Flooring update

Daz Disley definitely deserves a creative credit for his work with me on design and production of the flooring for ‘Other Ranks’.

Daz’s role in the production of the floor design and its preparation for print is both a technical and a creative one.

It has fallen to two sound specialists to execute the ‘Other Ranks’ flooring design. One, thankfully, moonlights as a graphic and video whizz, the other, however, is me. Do you know it’s a fact that not one person has challenged me as to how the heck I propose to realise a complex graphic design without eyesight? Strange but delightfully true. I can only conclude that you are all fantastically evolved human beings...as well as completely barking!

Daz and I have devised a system whereby I mock-up sections of the design using a handful of my business cards, as standard objects. Ten at a time, I’m arranging them into variations on chaos, to build an effective end product.

I have asked Daz to pull out a good range and mix of photos for each grouping in the design. He is picking them out ten at a time, and describing each one to me so I know what’s going where.

Next Daz assigns each photo to a position based on the design I’ve laid out on the carpet, rotating and adjusting positions to accommodate the variation in the sizes and styles of the photos we’re working with.

Once we’ve got all the groups completed (when we run out of photos) we’ll repeat the process, but this time we’ll be arranging the groups around each other, to complete the design.

Now, before anyone starts, it is not the case that I’ve had a vague idea and have sat back and challenged Daz to pull it off for me.



It is very much the case, however, that Daz has stepped up to fill an important funding gap, left by Lincolnshire County Council refusing to fund the project on the grounds that it is not, in their opinion, of sufficient interest to the wider community (for which I thank them, so neatly does it vindicate the rationale for embarking on the work) :p

The job is made all the more exciting by my failure to elicit greater numbers of photos by public open submission. I thought the brief couldn’t be wider, and more easily fulfilled in these days of cameras in every orifice. I forgot to factor in my own idiocy however; made it all sound much more complicated than I meant to, I think.

It’s certainly true that I’m especially interested in military pictures. ‘Other Ranks’ is a military- focussing project. I’m genuinely (if not literally) over the moon with the brilliant pictures people have sent me. We’ve got some cracking historical and modern pics, showing great variation of places, people, activities; action scenes and family snaps. I’m chuffed to bits with the way people have gone off and hunted up some really rare images.



It was never my intention to exclude civilian photos though. I couldn’t make a piece about soldiers without also acknowledging that the effects of war have a much wider reach. Ccivilian casualties are the hardest to justify and to live with. I’m clear, in my own mind, that this floor should include civilians, alongside the soldiers, historical and modern. Nobody gets to opt out of the effects of war, if war comes to their own small world... and has there ever been a day in human history when nobody suffered from getting in the way of someone else’s fight?

War destroys civilian infrastructure and tears apart civilian lives.

I say I was clear about this, but I failed to communicate it clearly enough with my various public shoutings. Consequently, while the photos we have are a brilliant mix of exactly the kinds of pictures I was hoping for, there aren’t quite as many as I’d imagined, given the broadness of the brief.

Sooo, as well as wrangling the concept into a printable design, we also need to take account of the fact that we’re not quite so inundated with images as I had intended us to be at this stage. Still, it’s all grist to the mill.

The hardest thing for me is, to be honest, missing out on being able to study all the photos at leisure, for myself. It would be stupid to imagine that a photograph can be equally appreciated on a 2 sentence description as by gazing at it for minutes on end. By the same token, while I hold an image of how I want the floor to look, and am working hard to get as close to that as possible in the execution, I shall never really know whether it works.



I’m fairly confident that you’ll be telling me though! :o)