Summer Update & Vunk Fest 2010

First of all, for those who have stopped by recently - you may have noticed the lack of updates on latest projects. It has been a busy old summer of projects amongst other things including moving into a new flat and trips away to London through my placement at Shetland Arts - to work on an exciting project, involving the branding of Shetland Art's new venue, Mareel. More about this in future posts, I'm sure.

So to begin the update, I will start with Vunk Fest.
Vunk Fest is an alternative music and art festival in Shetland. This year I was involved with the Vunk Fest Visual Arts Collective which was a group brought together to create work as a collective. We chose to involve the musicians as a greater part of the visual arts side of the festival and break down preconceived barriers between the artforms of the festival. We also arranged a pop-up shop in the run up to the festival which I briefly blogged about in May here. Wow summer has gone by fast!

My main focus over the build up to Vunk for the collective was on "The Drum Splattering". Murray Arthur of Shetland Drums kindly agreed to sponsor himself and a drum kit for the idea, which was to film a completely white drum kit splattered in paint while someone played along to a backing track, the film would be used as a promo to the festival and the drum kit would be used on stage at the gigs.


First I had to figure out a way to splatter paint on the drums, a test film with an old cymbal and house paint was set up back in March, this concluded that the simplest way to fling the paint would be most successful, this method was plastic cups.

Next step was preparing the drums. The sponsored drums were Murray's practice kit, which were coloured red. This meant a few days of full on sanding action to take the existing lacquer and paint off and back to bare wood.



The drums were then sprayed white over the next week. Another point to add was the metal hardware had to be numbered and documented to make sure everything fitted back together seamlessly and fast!

This preparation process took some time to do but was a great feeling to get the drums looking so good at the end. They look brilliant just white, but they were missing that something Vunk.


Moving on now, we arranged to commit the splattering during the following week but the spray paint dried faster than anticipated and with a beautiful looking Sunday night we pushed the filming forward. Thankfully everyone managed to get there on short notice to help out. At this point I must thank Karen & Kirsty Bruce, My Dad for transport to location, Murray Arthur and the splatterers Chris Storey, Birdy, John, Elaine and Jamie.





I really couldn't be more happy with how the drums turned out in the end they look and sound brilliant! There was always a slight element of worry that the sound quality would be effected but after getting Murray along for a quick tune up we realised they sound good! Phew!

So now please enjoy the final film with music by kind permission of Poison Popcorn and El Pedro. Thanks for looking!

Vunk Fest - Its Gunna Be Messy! from Jono Sandilands on Vimeo.