COTTINGLEY FAIRIES

Brief: Create a 00:45 – 01:30 intro sequence / credit sequence for a Film, TV show/series, theatre play/run or simply your own dream project. Title sequences are a delicate balance between meaning and form; text and shapes; visual effects and playful distortions of established visual conventions. They do not have to be any one thing. Rather, they have to be two things simultaneously; two things that work in conjunction with one another, at the same time. There is no point crediting major talent in the work, a marketing tool in itself, if it is illegible or hidden. When the audience is waiting to see what they’ve paid to see, how are you going to add to the tension? What will you allude to and why? How will you prime and influence your audience for the next 90 minutes plus? You must demonstrate that you understand this balance between function and form.

Using some old collectable fairy ornaments by Christine Haworth I'm going to animate the figures to make them look alive. This will dwell on the uncertainty at the time of the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairies. Upon further research, a movie has been made about the story called Fairy Tale: A True Story Dir. Charles Sturridge.

A brief contemporary update of the famous Cottingley Fairies photographs from British Photography:

"Some of the most famous and notorious British photographs of the twentieth century, a series of photographs taken in Cottingley, near Bradford in England in 1917 by two cousins, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and 16-year-old Elsie Wright. The pictures, taken in the woodland near their home, appeared to show fairies and gained enormous publicity when championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who declared the pictures of the Cottingley Fairies to be genuine in Strand magazine (December 1920). Arguments about their veracity fuelled debate between science and spiritualism. However, in the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted what to today's eyes seems obvious, namely that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time. However, Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine."

More potential for audio:

ARTIST REFERENCES

William Blake: Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing (1786)

Although, more often I come across this red tinted version.


Howie Wonder: paper collages (2019)
Particularly interested in his works where backgrounds are geometric repeating patterns that contrast a figure in the foreground.

Mat Colishaw: Catching Fairies 1, 2 & 5 C-type Photographs (1996)

Collishaw finds it curious that people so often record and document things going on around them, and can't quite appreciate the existence of something unless they capture and preserve it. Catching fairies was meant as an allegorical expression of this thought. In the images, Collishaw stands to his thighs in muddy water vainly attempting to capture fairies in his fishing net. These beings by definition are ephemeral, which makes his pursuit futile and absurd: to capture them would be to destroy them.

Anna McNay Interview (2015) for Studio International:

AMc: Just to touch on something slightly lighter, then: you’ve also done a lot of work on the theme of fairies. Do you believe in fairies?

MC: Not really, no. I wanted to make work that was about the ridiculous pursuit of the ephemeral and that, in making art, particularly in making photographs, we’re trying to take things from the real world and make records of them. I often wonder why the real world is not good enough as it is. Why do we have to try to capture everything and pin it down and have it there for us to examine, in the same way that butterfly collectors go out and kill exquisite butterflies and pin them to boards so we can analyse them and have power over them? So the pictures I made of myself trying to catch fairies with a fishing net in Clapton Pond [in east London] were about the absurdity of trying to capture these little mythical, ephemeral creatures.

"It’s our desire to see something that’s not there. We’ll be convinced by something, even if the evidence isn’t that convincing, because the desire within us to believe is so strong. We want to believe there’s something more to this world than what we experience – a higher power, whether it’s a god or fairies, or just something else. There has to be something greater that can save us – something pure, something that’s not tainted by this grubby world that we live in."

FURTHER VISUAL INSPIRATION: here