Sunday, January 13, 2008

Balloon art - Japanese style

Overview

During the first week of December, 1998, I found myself in Tokyo, Japan leading a rather unusual, and rather challenging project. I spent a week training a team of Japanese celebrities and a crew from Fuji Television in balloon art. The goal was to have the celebrities build a giant balloon creation as part of a show that was to air on New Year's Day.

From the time I got the job until the time I arrived in Tokyo, I was both excited and scared. This was a chance to do a record breaking sculpture. I knew that I had all of the technical knowledge to pull it off. There was nothing I planned to do that I hadn't done dozens of times before on a smaller scale, and I had designed it all before leaving for Japan. What I didn't know was Japanese, and I needed to transfer the knowledge I had into the heads of a crew that I was about to meet. All of this was to happen through a translator.

So, here's the scoop on the project. I was hired as an instructor to teach the 8 Japanese celebrities (comedians, actors, and a model) how to do balloon art. In some respects this was the Japanese equivalent of the American Circus of the Stars. Celebrities learn skills that they wouldn't otherwise use and compete against each other. This particular group was learning balloon art and had to put their work on display. Rather than just letting us start with the simple stuff, I had to teach them how to do a really large creation. The object to be constructed was a nebuta - a samurai warrior fighting a demon. It measured 8 meters wide, 4.5 meters tall, and 4 meters deep. To take it even further, it was decided that there should be motion in all of this. I designed it so that the Samurai's arm would move, and he would chop the head off of the demon with his sword. In theory this isn't difficult. I've made other big things that move. It's just time consuming. Actually making it happen with 8 celebrities that can only schedule 2 hours at a time for training and that have never touched twisty balloons is another issue entirely.

To make this a little more doable, it was decided that they would provide me with seven staff members that would actually do the work. These were people that could devote the entire week, day and night if necessary, to this project. The camera was just being used to capture the celebrities working one-on-one with me. The Japanese speaking staff was to work off camera with the celebrities to walk them through the things I had taught them. The staff was to be in the background, even though they were doing the bulk of the work. Once the project got going, the stars were very cooperative and put in far more effort than I expected, although a few were more interested in playing with the camera and making themselves look funny, leaving the rest of us with even more to do.

The staff they gave me to work with was truly an incredible bunch. It took them as long to get up to speed as I had predicted, but the patience and determiantion of all of them is to be commended. They put in 10-12 hour days without complaining. They took instruction and criticism really well. Unfortunately, they wanted to only follow my instructions exactly for a while. Convincing them to take liberties on their own was quite hard. I did map out everything and tell them exactly what I wanted, but I needed them to experiment a bit so they understood the way the balloons behave. After two very long days, I could see it click, and I could actually see this coming together.

The stars themselves were an interesting group. Even though I don't know the language, we all communicated fairly well. We successfully made each other laugh. I did have one big problem and that's that I always wanted to respond to things being said and done, but I was dependent on an interpretter to make sure my lines come out right. I could always tell when the translation was successful since the room bursted into laughter. On the other hand, I often wondered if Kiyomi was really saying to them the same thing I said to her. If you've never worked with an interpretter, you can't quite imagine what it can be like.

In the end, the stars successfully built a sculpture, using approximately 15,000 twisty balloons (260's), of a traditional nebuta. I was as impressed as they were tired. It felt good to have pulled it off. I wanted them to do it since teaching them was what I was hired to do, but I really had expected that the staff would have to do most of it. Without the staff, it wouldn't have come together, but the celebrities really did have their hands in it every bit of the way and did deserve the recognition they got on TV for their efforts. Being someone that always wants to give proper credit, I wish the staff was recognized equally for the project. At least I still get to talk about them here.

My role was teacher, designer, project leader and chief worrier. I helped with a few especially challenging parts of the sculpture, but in most cases, I coached and solved problems rather than twist balloons. There was very little time for me to actually do any of the construction since I was pulled in every direction constantly. As chief worrier, I made sure to keep an eye on everything and refused to disappear for rest. The final construction was done over a 36 hour period, of which I attempted to sleep for two. Most people at least took a four hour break. I just feared that without me, a problem would come up that would hold up the whole thing. A problem did come up while I was gone, but rather than let it stop them, they continued, leaving me with two hours of work to repair what otherwise would have taken 10 minutes. I can't complain too much. The staff really thought they were helping. (Truth be told there was one problem that came up while I was there that I couldn't solve to my satisfaction.)

There was a very minimalist frame that was built since this sculpture needed to be strong enough to move outdoors, but except for the arm of the samurai, the frame had essentially no load on it, so this is as pure as you can get in terms of "balloon" art (in my opinion). The frame was nothing more than a "T" inside of both the samurai and demon and, as I said, was used as additional support so that we didn't have any unexpected surprises when we moved it after a 36 hour construction period. Most of the sculpture was actually built and assembled off of the frame so I know it could support itself.

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