June 7, 2010

We have just got back from UPfest 2010 in Bristol and had a great time again this year. The weather was better, there were more people and the beer was flowing.

We had been busy with other things in the run up so didn’t have as much time as we would have liked for preparation. Truth be told we had a sub-standard design ready on Wednesday and then decided we really needed to come up with something else that we were both happy with. After shooting down just about as many ideas as we could come up with and become trapped with decision paralysis we finally managed to come up with the bare bones of an idea late on Wednesday evening…

After doing a little research on Bristol we came up with the fact that the Samuell Plimsoll who invented the Plimsoll Mark (which was designed to show the limit to which a ship could be loaded) was from Bristol. Hey Presto! – an idea formed and we’d have a plimsoll line above which no colour would be applied to the wall. The rest would consist of the most colourful background we could come up with, a fake CCTV screwed to the wall (which moved and had a red flashing light but was the bane of my life on the day as it obviously had a loose connection and you had to keep fiddling with it to get it moving!) and a big stencil of a slightly imperious looking siamese cat. The finishing touch would be a stencil of a miniature version of us applying our name stencil to the piece. We started out pretty promptly around 11ish with discobag playing to keep us amused. It was definitely nice to catch up with people and put some new faces to names. The road had to be cleared by 7pm so we finished for about then. All in all a great day out. We then followed up with some drinking, chit-chat and general tomfoolery before heading to the after-party bar for a final few drinks. Perhaps predictably we were the last on the dancefloor…

Below are the in-progress shots and a picture of the final piece. It’s definitely best viewed large and if you want to do that they are on our flickr here