ALIGHT installation idea

Continuing on with this development I've had to create a structure/installation piece for the Alight project I've been looking at the shape of the structure & how it would or could be constructed for the event. Here are my current pages from my sketch book showing the thoughts as they develop:

I cut these shapes out and constructed them into the 6 sides shape that I had been envisioning. From one of the panels I used my scalpel to cut out the lettering just to see how it would work & look when light was shone at the structure.

  

From the one panel section that I have cut into I think the outcome has worked really well. The shadow below the structure is the perfect place for light to be shone through to light up what is written in the panel. As the light is moved around, the quality and positioning of the word/shape in light changes which I think is a really interesting effect.

This is the structure laid flat on the floor from a birds eye view shot so you can see the over all shape of the structure before it is bent up into a standing position.

I've also been thinking about where and when to position this piece for the Alight event. Obviously it is an all day event, ending up at the hubs for the evening entertainment drawing to a close. I thought the ideal position for this would be outside of the hubs. It can be in use all day, but obviously as the evening comes & it gets darker, it will work much more effectively. This would be free to the public to interact with, not only by crawling inside the structure but also being given the opportunity to graffiti the inside of the piece, so that when it is taken down after the event, the panels can be kept with people thoughts & memories of that day & possible displayed around the city.

 Going hand in hand with this project & feeding off my first initial ideas for this event, I still also want to concentrate on the lantern side of this too. I think some where near this piece there should be a stall selling lanterns that can also be personalised. At a set time in the evening, everyone who has purchased a lantern can come out into the street and light them together and send them off into the sky as the closing event of the day.

Shadow work ideas...

I've been looking into putting my own twist to the youtube video idea & these are the panel ideas:

These individual panel ideas all come from my previous designs for the lanterns & still use the concept of light, but I have developed my design & taken it to the next level. On each panel there is either the typography for the ALIGHT heading or a quote/section from a poem or rhyme referencing light.
These panels would be joined together to form a 3D structure that would be large enough for 1-2 people to crawl under & sit inside. The idea of the cut out lettering is so that when a light is shone onto the structure, the light passes through the gaps & the word is written in light below the structure. This still also has my interactive theme that I wanted to include at the beginning of the project.
These are my thoughts on paper of how the structure will work:

this shows the seven different panels & a rough idea of the shape.

Although this is on its side, it shows how the light would pass through the gaps to produce a copy of what is written in the panel.

Developmental thoughts for ALIGHT project

As I was researching poetry or quotations referring to light, I came across this video of a different way to use light & typography combined. What I like most about this design is how the natural movement of the sun changes the accuracy of how the type is projected through the holes.
I'm going to think about how I could use something similar to this in my own ALIGHT design ideas. This still connects with my thoughts that I first had about using lanterns with cut out shapes or pieces of type, but it takes it to a new level.

ALIGHT

This is my Alight project..... I'll update images as my work progresses:

In a nut shell, my idea is to light up the city through out the day from morning right through to the evening with all kinds of lanterns. Bright coloured ones in the morning, lit lanterns as the night draws in & it gets dark. Going off topic during the day but staying on theme with the idea of light, creating tall 3D free standing lettering spelling out ALIGHT in the street that are interactive with the public. They can be climbed on etc for photographs.

Here is my primary research of already existing chinese lanterns, both flying, hanging & floating:

I have been looking into typography & in specific lettering for the word ALIGHT. I have used the book Hand Job for research of different fonts & these are some of the ideas I have come up with:

As you can see, I then went on to looking at how I could cut into the lantern & how the lettering might look if I were to do this.

I decided to use one of my lanterns as a test piece to see how this would work on the actual product:

Whilst cutting into the tissue of the lanterns, it was very difficult to get a neat, straight cut because it was such a fine & delicate material. It also didn't help that the scissors I was using were far to large for the delicate corners of the type.

Once the lettering was cut out, it was clear that this wasn't going to work as I'd originally planned. Due to having to cut out the whole external shape of the letter, it became unclear what the letters were after they were cut out, especially in the case of the letter A and H.

The next big problem with this idea was the fact that once the tissue was cut into, it most likely would not function as a lantern should. once the shape of the lantern was cut into, the heat from the flame that would normally fill the lantern to make it float wold now be lost out of the holes cut into its side. This means that the lantern would no longer have the capability to fly.

After this I decided to look into how I could use the material of the lantern to create an image, illustration or some sort of typography on. My tutor pointed me in the direction of poetry rather than the factual & some what in-your-face idea of writing ALIGHT straight onto the lantern.

I found two poems that had some relevance to light:

This is a verse taken from a poem by A. E (George William Russell)

This quote is taken from the poem "Daylight" written by Itumeleng Adams and is my preferred piece of poetry. It talks about darkness & flames which are both embodied in the idea of my project. I used ink to paint this sentence onto the side of a lantern just to see how it would react with the material & how its overall look would or could shape the lantern.

  

This was just a first practice to see how it would work out. I now need to refine my idea & decide upon a type face to use & how to position the lettering.

  

Going off on a slight tangent, but still thinking about light I have been playing around with the shutter speed on my camera & photographing lights at night:

I've gone back to the quote from the poem by Itumeleng Adams & I've been doing more research into the typography I could use for this piece of writing.

This was a random Alight logo I came up with whilst researching different typographical approaches to the lettering. 

This last image is using the same ink I used to paint onto the tissue of the lantern.