Kiki & Bouba

It's still miles from completion...in fact I've not properly started it yet, it only exists as storyboards and scraps of paper on my floor but I have a new idea for an animation. I should say it's a collaborative effort with me doing the visuals/animation and my friend Richard of Pen Paper (Pause) fame creating the accompanying words and music.

Richard is far more organized than I (or perhaps less busy at work?) as he has already completed the poem to which I'm meant to be creating visuals. This makes me feel a bit of a guilty shirker as it was my idea to do this in the first place. However my initial concept is pretty ambitious so I'm confident that the end result will either be an unmitigated disaster or an accidental triumph. Perhaps this may prove to be the perfect opportunity for me to live the Wieden + Kennedy mantra of 'Embrace Failure'.

The inspiration for this project came from a faded newspaper article I found myself reading a while ago that mentioned an experiment first conducted by a German clinical psychologist called Wolfgang Kohler in the 1920s. He and later other sociologists became fascinated by the construction of language or rather the unconscious and culturally mediated cognitive processes through which human beings comprehend meaning in one another's speech. The experiment was called the 'Kiki Bouba' effect. It found that irrespective of the subject's native tongue when asked to assign the made up names Kiki and Bouba to two abstract shapes- one curvy, the other spikey overwhelmingly subjects associated the curvy shape to Bouba.

Re-reading lots of old Shakespeare plays reignited my pleasure in language and the fun that playrights or poets can have simply by adjusting the relative balance of vowels, consonants and where the various syllabic stresses lie on words. This got me thinking about whether tricks could be played by abusing these various linguistic phonemes. Mightn't it be fun to say one thing with language but communicate something else entirely through the aural effect the combination of these words and sounds have upon the listener's ear? What is more can visuals be used to distort this meaning still further - could they exacerbate as well as reduce confusion caused, could a narrative be overlayed on top of this? These questions led me to explore other variations of synesthesia such as graphemes, euphonics and cacaphonics.

As I say the animation itself is still a work in progress but I can tell you it features a black plasticine dog and attempts to animate light and shadows simultaneously. Yes, I realise I have bitten off far more than I can comfortably chew.