Creative Selfie - street event

As a member of the Get Involved 17 group, I was involved in the costume, masks and prop making of the Creative Selfie project which took part on the 1st of June in the city center of Nottingham. This project has been developed over the past month as a street performance/flash mob which to celebrate the creativity of young people. The name of the project includes the very popular nowadays word "selfie" which refer to "a picture of yourself taken by yourself". This word is widely promoted and used by young people in the social networks which was a good reason to engage our project with that word.
The plan for the events was to develop 4 ideas expressing the main idea into props, costumes and masks. Afterwards, to organise a walk throught the city engaging the people with our idea and stimulating them to participate by presenting their creativity.Here are the four ideas and how we created them:

1. The head mask
The Head represents all the different young people around the world. For that reason, it's covered with a mixture of different skin tones and has two faces - a girl face on the front and boy face on the back. The girl's hair was made of many different colors like a rainbow as a symbol of creativity.
The base for the mask was made of plastic rubber bon and card bord skeleton which was first covered with newspaper. Afterwards we covered it with small paper pieces in different skin tone colors glued from both sides with glue and stick yes and mouth which were drawn and cut from paper. The glue we used was washable to avoid ruining our clother while sticking the pieces althought it lasts for a shorter period. The hair was also made from paper rolled and sticked to the head. There a small cut on the neck of the head for the eyes of the person wearing it and also there were supposed to be two cuts from both sides for the shoulders in order to be more stable but we hadn't got enough preparation time to make them so we needed two people to assist the person with the head while walking through the city.

2. The box
The black box is actually a big carboard box, which we painted black on the outer side cutting some small holes. The inner side of the box we covered with our selfie pictures and we sticked opened small bags of pink gloss on each corner of the box. This boc was made with the idea to show how some people at their young years may look quite shy and quiet but they hide a gifted and full of ideas souls. The people were invited to look through the holes of the box and to see the pictures inside.

3. Mirror masks

The idea with the mirror was quit simple - when people look at them to see theirself. It was a way to spread our celebration and creativity through the streets. They were made of silver foil paper.

4. The kimono

The kinomo idea was the main one in terms of engaging the audience. For this costume we used a normal old kimono and extended the sleeves and the back with fabric. The plan was to start drawing ot it covering the top part and then walking through the street to stimulate people to draw their inspiration on the long back part. we also attached some selfie photos with safety pins on the back of it.

Here are also some of the picture from tour walk through the city taken by one of the member of Get Involved 17 group - Vika Nightingale:

Our work will also be shown on the Welcome week of Nottingham Trent University in September as a advertisement of Nottingham Contemporary and Get Involved 17 among the new students of the university.