Julia Robinson
Through the Doors
Through the Doors (2020)
A collaborative project in association with the National Arts Centre (NAC), Carleton University and Carleton's Immersive Media Studio (CIMS)
Want to see the full project?
https://smnjehdehi.wixsite.com/throughthedoors
Through the Doors is a collaborative multimedia project that documents the life and influence of artist Jordi Bonet, who was the creator of the NAC's iconic Salon Doors.
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Users can watch and experience a multimedia documentary detailing how budding artist Jordi Bonet was commissioned to design the Salon Doors, as well detailing his personal life through interactive postcards created by the Through the Doors team, but are rooted in fact from archival material associated with Jordi Bonet.
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Original character design for our artistic rendition of Jordi Bonet. Due to his highly monochrome art style, we refrained from using colour for the animation, and stuck to greyscale.
In 2020 for my Visual Communications final project, I collaborated with fellow classmates of mine in order to design a multimedia project for Ottawa's National Arts Centre (NAC) and its iconic Salon Doors. We created a documentary about the doors and its creator, Jordi Bonet, along with an animation regarding his biography.
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We separated the multimedia project into two portions; the documentary team, and the animation team. As two members of our group were skilled with photography and video while two were best at animation and illustration, we felt it was the most natural split for our skills while also showcasing our strengths.
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The documentary aspect of the doors was created by fellow group members Liam Arp and Ben Simmonds, while the animation was split between myself and Sara Mizannojehdehi, through the drawing application Procreate. In order to get the footage for the video, we visited the doors on site, as well as meeting with a representative in order to access the NAC archives for documentation of Bonet's design process.
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As we worked on the storyboard, we also chose to separate our work by subject. Sara decided to do the background, while I did the foreground and characters animations. We then blended the layers together to create the frames, and then sent our animation to the documentary team to be ultimately added to the entire video.
This is one photo we found within the NAC archives. Predating the doors, it displays how the NAC foyer used to look, and would soon be replaced by the doors, as displayed below.
This photo, also found in the NAC archives, dates to when the doors were installed. Similar photographs of its production were included in the documentary portion of the video, but also provided inspiration for the animation portion.
This multimedia project was met with resounding success. It resulted in an A+ for the assignment, but also gave us students an appreciation for artists and the narratives behind their work. Jordi Bonet’s life story is a powerful one, and we were happy that our documentary of his life story was well received by our peers.
