THE ARTISTS
By: Farah
Other Stories in this chapter: #Suva-Aaaaveee | BRAINSTORMING AND MOOD BOARDS
FORME, DHAHAU & AHMED
What I have done in Dhoores so far is follow people around, trying not to seem too creepy.
On the third day, I decided to follow Forme and Dhahau to the carpentry where they were going to film their story. The two of them were going to tell the story of Ahmed, a freewheeling gentleman who makes the frames of all the lights on the island. Whilst Dhahau set up her equipment, I made myself useful by keeping out of the way.
They first got Ahmed to make a frame in order to film his technique. The narrative of his story was filmed afterwards.
What piqued my interest the most was their candid approach to getting his story. I was told that they would be “interviewing Ahmed”. So naturally I was expecting them to ask him questions. However, Forme and Dhahau told Ahmed that they wanted to know how the frames were being made and then they asked him to tell them his story – simple as that. They let their subject narrate his own story without compelling him to get what they wanted out of it. This made all the difference because it made Ahmed’s story more sincere and natural.
What I learned from watching them is that the role of a storyteller is not to interject their ideas or views in to the story; instead, their approach of letting the subject freely narrate brings out something more genuine and real.
EVOLUTION: THUPPI & MAISHA
Thuppi initially started with the idea of making gifs to show the techniques used by the carpenters to make the furniture.
However, after wandering around the carpentry and shooting gifs from her phone, she came back to the workspace with the idea of making the gifs palpable; by turning them in to flip books.
Thuppi spent her day going back and fourth between the carpentry and the workspace. She spoke to the workers and very politely asked them if they would allow her to film what they are doing and then she would go back to a table that she had occupied at the workspace and make snippets from the gifs, cut them and place them in order. She made about eight flipbooks; containing twenty pages each, in one day. This may sound simple enough, but putting together twenty images that are almost identical in the right order is a lot more time consuming than it sounds. And she did this eight times over.
Likewise, Maisha started with the idea of making illustrations of characters on actual photographs to depict the stories that she heard from Nizarbe’ and other locals working on the island. She went around the island taking pictures and came back rather overwhelmed because she wasn’t quite happy with her original idea anymore.
After spending some time with her very fancy new-age art equipment (apparently we now have a board-sort of things you can draw on using a stylus-sort pen and whatever you draw magically appears on a programme on your desktop and you can do all sorts of fancy art on it), and discussing amongst the other artists, she decided to make a children’s book with a lot of illustrations. However, she was then faced with the dilemma of writing a story to match her artwork.
Almost all the artists that I followed around today started with what they put up on their mood boards. However, after going to the actual locations and starting their productions formally, their ideas evolved and more elements started coming in to what was primarily discussed. They improvised, and the more time they spent collecting the raw footage or sources for their work, the more their ideas progressed.
For Thuppi, what started out as simple gifs ended up as flip books whilst Maisha’s story of little illustrations on actual photographs is turning into a series of almost fully-fledged children’s stories.
“CREATIVE BLOCKS” &
INSPIRATIONS
The fourth day was pretty intense for all the artists. We had to present our first story by the end of the night.
At this point of our trip, “burning the midnight oil” bad become a normal thing. Everyone took turns sleeping on the (handmade) wooden couches in our “work space.” And when you wake up two things would have happened: someone would have put a blanket over you, and a picture of you sleeping would be in the Emmenge Viber group. By the fourth day we had fully embraced the mantra of “creating stories in a collaborative space” that was advertised by Emmenge.
However, inspiration doesn’t come just like that for all artists. I noticed that every artist had his or her individual methods of working. And sometimes their work was hindered due to unforeseeable circumstances.
Aima, who was very intricately drawing the leaves of the palm trees and the taro trees using a very thin cutter, needed a frame for her installation. However, she couldn’t continue her piece, as she only had limited materials to work with.
When I came back to our workspace after wandering around, Aima was sitting on the couch looking rather miserable. She said that her idea started developing after she started working on it but she was in a limbo because of a scarcity of materials. To add to that misery, she said she was feeling uninspired because she couldn’t continue and the wait was making her question her installation and its significance.
Maisha was also having trouble continuing her work. She had an idea in her head, she knew exactly how she wanted her piece to look like, but it was the matter of the written story that was getting to her. Because she wasn’t so certain about the flow of the story, she didn’t know how to continue her illustrations.
And there were both feeling the pressure of the deadline dawning nearer and were slightly panicking – which did not help their situation.
Just as writers experience “writers block”, I found out that artists and craftsy people experience a “creative block” which makes it almost impossible for them to access their flowing stream of inspiration.
Eventually though, Aima managed to brave it up and risk handing her installation over to one of the workers in the carpentry to make the wooden frame around it; which turned out to be great. The carpenter she worked with – a Bangladeshi man named Shameem – pitched in his own ideas about her installation, which she said actually helped her continue. And Maisha managed to get her creative flow going when she and Thuppi started talking about her storylines after a much-deserved nap.
CARTMAN + REE
Cartman and Ree has been a “Cartman and Ree” unit since we arrived. They are painters, animators and also a couple. They met at an art gallery. How often do people get to say that these days?
I decided that whilst they were rushing to complete the animation for their story about the bar made from a fallen tree before the night’s presentation, I would go and have a chat with them because they were the only two people that I didn’t know of prior to the trip.
Cartman and Ree are quite different from each other; it’s hard to ignore Cartman’s presence because he has an appropriately hilarious comeback for everything whilst Ree is reserved and quiet.
I asked Cartman about his art and how he got in to it. Cartman immediately whipped out his phone to show me his work and it was so, so impressive. Cartman does 3D art and I have never met a Maldivian who does that. He also does murals and he showed me a drawing he did of the Mona Lisa, which had me convinced that Cartman could be an art-forger if all else fails in his life. Before Ree could say anything, Cartman showed me some of her paintings too. Ree mostly does abstract paintings that have an airy, feminine touch to it.
To stay relevant, I asked Cartman what it was about the bar that piqued their interest. He just laughed and said that he found it funny how a tree near a mosque fell and ended up being a bar. “From nature to the bar – Gudhurathun vee bar eh!” Puns and wordplay are amongst my favourite things, and Cartman was just on-point.
The work they were doing was not simple at all though. They drew over 200 images of how tree ended up being a bar and that was just half of their work – they also had to scan the images, and edit it in order to make an animation, and add sound effects and whatnots on it. And they did all that, in just three days. Maybe I am not used to seeing work like this, and this may be a completely normal thing for animators and painters and videographers to do so much work within a limited time frame, but I couldn’t help but be genuinely impressed.
Other Stories in this chapter: #Suva-Aaaaveee | BRAINSTORMING AND MOOD BOARDS