Mela Project

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Nicolai Berntsen Event & Experience design DESIGNING ORGANISING & EVENTS FOR THE MELA FESTIVAL

description

Exam Westerdals Expericence & Event

Transcript of Mela Project

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Nicolai BerntsenEvent & Experience design

DESIGNINGORGANISING&

EVENTSFOR THE MELA FESTIVAL

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Assignment

Content

Designing and organising events for the Mela Festival. Assignment: 1. To make a design for the opening ceremony for the Mela Festival 2012. The ceremony will take place 23 August in the Oslo Town Hall´s main Festive space. To design a visual space for an hour long programme which will include music, poetry and dance from all over the world. The stage shoud accommodate per-formances by individuals and groups up to 10 people. 2. To plan, coordinate and execute a Flash mob on location in Oslo with (or without) participants from the Mela Festival commu-nity. The aim is to promote the festival and the event may be linked to the festival via a web-site or social media.

3. To make a visual concept for the Mela Fes-tival Site. The teams can choose any medium to communicate their ideas which will be pre-sented 6 June 2012.

In t roduct ion 4 Insp i rat ion , research & process 5 Visua l concept 6 Fest iva l s i te 6 F lash mob 9

Opening ceremony 9

at tachments : P lan & E levat ion 1 :25 , P lan 1 :100

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In t roduct ionMy first encounter with the Mela festival was a presentation held by the organizers. They gave us a presentation about the concept as a whole and how they previously had done it. They defined their mission to extend peoples horizons by increasing their art perspectives from all over the world. They called it a worlds culture festival for executive art and culture expression. The tools they used were different art forms like music, dance, litterature, theater and food.

The concept sounded really good and I was quickly excited by the idea, but after see-ing pictures, videos of the previous festivals I came up with several ideas I thought could help. One thing they mentioned was that they wanted the audience to be the “owners” of

the festival. My first thought was to give the audience something more physical to own. For example by making them paint the art in the festival. This presentation will include how my team arrived at our design proposal and an over-view of the whole project.

Our main inspiration came from the Holi festival of colors in India. The vast specter of colors they use in Holi could been seen as a metaphor for the multicultural festival that Mela is. I wanted to take this further with combining this to the idea mentioned in the introduction:”Giving the audience something physical to own”. Placing a huge wall to paint on at the festival site, the audience would have the opportunity to paint and create a wall of art together. This would also illustrate the meaning of word “Mela” which means meeting place. This could be done like a workshop before the festival and then use the art as the stage design, or the design could be created while the festival is running. This way the audience is physically a part of the design and the festival, and it would include many different perspectives of art and cul-tures as anyone can join in. This turned out to be our basis for our whole concept and helped us solve our three assignments:

1. To make a design for opening ceremony for the Mela festival. 2. To plan, coordinate and execute a flash mob. 3. To make a visual concept for the Mela festival site.

At first we prioritized task three in the assign-ment. It seemed natural to plan the visual concept for the festival first as this would create a general theme for the festival. This could then be used as a guideline to solve task 1 and 2. With background in our inspira-tion from the colors in the Holi festival and the idea of “giving the audience something physi-cal to own”, we came up with the slogan: “We are the canvas, you are the paint”. By “we” we meant Mela and by “you” we meant the audience. With this as an overall theme we started focusing on task 2: the flash mob.

Live-painting was our main inspiration for the flash mob. As far as we knew it had not been done before in a flash mob. Which meant that

our idea was kind of original which could also mean good marketing. To get this done we needed good artists, and with a low budget in mind we contacted the art school “Strykejer-net” with hope of finding some volunteers. We also created posters to put up at the school and other places we thought were relevant. With this in progress we also looked at other possibilities. In case we got no volunteers, but also to maximise the effect of the flash mob, we applied for an increase in our budget from strykejernets principal. This was recom-mended by our counsellor “Tatjana”. At the same time we got response from “Strykejer-net” meaning the idea was turning into a real event. However, Sandra in our group man-aged to summon 6 professional graffiti artists. This meant that we had to change the idea of painting to graffiti painting. A change I thought would spice up the event but also increase the quality. We wanted the flash mob to oper-ate as quickly as possible, and graffiti artists usually have a better ability to paint faster than regular painters.

Insp i rat ion , research & process

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We wanted the flash mob to be the main trig-ger for the festival. The artists in the flash mob would create the basis for the whole festival design. Furthermore we pictured random peo-ple from different cultures and backgrounds to form the design. Either by arranging a workshop where anyone can come paint, or by giving out canvas to different communities in the city. Such as kindergardens, schools or retirement homes.

Then, after the art is finished by these ran-dom people, the Mela festival could collect them and take outtakes from the canvases to create “boxes”. We pictured this boxes to be squares with sides 60 cm x 60 cm. These boxes could then be used to create forma-tions or sculptures to build the visual concept for the Mela festival.

Visua l concept

The festival site at Rådhusplassen will be a very good place to show our concept. Even though the area is very big I believe our proj-ect will be well noticed. This because the de-sign is very colorful and includes big contrasts in their use.

Main stageAs for the main stage we pictured the optimal size for it to be 10 x 20 meters. The design will mainly be the boxes and canvases from the workshops mentioned earlier. This will also help the project to be noticed. The par-ticipants for the workshops might recognize their paintings or they might even show up just to see where their art ended up.

Poetry stageThe design for the poetry stage will almost be the same as the main stage. Covered in the

cubes and canvases from the workshops. Our plan is to place this stage near the water. This might create a more poetic feeling around the stage. Also a tent with only a roof over the stage would make the area more poetic and calm.

Children’s areaAs for the children´s area we thought the fountain in front of the city hall would be a good place. Children enjoy the restlessness of a fountain and for the parents the spot will be central. An easy place to keep an eye on the kids. A circle with a 6 meter diameter of walls would create a border where the kids alone could create art. Kids would be handed paint and then told to paint on the inside of the wall.

Fest iva l s i te

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Flash mob

With a budget on 10 000 kr we believe the event could turn out to be very good. The theme we chose and the design is not expen-sive to make. The stage inside the city hall will be a smaller replica of the main stage out-side. Also here cubes and canvases from the workshops will be the main elements of the design. An idea was to build these boxes into shaping Melas logo. The only thing we would need would be a trosse which would hold up the cubes with wires. We would spread out the cubes inside the city hall so the design is recognized not only at the stage.

We want the audience to be seated at chairs inside the city hall. These chairs would be divided into the two sides of the room, where the main entrance would work as a borderline between them. This sounds like the easiest and best way to do it.

A challenge that could occur inside the city hall is the regular artwork in the building. We would not want it to “steal” the attention from the art at the stage. A solution to this would be to light up our elements and darken the room.

Opening ceremony

We wanted to get as much attention as pos-sible. To stand out from the crowd, but also to protect ourselves from the paint, we used costumes. They were white dresses which covered the entire body including the head. For the face we used glasses and masks. Fur-thermore we had music playing for the entire event, this also to increase the attention.

The plan was to make the main graffiti-painter to start out alone in the middle of the park. First without the costume, but then put it on and start to shake a spray can. At this mo-ment the music would start. Two other graf-fiti painters would now start to run towards him with plastic covers. Four others would come running from another direction with the canvas held in the air. After setting it up the main graffiti painter would immediately start to paint. One of the others would place them-selves in the middle of the canvas while the main graffiti painter was painting. This person would eventually be a part of the art getting covered in paint. Hopefully the artist would be so good that the person standing with the canvas eventually would “disappear” within the art. The audience would might “forget” this person and new arrivals in the audience would hopefully not see this person. This would make the ending of the flashmob more surprising and rememberable. At the end ev-

eryone would move away from the canvas in different directions.

Personally I think the event did not go as smooth as planned mainly due to a location change 30 minutes before event. The reason for this location change was the lack of audi-ence in the initial planned park ( Kubaparken ). We then changed it to “Olaf Ryes plass”, where potential audience were greater. The change caused the organizers more stress and the feeling of sudden improvise might have reduced the quality of the event . One thing that could have been done better at that time would be to go back to the school and brief everyone with changes about a new location.

I have experienced and learned a lot from this task. One thing is how important it is for ev-eryone, who were a part of the organizing, to feel the same level of ownership to the proj-ect. Thoughts of somebody else in the group having more to say, or decide, than yourself could demotivate and decrease the quality of ones partition to the group. This is also impor-tant in moments of sudden changes, like the location change. It seems harder to motivate people who does not have the same passion for the project relative to others.

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