don’t need to worry too much about the colour printing. I don’t really need to worry too much about having hyper realistic recreations of the work. The posters are more about presenting the information in a new way that is enticing for people who wouldn’t usually look at Disney parks in this way.
We spoke about creating a companion document or book that goes with the posters talking about the process for creating them and what can be ascertained from the study. But I need to remember that I know a lot about this and I’m presenting this people who don’t. So I really need to cover the introduction to it. To peak peoples interest.
When I was in France a couple weeks ago, we were talking about the parks at dinner and someone asked me and a fellow parks go’er what we liked about the parks so much. And James, an engineer, said he loves the detail and scope of the engineering work that is there. It’s incredible impressive they made this city that functions and has it’s own fire department (in Florida) purely for the entertainment of it’s guests. Which is exactly why I love it, but because of the graphical detail and story telling. We both are looking at it from the same point of view with different interests. Which is the inverse of the surface level view of what people think of when they think about the parks. They think of princesses and rides and people in mouse costumes. This is what this project can do, shine a light on the things people don’t usually see.
When I was asking people online to get me photographs, I had a lot of people saying I should be able to google what I need, but people don’t tend to take photos of the exit signs and the wait times signs. Everything is wide angle. Surface level. And I’m just zooming in on one of the ways these parks are made.
The posters themselves do this, by taking the graphical information and celebrating it by presenting it as a unified poster. It doesn’t need to be colour and super realistic as the photographs themselves already do that. This is more presenting the graphic information in an interesting way to act as a way in for people to see what I see when I’m in the parks.
That is the function of the collection. I’m curating a study of specific parts of a giant thing, to highlight the level of detail that goes into telling stories to the guests.