00668 Creative Awards Trophies 2

I fell into a massive Instagram shaped hole and forgot to post for ages. So this is the second half of the Creative Awards Trophies.

As it turned out, I had to scrap the whole idea of the stamp because they wanted a perpetual award and many smaller awards.

In the end, I opted for a "Digital Timecapsule", which seemed to fit the conceptual bit of the brief. Basically, I stuck memory sticks in the base of the awards which are terminated in a mini USB plug, so that the pictures of the work that won the trophy could be uploaded into the trophy itself. It also meant that the Perpetual trophy would contain the work for the winner each year, intead of having those tiny plaques on them for each year's winner. The trophies were supposed to have the judges comments in them, but it looks like people got a whole load of busy and couldn't provide any. So I stuck a placeholder in, containing images of how the trophy was made along with a video with a message to make up for the vacancy inside:

Inside the trophy from ThisguycalledLenny on Vimeo.

Here's the build images. 

The large dowels were CNC lathed and the end caps and glass for the tops were water jet cut.

Water jet cutting just rules.

00667 Creative Awards Trophies

So I got asked to make these trophies for work.

I suspect they wanted something made out of bits of junk, but I asked if I could get a little bit of funding for the materials and machine time to make them  using CNC stuff.

And they said "Yes".

Which was nice.

They originally wanted ten trophies, one for each category and then changed the brief so this post is all about the lead up to making the categorised versions.

I had this idea that the trophies should all be cylindrical, made from wood and glass and that each one should be a kind of stamp, so that, in the unlikely event that the winner should want to show off their award on paper (like on a cv, for instance), they could use it to stamp the trophy graphic onto paper. Also, the trophy was going to be used to "make itself" - on one end of the cylinder was to be the stamp and on the other would be a piece of paper stamped by the base, covered by glass in a sort of circular window.

So I ran some tests with a local firm who do laser cutting and got them to etch the stamps onto birch plywood. The idea was that the birch ply would form circular end caps, the base would be the stamp and the top would be a circle of ply with glass inset through which the print could be viewed.

And, yes, I did forget to mirror the stamp (duh). That's what test are for, I guess.

   

But of course, I ended up doing something completely different.

00664 SPOTY

For reasons best known to themselves, work asked me to make a replica of the Sports Personality of the Year Award trophy for thier annual conference. Like you do.

I said "Yes" before asking about any of the details, which is pretty much how I ended up getting married.

So this is how it ended up (although it would perhaps have been better if I'd taken time to photograph the end result properly):

And this is how it got there (although technically, it was in a van):

   

 

Strangely, twenty minutes later, someone else asked me to make trophies for an altogether different event. Mind you, I had heard that there was a trophy commissioning pandemic sweeping the land, so it was no great surprise.