Blue Stag Selects: March

Welcome to Blue Stag Selects: March edition, where we serve up some of the most inspiring and interesting stories we have seen each month.

Celebrating and showcasing the innovative work that is shaping and influencing our culture today, March Selects include making your bedroom a camera obscure and a toilet roll tube challenge.

Paper Please!

For some reason during the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone is desperate for toilet paper. Even to the extent that people have been fighting over packs and bulk panic buying. But how many toilet rolls would you need to see you through a pandemic?

Well, look no further and have fun in the process with this Paper Please game by Hands, a Paris based agency. Try your hand at collecting as many rolls of paper as possible and watch the days of toilet roll survival clock up.

Nothing like a bit of procrastination during the lockdown, and practice your toilet roll grabbing skills ready for your trip to the shops.

Turn your bedroom into a camera obscura and make photographs with it

Brendan Barry is a UK-based photographer who has a talent for creating cameras out of anything and everything, including watermelons, bread, shipping containers and more. Brandan has been making the most of the current lockdown situation and has made his bedroom into a Camera Obscura, and even created a YouTube tutorial so we can all get creative and set up our own bedroom camera too.

‘I’m hoping that people stuck at home looking for a project to undertake, students wanting to develop their skills or parents homeschooling their kids might take it on and be of some use’.

Brendan has attempted to make the Camera Obscura with things many people have lying around the house, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to join in. He went as far as to make his own simple darkroom, but if you don’t have the equipment needed, you can just use a digital camera.

So the list of things you can use are:

• Magnifying glass/35mm camera lens/lens from a pair of glasses
• Duct tape
• Cardboard
• White paper/reflective screen/tracing paper

6 Feet Covers – Iconic album covers reimagined with social distancing

Inspiration is everywhere if we look for it, even in the new socially distant world we’re currently experiencing. Paco Conde and Beto Fernandez, Creative Directors of Activista in Los Angeles, have created the ‘6 Feet Covers’ project, reimagining iconic album covers to reflect social distancing rules of today, reinforcing the important message to keep 6 feet apart to stop the spread of coronavirus and save lives.

Some of the albums they have reimagined are the Beatles ‘Abbey Road’ from 1969, Queen’s 1979 album ‘Queen II.’ and Kiss’ 1974 album ‘Destroyer’.

We can only imagine how long it took to edit all of those albums so beautifully in Photoshop, bravo!

A new activist organisation is here to burst your bubble

A beautifully simple and effective website by ED. an Australia based agency for Rouser, a new activist organisation. Rouser is led by experts from the creative, entertainment and environmental sectors who worry about the future a lot. The organisation is new, and looking for support in the form of sign-ups, as their offer is still being formed but wow, it really makes you want to be part of this exciting new activist organisation.

The bubble animation (we love!), which grows as you scroll down the page is a really effective way to pull the messaging together when it finally bursts at the bottom of the page. It showcases their creativity as an organisation and adds a playful element. The brand is very bold with a bright green contrasting with the black, communicating action and boldness. Something you’d want from a new exciting activist organisation.

ED. bagged Site of the Day on Awwwards for this website, and it is well deserved.

Challenge: Squish your toilet paper rolls squished into expressive faces

This is an oldie, but we had to retrieve it from the archives because never has there been a better time to make use of all of those toilet roll tubes everyone’s bins will be overflowing with.

Junior Fritz Jacquet is a French paper artist, who created these expressive and fantastic toilet paper rolls. His work is influenced by humans and nature, which are a continuous theme through his creations. Taking inspiration from origami, he folds and squishes the rolls into various faces, finishing them with different pigments and a coat of shellac.

This week he posted the toilet paper roll challenge, encouraging others to make their own expressive masks for the chance to win an original mask by Jacquet. In his Facebook post, he says…

Conditions of participation:

• No age limit
• No cutting or glueing, just folding
• The model must be in colour (your choice of technique)
• Share a maximum on 3 creations via private message
• The winner will be the most liked photo
• The competition end date is the end of lockdown in France.

If you would like to join the competition, here is a link to his post.

Social distancing flipbook by The Flippist

A very topical bit of creativity from the super talented The Flippist. If you haven’t seen the Flippist’s works of art before, you’re missing out. There is something about flipbooks are so pleasing.

This particular flipbook is a gem because it not only highlights a very important message of social distancing, but also uses Kirsten Lepore’s ‘Hi Stranger’ animation as a reference, which has to be one of the best, and weirdest animations of all time.

Stay distant and stay safe everybody.

Thanks for reading Blue Stag Selects: March! If you’d like to catch up on last month’s here’s Blue Stag Selects: February. Check back next month for our next selection of inspiring and interesting stories from around the world.