I was very excited to get back to university and just start working on projects, I had all that experience during the summer at a design studio and felt like I'd been away from work for too long. After receiving our first brief I wasn't disappointed with the tasks we were set to do. Quite a lot to complete in 6 weeks but a challenge is always good and motivates me to want to do well. The first part of the project was the THANK YOU! project, I had trouble thinking of who to thank, I kept doing brainstorms to try and bring out who I truly wanted to base my idea around. I started thinking that because music is a big part of my life, maybe I could thank someone in the music business who had inspired me or someone who had taught me piano or guitar in the past. But thinking more about the matter I began to think that everyone would go for music as their main topic and I didn't want to become a cliché.
I then began thinking of more personal aspects of my life and looked into my childhood memories which has shaped me to be who I am today. A lot of experiences came back to mind and a lot of them were just random events that had occurred to me as a child. This lead me to think back to the days when I first learnt piano. I would go over the road with my sister to our neighbour's house to play piano, I would always go first and when it was my sister's turn I would go into the living room and pick out a video to watch. It would either be a disney film or Fawlty Towers. I remember re-watching this series so many times and it brought so many memories when researching about it. I then thought about thanking the character Manuel as he for me was the star of the show and made me laugh back in the day. This made my project a little different as I would be thanking a fictional character rather than the actor himself.
It was difficult to find a way to thank this character, I felt like I was falling deeper into the story and the ideas I had seemed a little too realistic for an unrealistic character. I then got side-tracked and thought about thanking the man who invented the bank holiday monday. I really liked the idea of doing a short film which involved the camera looking down at the shore and whilst the waves broke in and washed out again different words would appear behind the water. Then the final scene would be a bottle being washed up onto the shore, I would design the labelling for this bottle and the message inside it and actually give it to the inventor of bank holidays.
Even though I really liked this idea, I felt it were a bad thing that I already knew the solution in my mind at such an early stage. I didn't want to fall into the trap of having an idea at the beginning and sticking to it without developing it further so I decided to abort this idea completely and go back to how I could thank Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I brainstormed a number of solutions but nothing came to mind.
It was only until I watched a video of interviews with the cast that I decided to base my idea around designing a Fawlty Towers for Manuel, but in a way that he would have liked it. This came to mind because there was one episode where Manuel was left in charge of the hotel, and he took pride in that role; even though he wasn't very good at the job, it was obvious that he was trying his best and enjoying every minute of it. I thought about re-desiging a hotel from scratch for him but then figured that people wouldn't be able to relate to it, but if I drew out the exact set and props from the tv programme and added little extras for Manuel, it would be clear what I was trying to get at.
The next task I need to do is watch the episodes and map out what each room looks like and then think about what Manuel would want or wouldn't want in the hotel depending on what happened to him in each episode. Later I will think about whether I should design a mock up of the hotel, though this will be relevant to how much time I have to spare after getting it all down on paper.
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