As part of the field module, we were required to take part in a group project with people from other arts courses in Uni. I was in a group with people from courses like Designer & Maker, Illustration and Product Design. We were put together in a group because we had all chosen the theme of Migration in our Field project; “City”. We began to research migration and tried to tie in our own personal field project work. After finding an article which is in the next post, about the Monarch Butterfly, which the Mexican celebration day is based on, is all about the butterflies migration from Canada to Mexico. The Mexicans believe the butterflies are the souls of past loved ones returning to Earth. This made us think about how like many animals, we too migrate to new places in order to improve our way of living. Whether its moving away from university (my case), or for a new job, to a warmer climate or even for an improved standard or way of living; everyone seeks a change sometimes.

We fell in love with the idea of the Butterfly migrating, as most of us felt it would be a very relatable theme to all of us first years. The next thing we decided on was how we would present our work. We brainstormed loads of different concepts, like my idea of a kinetic sculpture (this is a music video clip showing a similar thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w ) or a large sculpture with elements from each of our own practices. However all of these we felt would not have enabled us each to show our own practices work to its full potential, which is when we decided to try something none of us had ever tried before; a stop motion animation. This allowed us to all create a part of the animation if we had a story or theme behind it. We focused on the idea of the butterfly migrating and began to write a story board for our concept.

We set up a green screen and lighting (I explain this in other posts with the links to our test runs). We faced some difficulties but were very please with the outcome. We aimed to create a story about a butterfly (a symbol for a human) that migrated to a new city (this part was based around me; moving from Jordan to Cardiff). We wanted to show the difficulties that we can be faced with when migrating such as having to leave a loved place, meeting new people and trying to fit in, getting to know the area and the good the bad and they ugly involved with it. We showed this by having the butterfly meeting ‘homeless’ butterflies and being saddened by this, being overwhelmed by the new bigger buildings and the different climate. However as everyone usually gets used to a new place and meets new people, they make friends. The butterfly did exactly this and met others from all different species (symbolising races, cultures and different backgrounds). Overall we were pleased with the outcome!