Lord of the Flies by William Golding

After creating a brainstorm and looked into concepts touched upon by William Golding, my group and I came up with what we thought could possibly be the basis of our final outcome. One of the ideas included a series of identical huts, preferably spray painted white with images projected upon them showing the procession of either a character or theme over time.

As almost all characters within this book ended up reverting back to their primal instinct hence becoming savages, we also felt the need to show and/or represent the duration of time within our final outcome as time was a very significant factor of the book.

This then got me thinking if at first the children were civilised but then gradually became more rogue, what objects can my group use to represent this? We came up with the idea of creating a centrepiece and maybe have paint gradually dipping onto it and so by the end of the evening, what virtually started off as a clean instalment is now messy and covered in paint-like the characters.

We were also inspired by the idea of creating an object that has two contrasting elements to it, whether it be a hut that looks good on the outside, horrible interiorly or contrasting imagery that represents how the perception of the main characters change. We were inspired by Brazilian Child Sex Abuse ads wherein the first picture, a child could be seen either immersed in play or relaxing, everything looks normal, innocent even. However in the second picture, whilst everything remained the same when an adult is placed in such position, the same picture that a second ago looked harmless now has a very dark borderline sinister meaning and feel to it. These couple of images works really well as the change was so abrupt, so aggressive that the viewer feels smothered, overwhelmed, almost guilty for having not seen anything wrong with the first image.

As a result of this, we wondered whether we will be able to take our contrasting imagery even further by giving our contrasting images given space, forcing viewers to have to look at our contrasting images separately or maybe place our contrasting images back to back, eliminating any breathing space, giving our images a very strong and aggressive feel.

Looking further into the idea of representing time, we also felt that it was important to address significant objects used within the story. In Lord of the Flies, the conch and the pig's head on a stick are one of the most well-known objects. So we thought that it would be very effective to use either one of these objects to represent a theme within our instalment. As we talked more about what object to use, we recalled how Golding initially wrote this book convinced, that all human are savages at the core. With this idea, we wanted to take Golding's idea quite literally and break a human and pig skull and then try to build another creature's skull out of the fragments of the two skulls. Even though this novel is based on events that happened to a group of boys, we as a group felt that it would be too much to include a figure within our instalment and by incorporating a figure, we would be giving up too much information upon first glance. As we plan to gradually smother our objects in paint, we thought would be really effective is if we made our instalment interactive - where viewers are welcome to step in paint and therefore leave footprints that will suggest the presence of humans but not in a way that will overpower other elements of the instalment.