“I am a pig, and as a pig, I have always stood out.”
Friday is pizza and movie night in our house. We’ve been hand making our bread for 4 years, pizza bases included. It started with me reducing salt in my diet to counteract hypertension (a gift from my dad's family), but once you get used to fresh bread toast, it’s impossible to go back. Taste aside, the added gluten in supermarket bread now plays havoc with our innards.
Take a look at the ingredients on a bag of bread. It’s pretty long. Most of the stuff in there is designed to increase shelf life, or counteract the industrialisation that removes one essential ingredient from bread - time. It’s a complicated way of making something fundamental, and it impacts the end result (if you want a real pause for thought, read the ingredients of Smash. that's a long list for a squashed potato).
Cost wise, home bread works out about the same, but it does soak up time. However, there’s nothing quite like discovering, at 11pm, that you need to spend 3 hours making a loaf for school to get you into an organised mindset, which is no bad thing.
So Friday is movie night. This week, it happened to coincide with another regular event in our house – a new Season on Fortnite. It’s the summer hols, so both my kids spent the bulk of the day holed up in one bedroom – one on the Switch, one on PC; two feet apart, shouting at each other because they have headphones on. As a gamer, I see Fortnite as the Primark of gaming – savvy pop culture mash-ups with a short lifespan, but no real depth. It’s a far cry from “Frogger” on the ZX81.
Frogger, released in 1981, was my first experience of video games, and I’ve been a gamer ever since. Technical limitations made early videogames simple in terms of their narratives and mechanics, but they were balanced by being incredibly hard to play. Games like Frogger, Manic Miner or the notoriously tricky Airwolf required split second timing and pixel accurate positioning. After showing my kids the 80s cartoon "Trap Door", I booted up the eponymous Spectrum game. It’s a stressful play – main character Berk moves at a glacial pace, and with only a few seconds to complete each task, every button press needs to be perfect. It should form part of the 6 Sigma course.
1981 also saw the release of Ray Harryhausen’s last film; Clash of the Titans. It’s a perennial fave in our house, and seeing it on a large HD tv presents a conflict. The effects were not designed for close inspection, and the foam puppets look dingy and ragged. It’s very apparent that they were hand made, and that could spoil the immersion compared to modern day effects. However, that jankiness somehow makes the story more compelling – like looking at a cave painting, or an impressionist work. The viewer has to take a step back from the detail and that forces them to focus on the wider story.
This Friday, however, brought another 1981 classic – The Great Muppet Caper. Chaotic and surreal, yet pedestrian and restrained in the way only a British comedy can be, it tells the tale of twin reporters Kermit and Fozzy, travelling to the UK to uncover a jewel thief. The standard muppetry is peppered with Buzby Berkely dance scenes, including a full aquatic number (incidentally, the only moment of the film where immersion is broken – Miss Piggy does a full swan dive, but is played by a child in a suit, rather than a puppet, and the change in the scale of the water is jarring).
My favourite scene though, is the bike ride segment. It’s incredibly clever, and even watching in HD doesn’t fully give the tricks away. Kermit and Piggy ride through a London park on bicycles, weaving in and out of the trees, and circling each other as they sing. Much of that singing is traditional “waist up” puppetry, with hands directly operating the Muppets mouths, but then the camera pulls back and we see Kermit and Piggy in full, still singing, moving their limbs unaided. They’re eventually joined by the full Muppet ensemble, riding together for the final chorus.
Credit: "Imagination Illustrated - Jim Henson's Journal" by Karen Falk
The scene is a combination of hand puppets, marionettes, and clever camera angles, so there’s no CGI, and no magic fixes. Everything that happens, happened. The marionettes were strung from high cranes over the tops of the trees, but the more we watch it, the more we marvel at the choreography of keeping the cranes out of shot, whilst avoiding the trees, yet still producing an engaging scene.
It reminds me that creative thinking requires limitations. Design thinking is by nature hemmed in with budgets, timescales, and client idiosyncrasies. Sometimes my students see these things as barriers, and lament the lack of freedom. Once we teach them to view the barriers as mirrors, reflecting ideas back and forth, they begin to design with purpose, and to consider their end results in relation to their process.
Understanding how to objectively relate process to outcome is probably one of the hardest things to learn as a designer. It’s easy to set oneself up as a perfectionist, but this often hides a lack of confidence, and a disconnection from the end goals of a brief.
Watching Clash of the Titans and the Muppet Caper on 40-odd inches of HD screen throws up the flaws and limitations of the time, but it also highlights that Harryhausen and Henson understood the importance of putting story before detail. It would be easy to replicate the bike scene in CGI, and make it more complex, but the original oozes ingenuity, effort, love and fun. Bizarrely, I’m reminded of the scene in 1987’s remake of The Fly, where Seth Brundel realises that his teleporter doesn’t understand “the poetry of steak”, so replicates it in a bland, ersatz way.
Bread has a soul that’s diminished by extra ingredients. A videogame can be enduring and challenging using less code than your phone does to send an emoji. Glue, foam and wires can suspend your disbelief just as effectively as 1000 hours of photo realistic rendering.
Of every goal or brief, ask “What is this in itself? What, in one sentence, am I trying to achieve?”, and only surround yourself with processes, tools and inspiration that mirrors or enhances the answer. All else is distraction.