Meeting with Teachers

Today was our meeting as designers to finalise with our teachers what the aims and objectives of the project are, and to work out the dates for the workshops. Now - with the dates fixed and the commitments made - its time to start the research, design and development process.

The teachers of Wyke Regis have had a request - after the workshops at the weekend they liked the wing like aspect of some of the costumes Kinetika showed us and have asked if it would be possible to have something like that worked into the design.


-Also, special thanks to our driver for the day Alison, who despite a tempermental minibus got us there safe and sound -

To start with - Kinetika Weekend!

This weekend has been the true kicking off point for designing for Moving Tides - and our first opportunity to meet the teachers that we will be working with the next 5 months. This weekend was all about generating ideas, and learning invaluable techniques in making carnival costumes thanks to the wonderful weekend of workshops by the Kinetika carnival design team. Kinetika is a company known globally for its large scale beautiful silk work costumes and puppetry. In this meeting we were also assigned the base colours for our costume designs.

Yesterday began with workshops on batik and working together with our teachers to create the design for our sails - which are to be made, painted and used by the schools in the procession - and were able to build the sails from their base materials.

Today we started with seeing examples of headresses made and used by the Kinetika team in carnivals worldwide, and learning some of the basic materials and techniques in creating them. Following this was a talk in carnival makeup and the oportunity for us to experiment with different face-painting stencils and designs.  We also learnt about batik, and created and decorated a prototype sail using our batik techniques.

Thank you to Kinetika for providing us with the oportunity to try on examples of costumes and headresses used in previous carnivals worldwide, and for presenting us such interesting and creative workshops.