THE PROJECT DESIGN

The Team:  Kyle J. Schmidt and S.E. Smith.

The Date:  September 2008

The Product:  A Yearbook for Sigourney-Avella Senior High School entitled The Savage Round-Up. 

The Concept:  Sigourney-Avella Senior High School is a fictional school where all the students have objects where their heads should be.

The Thrill:  How does a reader/viewer create character or navigate empathy when confronted with an impenetrable mask?

The Quill:  What happens when you combine a playwright (Kyle J. Schmidt) and a poet (S.E. Smith) who both write fiction?  What is the triangulation of these three genres?  Yearbook.  All roads lead to yearbook. 

The Fill:  Basing our project on a yearbook we found at a junk shop (the 1964 Travis County Rebel Round-Up) as well as our own encounters with the medium of yearbook (I just happened to have spent two years as the yearbook editor at my high school), Sarah and I wanted to examine how we could make viewing a yearbook an uncanny experience.  What is strange and alluring about nostalgia?  And how does the act of "looking back" through a cultural artifact affect our perception of the event?

The Skill:  We took stylized superlative pictures of a group of our friends hoping to photoshop objects over their heads in post-production.  However, during the shoot one of our models, Paul, put a bucket on his head while we took pictures.  We realized that these "bucket head pictures" acheived our desired affect (facelessness) without going crazy over technology.  We re-directed our project around these "bucket heads".  Later, we compiled the pictures from our photoshoot, picked the best, and then developed a writing process to create the backstory of our characters.  For each character, Sarah wrote a rhyming poem while I wrote a descriptive blurb.   During the writing process we played with themes, developed characters, and explored the tension between our faceless "bucket heads" and the "faces" we sketched through our writing. 

The Frill:  Does she have a drug addiction?  Is he stable?  How is she alone?  Who's gay?  Why is she crying?  Is that couple as close as they claim?  How many truths lie hidden under the print and beyond the bucket? 

The Kill:  The Spanish teacher mysteriously died.

The Final Bill:  I believe the uncanny is the world we know recognizably mistranslated.  In our first project, we attempted to create a networking landscape of stories that evoke classic Americana but sadly and strangely lack the irrevocability of the human gaze--we look into the void of another human being but nothing in the bucket looks back.  A picture is worth a thousand words, a face tells a thousand tales, but a man recorded always remains hidden from view. 

Documents

Here are the two e-mails we used to correspond with our models.  I think they give a pretty nice insight into our thoughts regarding the project at the early stages. 

The First E-mail To Our Models
The Second E-mail To Our Models