Final Piece: Sense of Change

When we started thinking about what to do for our final piece, we began by considering what we felt was the real essence of the Manchester International Festival. We all agreed that the main theme was a sense of change. The idea that Manchester was on the verge of something - there was this feeling of an energy growing. We felt Manchester was at the beginning of a journey. Not knowing where it's going, but knowing it's on its way.

The graphic narratives of Doug Aitkin inspired the formation of the written prose that makes up the structure of our final piece. We decided that to visualise movement through the city, we would document a cyclist making his way through its pathways.

After attending the premier of Monkey - Journey to the West, we felt it would be fitting to base our piece on this idea of a passage. We tried to create a sense of anticipation and tension building up in the piece. This then breaks into the flowing pace and rhythms of the city. Touches of colour add to a sense of vibrancy, the graphics, the use of mirror image and split screen was inspired by Mike Figgis's work on Ground Beneath Her Feet. Shots of the Hilton Tower feature prominently as they reminded us of a PlayStation 3. With our score we wanted to use industrial and mechanical sounds to represent Manchester's industrial heritage. We used close-up shots of the cycles gear changes to add to a build of pace and energy in the piece, supported by the score and editing. Finally the piece reaches a crescendo and then rests again, representing Manchester reaching that undefined somewhere in its journey.

Overall we decided we would like to take the chance to experiment with this piece and create a more artistic piece rather than a more traditional narrative piece of work.