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Evaluation

For a while, I wasn’t sure where I was going to go with this assignment.

I found the idea behind some of the pieces at BMAG fascinating, particularly ‘The Dawn Chorus’ by Marcus Coates and ‘Caryatids’ by Paul Pfeiffer. I liked that both were examples of everyday activity that had been altered in some way and laid bare. It offered different perspective and insight on something otherwise relatively straightforward; whilst ‘Caryatids’ exposed the theatricality of “dives” in something as high-profile as professional football, the ‘Dawn Chorus’ broke down ever-present birdsong to a pitch that could be mimicked with the human voice.  

The piece I was most drawn to was Stefan Gec’s ‘Untitled’; an animation drawn from blueprints of the first ever US-Soviet joint space mission. There was an intricate complexity and fragility to the vectored lines of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docking together that seemed in stark contrast to the sterile, functional machines themselves.

The aesthetic and tone of this piece was even relevant to the Territory Studios presentation I attended during Flatpack Festival. Territory’s area of expertise is providing the 2D and holographic interfaces often seen in science fiction films. The information they project can often develop narrative and world-building, and may even inform the actors themselves during their performance.

The brief for “I Want, I Want” and its specific emphasis on technology was fresh in my mind during my visit to Hiroshima.

The infamous city has long held my fascination, yet the reality of being there still caught me unprepared. The presence of the surviving A-Bomb Dome building and the surrounding memorials of Peace Park are charged with emotion. Almost immediately I knew this was what I wanted to portray.

For as long as I’ve understood the reasoning behind the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’ve also acknowledged the juxtaposition at which these events exist.

The Second World War was over in Europe, yet the United States remained locked in combat with Japan across the Pacific territories. The world yearned for an end to the fighting, and to achieve that the US harnessed the splitting of the atom to engineer a new kind of weapon.

Many thousands of civilian lives were lost in two blinks of the eye, yet those attacks brought the War to an end. However, the world that so many had fought to preserve was forever changed by this new atomic age. What had been the real cost for peace?

My original influence was also still relevant, as Stefan Gec’s ‘Untitled’ emphasised a collaboration between the US and the USSR after decades of Cold War in the wake of WWII.

For research, I looked at the influence the bombings had had upon Japanese art and culture. From fine art such as ‘Myth of Tomorrow’ by Okamoto Taro, to serialised first-hand accounts in Keiji Nakazawa’s manga, ‘Barefoot Gen’ to imagery used in Katsuhiro Otomo’s ‘Akira’ and even music with Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’.

Barefoot Gen also shows the bombing from the perspective of the crew of the Enola Gay. It occurred to me that the targeting reticule and monitoring equipment shown from their perspective was reminiscent of the interfaces portrayed by Territory Studios, yet I also wondered whether scrutinising their actions through such devices granted them some ethical detachment and preservation from the horror they’d just inflicted.

I wanted to use a similar “filter” overlaid on my own work, but instead I used the reoccurring motif of the US clock designating the 8:15 am drop-time. I liked the idea that somewhere distant there was an office the orders had come from, and that the only acknowledgment in that remote place would be a desktop clock. It also echoes the famously preserved watch from Hiroshima, which had stopped at the specific moment with its hands burnt into its face.

I’m happy with the animation I produced. Although I used monotone and relatively few frames a second, I feel this gave it a dated, contemporary look. I had a clear idea of the overhead perspective I wanted to show the city from, however this means I had less to animate. Had I opted for a closer angle I would’ve been compelled to add more frames and more intricate animations.

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Final animation, submitted as a flip book.

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Melting clock - perhaps too Dali-esque to use in context, but worth showing anyway 😉

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Here's an extension of the previous animation. It looks janky and I don't like it, but it's significant as it's most likely gonna change my approach.

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Progress - smoothed out the fade with a transition to drawn image of Hiroshima. Hundreds of mushroom cloud frames to go...

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Struggling to find footage I can reference for a B-29 bomber. Instead I've decided to go with a US military clock to depict the infamous 8:15am drop time.

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Bikini Atoll nuclear testing took place between 1946-1958.

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Animation workshop with Steve Chamberlain of Selotape Cinema. Pretty rough and undeveloped.

We had to begin and end with the letter Z.

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Victory?

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Perhaps one of the most interesting ways I ever saw Hiroshima interpreted in narrative was in the Steven Spielberg movie, Empire of the Sun.

We see through the eyes of the protagonist, who is many hundreds of miles away from Hiroshima. The horizon is suddenly filled with incredible light, and oblivious to the awful truth, he instead interprets the strange colours in the sky as the passing spirit of his dying companion. 

There’s an essence of personal emotion and child-like wonder in his observation, a stark contrast to what actually transpired.

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Although technically not a nuclear explosion, the opening scene of Akira features the instantaneous destruction of Tokyo, which is at first assumed to be a nuclear attack and triggers the outbreak of World War III.

Again, perhaps further evidence that the horror of Hiroshima permeates the Japanese psyche - particulalry in sci-fi and manga, of which Akira is a prime example.

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I tried to capture some of the horror and duality of the incident in the Julian Opie workshop - on one side the victorious, saluting soldier “just following orders” and the burning victim on the other.

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Applying the narrative device discussed by the animators from Territory studios to my focus on Hiroshima reminded me of the bombing scene from the animated adaption of Barefoot Gen.

There’s something to be said about the cold precision of the targeting interface and the way it separates the crew of the Enola Gay from the horror they drop onto the city.