For this project, I was working with Ellen Rose; A fellow illustrator on my course. We chose to create a video/film response to a sound clip from ubuweb.com. The clip that we decided on was vocal performance by Todd Coby of a poem called 'Cake'. We like this piece in particularly because we felt that you got a sense of character from not only the words but also in how the words were spoken by Colby. We started off by thinking that we may go down the route of making a stop motion animation; possibly using play dough due to its cake dough like consistency however, we then decided to take a much more literal approach. Ellen and I decided that like the poem, the film we would make would have two sides. The first side was adoration - for cake. In the poem, Colby repeatedly says the phrase "I love cake" and this is enforced throughout the dialogue. In contrast, the second part of the poem becomes quite threatening and violent with Colby telling the audience "I would punch somebody in the face for cake". The tone and speed of his voice in this second part of this points towards major agitation and possibly an instability. Because Ellen and I wanted to take these two contrasting parts to the extreme, we bought a lot of cake. We also chose to have a red, velvet background to give the film an almost pornographic feeling to relate to Colby's strange love of cakes.
Below are process photographs of the set, the food and the materials that we used to create the film.
Having created our set and set up our cameras, we made a list of the different cakes, how we would film them and which part of the film they would end up being in. Most of the cakes did end up being in both the sexual and violent parts of the film as we wanted a continuity between the two halves however, some of them didn't due to being destroyed or eaten.