“Most people think you dance with your feet. B*ll*cks.”
Christmas is nearly upon us, and that means the start of traditional pre-Christmas rituals in our house. I don’t mean putting up decorations the day after Halloween, or indulging in the distasteful practice of ‘December boxes’. I mean Strictly Come Dancing, Julia Donaldson animations and another stab at getting the kids through all 8 Harry Potter movies (they bail out after Cedric Diggory buys it, and who can blame them).
I always feel that as Rowling’s books progress, one can feel her writing morphing into what she was expecting to see on screen. The characters become predictions of their movie selves, rather than book characters in their own right. The plot and the characters become overblown and the logic holes created by the first book start to grate against the narrative.
Along with Harry Potter, we have the usual roster of Christmas films to fit in before the Big Day, working up from ‘seasonal’ fare such as Home Alone and Die Hard to the heavy hitters - National Lampoon’s Xmas Vacation, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Jingle All the Way.
We love to find hidden classics (my bar is much lower than my wife’s). I love Mouse Hunt, and Ernest Saves Christmas. I also have a soft spot for ‘The Christmas Candle’, a TV movie starring Sylvester McCoy and Susan Boyle, whose expression suggests that whatever she was channelling during the shoot, Christmas wasn’t it.
We both love ‘Just Friends’ - a true hidden gem with Anna Faris playing a blinder as an unhinged, entitled pop star, and Ryan Reynolds as…well…you just have to watch it.
The other week, having explained to the boys the origins of both ‘Strictly’ and ‘Come Dancing’, we segued into ‘Cuban Fury’. Not a Christmas film, but the springboard for this post.
A by-the-numbers tale of redemption and personal trauma overcome, it’s a masterclass in understatement, which is interesting, given the flamboyance of Salsa dancing. The lead, Nick Frost, is one of my favourite actors. He nails the self effacing litotes that characterises most (regular) British men. I love his sense of timing - just watch the climax of Paul: Spacecraft takes off, fantastical adventure comes to a close. briefest of pauses. “Well, that was good, wasn’t it?”
In Cuban Fury, there’s an interesting contrast around what it means to be flamboyant, or personally expressive. Protagonist Bruce Garrett abandons his Salsa passion because he gets bullied over his appearance, but when he see him later in life, he’s still visually an outsider - overweight (a characteristic that Frost uses to good effect without allowing it to define his comedy) and incongruously dressed.
Nick Frost in Cuban Fury (credit: IMDB)
Less is more. The combination of colours, shapes and hemlines show the complexity of costume design - creating a character without telegraphing everything through extravagant clothing.
The phrase ‘less is more’ is so overused that I’ve stopped really thinking about it, but the older I get, the more I’m seeing how damaging to creativity the concept of ‘more’ can be.
Edouard Lanteri’s 1904 volume on relief modelling comments on the then new practice of sculpting coin reliefs at enlarged size and having the result reduced to final diameter via a mechanical pantograph:
“...This is an undesirable proceeding for figure subjects on a medal, for the figures which are conceived in the large proportion of the model come near the relative proportion of nature, which produces a petty effect in a medal.
You will have observed in all antique medals...the extremities of the figures are comparitively strong....and retain thus in small size a good balance and a grand air.”
What Lanteri was saying was that sculptors, provided with a new and innovative way of creating, were forgetting their end product. The ability to model at large scale democratised the craft of coin sized bas-relief , but in doing so, kind of missed the point. The craft of small scale bas-relief wasn’t in the actual making of the relief, but in the understanding of how to adapt a design to work in the format.
UK Sovereign design, by Benedetto Pistrucci. Image credit: The Royal Mint
Pistrucci’s sovereign prizes impact and composition above real world proportions, as can be seen in the scale of horse to rider.
This is central to my issues with Generative AI. AI has democratised the act and dominated the conversation about ‘what’ can be created, but in doing so has forgotten the importance of the relationship between ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’. It’s this relationship that lies at the heart of good design, and there’s a real danger that this will become a lost craft.
This isn’t entirely a product of AI, although the technology has accelerated the issue. Blockbuster films and AAA videogames have been increasingly relying on visual filler to hide poor or homogenous writing.
Personally, I’m seeing the issue both in the state of coin design, and in my recreational hobbies. As part of my love of D&D, I like to paint minatures. Modern digital sculpting and 3D printing techniques allow for unprecedented levels of detail in TTRPG figurines, which should be a good thing. What I’m finding though, is that the intricate detail makes it much harder to give a minature character through colour, which is the whole point.
The old Ral Partha figurines of the 1980’s, cast in lead, were clumsy and boldly proportioned (World of Warcraft has leveraged this cartoonish style), but Lanteri would have approved. The characters are larger than life, reduced to 2” scale, so if everything is reduced with them, they become fussy and lack a strong silhouette. I find it almost impossible to paint the tiny details on some 3D printed minatures - it spoils the fun and the end effect.
Ral Partha lead minatures. Image: Tesoros trading via Ebay
More worryingly, I’m also seeing this trend repeated in coin design. Without openly criticising my industry and my colleagues, I’m seeing a trend for highly detailed ‘art’ coins, showing complex illustrated scenes. They are exotic and fascinating - endless layers of detail, inviting investigation. A love of ‘stuff made small’ is central to the passion of the coin collector, and inherent in the craft of designing and sculpting them.
I can’t help feeling though that something is lost, and Lanteri’s comments come to my mind. The craft of coin design lies in making something small that invites investigation, but also has visual impact from afar. It’s easy to allow new tools to push us down a road of adding detail because it can be added, at the expense of the overall silhouette and composition. Good design should reflect and enhance storytelling, without feeling the need for visual redundancy. Have we lost the confidence to do less?
The opportunities and risks involved with AI should help us find new ways of creating, but also remind us which parts of the creative process are vital. New tools should be evaluated for what they give us, but also what they take away.
Like Bruce Garett in Cuban Fury, we must remember that silk shirts and synthetic socks facilitate the dance, but don’t define it. We must remember that we do not design with our pencils, but with our hearts. With el corazón.