Conánn FitzPatrick

This time last year I was busy squirreling away on a degree in Design Communication and found myself having to "design my own death". This eventually took shape as a series of illustrations which ended in this album cover type illustration. In order to tie this all together I wrote a short description of how I came about my demise.

My Death

I reached into the dark depths of the cold water and pulled out the soft tan burlap sack, which had been thrown into the lake by two young men in white shirts riding as-new old-fashioned black bicycles. The large text in western serif font reading “Saturate before using” at the rim of the bag only added to my fear of danger. Jackson Browne’s first album was called Jackson Browne the lettering on the radiator bag was a misinterpretation by the public and remained a joke between the singer and photographer Jim Marshall, who on a trip to Joshua tree with Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell; who sat in the back seat of the black Lincoln Cosmopolitan with suicide doors penning “Big Yellow Taxi”, had completely failed in their peyote ridden haze to get any useful photographs for the album cover.

That was 1971 I was born in 1971 and they were living in laurel canyon, I had worked with a woman named Laurel Click who lived in Laurel canyon. This level of synchronicity combined with the fact that I could no longer feel my legs as I was being swept away down the meromictic lake did not bode well for the future. To my left I could see the stranded pontoon boat; owned by Pastor Inqvist of the Lake Woebegone Lutheran Church who had purchased it from Father Wilmar of our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church only last summer. I plucked the pink-eyed albino cat off my torn eyelids. I could see his name was Zantzinger from his silver nametag, which was blinding me in the early morning spring sunshine. Forced her into the sack and threw it at the pontoon where it hit the deck with a sound only a sack full of wet kittens could make, their startled spiky heads turning to watch me helplessly drift under the dark water’s surface.

For the Innovation moving image module I had initially planned on doing some filming on a train and doing some animation to depict a daydream out the window. There is a fantastic train journey from here in Derry to Coleraine which also has some old tunnels along the way.

While there were some nice ideas and animations during the development process I could not get passed the overwhelming cliché. Sometime around week six or seven I started sketching again and came up with this drawing for some tunnel graffiti.

I frequently suffer from being blocked. If my gut does not like the idea of something I just can't work on it regardless of how much I try to tell myself its a good idea. Unfortunately it takes me some time to realize that my reason for abstaining from a project is because I just don't like it and everything else I have to work on becomes a much more exciting prospect.

Having two other modules on the go and working full time commercially. The right thing to do was to just knuckle down and get the short film on the train done. Changing direction this late in the semester is a bad idea. As a “mature” student the right thing to do was obvious; Ditch the damn thing and start something completly different.

Though initially this sketch was meant to be graffiti it's playfulness highlighted how much I wasn't enjoying what I was doing. When working on your own projects there is no excuse for not having fun

I just finished a degree in Design & Communication at Ulster University. This animation was the result of one of the six final year modules.

Animation was in Maya and most of the rendering was Renderman for Maya.