I had my last visit with the 4th year Visual Communications students at LSAD this week, where they presented their final projects. These students are amazing - I was beyond impressed with their responses to the short stories we worked with. I can't comment or report on all the projects here (there were 30!) and it wasn't possible either to photograph video work, for example. So I will just show a sample (two) for you to see the type of things some students produced.
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| Lorraine Breen's smoking kit |
Student Lorraine Breen worked from Cathy Sweeney's story 'The Story', which appeared in
The Stinging Fly, spring 2014. She took the pipe that the main character smokes as inspiration and built a smoking kit around it that represented the secrets and the story-within-a-story in Sweeney's piece.
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| Text from 'The Story' runs through the box and a secret compartment reveals a vintage photograph |
The photographs above are Lorraine's own hi-res images. I just took a few pics with my phone (of very few projects, it has to be said - I was too busy marvelling at the quality of the work itself). So, my pics are not great. But here is Lauren Keegan's deck of cards inspired by Claire Louise Bennett's story 'Finishing Touch' (
Stinging Fly, winter 2014):
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| The colour scheme expresses the mood of the story/deck |
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| The cards come in a beautiful box bearing a fabric tag with Bennett's name |
Other students made, among other things, a tabloid newspaper, a graphic novel, a hardback book, a photo album, videos, and a bottle with an unpeeling, embossed label.
The attention to detail, as you can see from the examples above, was exemplary. Myself and
Stinging Fly editor/publisher Declan Meade, who came to view the final results, were blown away by the creativity, the vision, the interpretation and the perfect execution of the projects. Brava to the girls, bravo to the boys. I am in awe of their talent.
