Bunkasai & The 2 Kims
At the Bunkasai Festival
When early this September one of the homeroom teachers asked me and my computer-savvy
to help out in his class' Bunkasai (Cultural Festival) presentation -- a mosaic
of the 2 Korean presidents holding hands, to be made out of used drink packs
-- I was very happy for the chance to be a part of the school. Little did I
know then what Mr Uemura, 3Azusa, and I had gotten ourselves into!
The original image
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Final touches
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Hanging the mosaic from the 4th floor
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The short story is that we ended up with a stunning and massive 4 x 8 metre
poster that won first prize at Bunkasai and got a write-up plus photo in
a major newspaper. The long story is about:
- scavenging thru garbage to find enough drink packs, then cleaning them and
peeling the coloured-packaging sheet from the aluminum inside -- yuch!! --
in order to have a 24-colour palette from which to create the 50,000 3x3 cm
tiles
- finding a way to convert the digital image into mosaic form. For this, heartfelt
thank-you's to Mr Seamus Browne and his mosaic-creation
service, not only for doing the conversion at no charge but for also urging
and guiding us about how best to achieve the most professional-looking
end result
- manually copying out into full-scale form and onto sixty 1x0.5 metre sheets
of blank paper the 50,000 numbered grid-squares of the small-scale, computer-generated
model of the mosaic Seamus sent
- having to renumber all those 50,000 squares when, a third of the way through
and several thousand already-glued tiles later, we found out that there was
a very small but significant mismatch between the original image and the computer-generated
model
- cutting, cutting, cutting... and gluing, gluing, gluing... and worry, worry,
worry at not being able to actually see until the very night before Bunkasai
the entire image we had been hopefully recreating, so large was the poster
and so small were the tiles
And at the post-Bunkasai celebrating and unwinding party, talk of bigger and
greater things next year. Oh no!!!
About our poster, in the Chunichi newspaper