New Designers 2013 - Day 2: The build-up continues!

Another long day at the Business Design Centre for the staff and graduates of Ba Hons CG Arts & Animation as we put the finishing touches to our New Designers 2013 exhibition stand.  Months ago now, we came up with this cunning plan - an idea to transform our usual spot into a 1930s Art Deco-themed cinema evoking the golden age of the silver screen when special effects and movie magic were dazzling audiences in RKO's King Kong (1933) and terrifying them in Universal's Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).

Today (02/07/13) was day two of the New Designers 'build-up' - a marathon of lifting, carrying, wiring, sawing, painting, and cleaning.  What the following sequence of images from today don't show is all Alan's hard work installing the audio-visual infrastructure - an epic undertaking.  What the images do show are all those all-important finishing touches that turned an ordinary white room into a rush of sweet movie-going nostalgia!  

But New Designers is not just an exercise in transit vans, white emulsion and MDF.  We owe a huge debt of thanks to CGAA year two student, Steven Payne, who has been working his socks off behind-the-scenes to produce a series of animated idents to sit perfectly within our retro picture-house.  Below is an early mock-up by Steve, but if you look closely on the big screen in the image that follows this pre-viz, you'll see the real thing in-situ looking rather swanky!

Preparing for New Designers is always knackering and fraught with fire-fights and eleventh hour hoo-has. Indeed, some might argue that putting so much effort into something like this so very soon after the rigors of final project hand-ins, assessment and graduation is the stuff of madness - or masochism, or both.   

Then how about I share with you one final image from the end part of today that reminds me why the efforts made on behalf of our graduates are always worth it. This was the moment, in the calm and the quiet of the emptying Islington venue when graduates from the Class of 2013 sat themselves down in those old, velvet seats and saw their work on the big screen for the first time.  I can say honestly that it was a magical tableau; that's proper delight on their faces.  Amazing.  They're looking at animations they've seen countless times before, and yet they're charmed and entranced, and somehow innocent again of process.  The magic of the silver screen indeed!   

Tomorrow night is Private View night, as New Designers 2013 begins in earnest.  Watch this space - more updates on the CGAA Class of 2013 show to follow!