Nighttime Hill
The creation of this little story was inspired by two books: William and the Magic Ring and William and the Christmas Moon, both by Laura Robinson. These are "shadow casting bedtime stories," in which the illustrations consist of 13 or so stencils finely cut (via laser, I’m told) into their stiff pages. They are designed to be read aloud in a dark room while a well-focused pen light is aimed through the illustrations, projecting the images on a wall, like the magic lantern shows that predated photographic slides and motion pictures in the 1800s. Quite cool!
More specifically, my project was inspired by the huge popularity of Ms. Robinson's two books among my own two children a couple years ago. I was getting tired of reading them over and over again upon request! Regardless, I would recommend the William books to anyone with small children. I merely needed an occasional shadow-casting substitute I could enjoy more on a personal level.
My goals were to throw together a story that was slightly longer and more character-driven than either of the William books, to incorporate the personalities of my son and daughter into the story, to let it stand as a memento of that priceless period of time in which young siblings share a bedroom, and to remind them of (and pay fond tribute to) the colossal mess in which that room was always kept.
Using an X-acto knife, I cut 25 illustrations into card stock sheets on which I also printed the verses to read aloud to the kids from a three-ring binder. The cuttings are only six or less inches wide, but had to look good when blown up as wide as five feet on the wall. This mode of art follows most of the same rules as carving portraits in jack-o'-lanterns: the cutout areas are the bright spots, while the solid areas must stand in for the nothingness and shadows in-between; plus, the "shadows" must all connect somehow in order for the stencils to obey the laws of physics.
To simulate the projections for this web site, I put the pages against a window and shot digital photos of them with the sunlight shining through. I suppose it will be much easier to share the project with others this way, but honestly, a web site can neither simulate nor beat the experience of playing with flashlights and huge, wavering shadow pictures in a dark bedroom at night.
