Flickers can be made for any site: indoor, outdoor, urban, rural. Participants set off with an expedition kit, a series of flick books, which act as tools to navigate a site. The flick books can also be attached to trees, railings, lamp posts along a route to be discovered and followed by passers-by.
Flickers is an immersive hands-on experience which engages the participant in their immediate environment by placing them inside a story that happens in the site through which they are moving. In an educational or interpretive context, Flickers has the potential to be a startling and engaging learning tool which opens up a site and its secrets.
Each version of Flickers is unique to the site and can be made up of any number of sequences, from just one flick book up to a series with twenty sequences. The process is like making a film that is set in a particular site. A ten-book, 40 minute walk takes about three months to make. A longer lead in time is preferable.
Process Outline:
Development ideas for future commissions:
Example scenarios for education and heritage sites:
Contact Rachel Henson to discuss commissioning, fees and cost structure.
Flickers is an immersive hands-on experience which engages the participant in their immediate environment by placing them inside a story that happens in the site through which they are moving. In an educational or interpretive context, Flickers has the potential to be a startling and engaging learning tool which opens up a site and its secrets.
Each version of Flickers is unique to the site and can be made up of any number of sequences, from just one flick book up to a series with twenty sequences. The process is like making a film that is set in a particular site. A ten-book, 40 minute walk takes about three months to make. A longer lead in time is preferable.
Process Outline:
- Deciding the site with the commissioner
- Finding a route through and creating a concept or narrative specific to the site
- Filming and photographing the route, creating approximately one frame per 5 paces
- Story-boarding and deciding the start and finish of each flick book
- Adding animation and effects
- First edit
- Testing draft flick books on site
- Second edit
- Colour and adjustments for print
- Printing
- Presentation
Development ideas for future commissions:
- Discovering secret paths and desire-ways through your neighbourhood - uncovering old paths or imagining routes through.
- Traverse your neighbourhood as a superhero - leaping buildings, seeing through walls, rising in the air to gain a bird's eye view.
- A magic realist urban thriller
- A walk that leads you into and under the water (pool, river, sea)
- A journey in and through a building
- Experiencing a public space from a child's eye view.
- Making visible parts of a site that are inaccessible to some audiences;
- Viewing memories of a site in the present, for example, creating a living archive: an impression of a festival/event past so that it can be viewed all year round (especially suitable for a city which hosts a regular festival)
- A walk through a museum where artefacts lead you through and 'speak' their histories
Example scenarios for education and heritage sites:
- You walk over what was once the threshold of a ruined building and the house appears around you. You catch a glimpse of a child running though one of the doors and follow her to discover the house and its inhabitants as they once were.
- You walk into the woods. You flick the flick book and see a fox cub emerging from the fox hole at the edge of the path, a may fly emerging from the pond at your feet.
- You walk over the pitted landscape that lies above the network of Neolithic flint mines known as Grimes’ Graves. The flick book opens the earth at your feet and allows you to climb down a series of ladders to find reindeer antler picks buried deep in the mine shaft.
Contact Rachel Henson to discuss commissioning, fees and cost structure.