green fairy project

On Tuesday 9^th March, we all got a bollocking. The gist of said reprimand was that, as a group (by which I mean the whole year, not our amazing tight-knit team) we had done what is colloquially referred to as “fuck all” towards this project. Attendance had been low, ideas thin and enthusiasm minimal. In my defence, I would suggest that the brief and what has been expected of us has been “vague”, but all in all – fair point. In order to remedy this state of affairs and avoid everybody failing the module, we were given an hour to split up into our individual groups, brainstorm for an hour and then present our ideas to the rest of the year. The reason for this newfound urgency was that in two weeks time we would be presenting our initial ideas to the council themselves. Piece of piss. My only concern at this point was that having arrived a couple of minutes late, due in this case to finishing an interesting 3-D modelling session (i.e. making models, not performing on the catwalk while people wore polarised glasses), I caught Dan’s eye and inadvertently winked at him. Sorry Dan, I don’t think of you that way.

I sat down with Gary and Harry and discovered our magnetic team had attracted another member, in the form of Heidi. Having already met the previous Friday, we could expand on the ideas that emerged from that session and attempt to coalesce them into a coherent conjugation. The following progress was made:

Battery Bees – The model bee could double as a container in which to deposit dead batteries for recycling, thereby combining the two aims. When you bring your decorated bee to the tree, you bring your batteries for recycling too.

Bee Tree – Could we make it buzz? Would there be enough (or indeed any) power in a whole heap of dead batteries that could drive some sort of amplifier so that as the swarm of bees grew (people bringing bees and depositing batteries), so did the volume of buzzing. Help create a buzz! – Quite literally…

Podcast – This was an entirely new idea, perhaps easier and cheaper to develop than an iPhone app and more universally available to anybody with an mp3 player. The podcast could tell the story of the giant comic, act as tour guide around the route and include sound effects.

Recycled Sculpture – It was suggested that a statue (e.g. of Recycling Michael) could be built out of recycled materials and placed near the bee tree.

The majority of the hour was spent looking at how we could present our ideas to the rest of the year. We were also given a photocopied map of the route (finally), although this was a little difficult to follow and appeared more like the route the judges would be taken along than any kind of industrial heritage trail.

PRESENTATION

We needn’t have worried (I didn’t) – our group had more ideas between us than any other. We were told by Adam that we had so many ideas that we should present them individually and then work collectively on any that were selected as viable for further development. Our presentation was enlivened by Gary’s rapid illustration on the flipchart of the statue by the tree – attempting to inject some humour, he drew Recycling Michael holding a chainsaw. Except that he’d already draw him waving both hands in the air, giving the chainsaw the impression of being something entirely different and behaving in a manner ill-suited to attracting families. Not that such accidental interpretation prevented the 2012 Olympic logo from looking obscene from a certain point of view, we should probably endeavour to avoid giant statues ostentatiously presenting their phallus for all to see. As I was standing behind the flipchart, the joke was entirely lost on me, but Zoe could barely contain herself on noticing Michael making no attempt to contain himself. Oh how we laughed.

Of the other presentations, some had come up with the same ideas as us (bees as containers for batteries, hanging bees from the tree), others had come up with some gems and some had clearly cobbled something together in the last hour.