There must be something in the human brain that makes us enjoy stories
so much that we are able to blot out everything else. Watching a good
film, you quickly forget about the edges of the screen. Movies with
subtitles are even more engrossing - I forget I’m reading the words
and can’t take my eye off the screen for a second. My wife is a
puppeteer. I love watching her shows, particularly because I so quickly
forget her presence and get completely involved in her characters and
stories.
A while ago I was keen on making
simulator rides because they felt so all absorbing. I still enjoy watching
people use Microbreak - completely unaware of the crowd watching them. The
Bathyscape, a simulator with more of a story, remains one of the most
popular machines in The Under The Pier Show. So when I thought up a new way
to tell a story, a cross between comic strip, movie and flea
circus, I was excited.
It came from an unlikely
starting point. I was working at the Exploratorium in San Fransisco,
where they run a 'Tinkering Studio' to engage visitors with workshops to
make things lasting 30 minutes to an hour. I suggested dioramas inside
shoeboxes, lit by LEDs. I spent a week making a few examples and then
thought of linking them together. I bought a recordable sound module for
a greetings card and put all the shoeboxes inside a big box. Another
project I had been working on was making programming more tangible, so
I’d built them some electromechanical cam timers. I used one of these
to turn the LEDs in the different scenes on at the right moment while
the audio played. The finished result was Alien Salvation.
Alien salvation video
It excited me, both because it
only took 10 days to make, and also because of this novel form of
storytelling.I came
home wondering if in some form it could be an arcade machine. I have
considered making dioramas or peep shows before, but a plain box with an
eyehole would be unlikely to tempt
anyone to part with their cash. A month or so later I thought of leaving all
the scenes visible, lighting them up in sequence. The machine could look
like a giant page from a comic.
So I started looking for a story.
Of course films almost always start with the story, and then look for a
visual style to tell it. I wasn’t sure if it would work the other way
round, particularly because I’m not a writer, but decided it would
still be interesting to try. The Bedbug drama unfolded at Novelty
Automation. The people in the flat above got infected and I got bitten.
I developed a minor allergic reaction so every bite swelled up
alarmingly. Also a nearby hotel got infected so I discovered the
fascinating tricks of how they get rid of them. At the same time many of my
friends rent out rooms on Airbnb. With all these ingredients, bedbugs
became the theme.
I invited Paul Spooner to
collaborate and we spent a happy couple of days working out a
storyboard. I had hoped that we would be able to make one scene at a
time, working out the layout as we made them. However I gradually
realised that this would be impractical so I started by building rough
versions of the scenes to fix all the dimensions of the final
versions.
prototypes video
With a set of boxes for all the
scenes I then sent Paul some to fill.
I started confidently, thinking
I could do a box or two in a week. But I’m not used to working on this
small scale and this seemed to involve lots of things I’d never tried
before. I’m also not used to painting things like this – I had to
learn to spray acrylic paint. It was all was interesting, but it took
over three months.
The software quite
simple - one trigger input from the coin acceptor starts a chain of
events. The main problem was organising the wiring, there are just so
many different lights and motors and effects all working on different
voltages. Also each scene has to be removable to work on if it goes
wrong. Fortunately the motors draw a small enough current so can be
outputted directly from the PLC without any relays. Each scene has a
connector board with voltage regulators, so the power from the PLC is
always 12 volts. Multicore cables go from each scene back to
the PLC.
The projectors need shutters
over the lens to block the startup screens. At first all the projectors
ran for the entire show, but I realised by switching each one on just
when was needed could quadruple their lives. Yet more wires and
complexity - but the 'system' worked very well, I rarely got in a muddle.
Early on I had the idea that the
finale should be that the people wearing the headphones would get bitten
on their heads, with some sort of mechanism hidden in the headphones. I
left making this until everything else was finished but then it all went
wrong. For a start the top of the head is surprisingly insensitive to
touch (ask a friend to touch your head and guess the number of fingers
touching, its not easy). The closest I got to a ‘bite’ sensation was a bit of
fishing wire poked into the scalp. But the noise of the mechanism was amplified
so much by mechanical transmission through headphones.
This dominated over any physical ‘bite’ effect. I finally tried air
jets to avoid any mechanism in the headphones, but the head is used to
this – it just feels like a cold wind. Nothing would link instinctively to
the tiny heads being bitten in the final scene
.
failed bite
mechanisms
Fortunately Paul then arrived
and with a sympathetic ear to unburden myself, I finally admitted defeat
and abandoned the whole idea. We then had fun adding detail to the
interior scenes – before he arrived I’d thought of leaving the
scenes empty, looking more like the exterior scenes. Adding the detail
made the interiors look more dolls house, but I now don’t know why
that bothered me. I now prefer it that scenes aren’t all exactly the
same style.
After installing it in The Under
The Pier Show on test, I lost heart. There were two basic flaws. First
because the physical headphone ‘bites’ hadn’t worked out, the
ending was very flat. Second my original idea that the bedbugs journey
could relate to the journeys of immigrants just didn't work. Deflated, I left it on test for a few
months while I got on with other stuff. The gap made it easier to
rethink everything.
Not that much I could do about
the story. It made me realise why movies have so many stages of rewrites before the ‘shoot’. But small changes did make a
difference. The spiders, who had been the immigration officials in the
original, turned into Air BnB enthusiasts. This also made the story
simpler and easier to understand. The ending, which felt so flat was
improved by a menacing twist – the narrator suggesting you may make
some new friends while you sleep while the action returns to the first
scene of the big bug feeding.
I had also been stuck with the
sound track. I’d asked a friend to do the effects and music but he was
changing jobs and didn't have time to do much. It was equally my fault for
not being sure about what I wanted. Anyway one evening I just went
online and found everything I had been imagining. Adding them improved
the whole thing a lot – all movies need music!
Finally I kept thinking how much
better the machine had looked at night with all the lights off.I'd almost added a motorised curtain mechanism to ‘envelope’ the
users but this was complicated and curtains are bulky, even when pulled
back. Returning afresh I decided to make a descending blind instead (a much
simpler, more reliable mechanism). This was the biggest improvement of
all. I finally started to see people coming away laughing and telling
their friends the plot.
Looking back, it was good to try
something completely different from my usual arcade games and I’m
still excited by its potential as a story telling medium. The downside
is that its so inflexible - even less than a movie – the shots and their order
have to be fixed so early on. If I ever try another, I will put more
effort into the script before starting to ‘shoot’.
