Mandy Bangerter
Guidance Notes for Gallipoli Storyboard
Isle of Wight Contemporary Craft Group, QuayCrafts were commissioned to create a piece of work inspired by the stories of the Isle of Wight Rifles and their role in Gallipoli during the First World War.
Looking at the memorabilia in the collection and displays at Carisbrooke Museum started to bring stories to life and gave me a sense of being pulled into the lives of people whose families lived and may still be living on the Island. The postcards, letters and photographs served as a visual connection to these people. As a results of seeing these I realised I needed to understand more about their journey - from newly recruited soldiers on the Isle of Wight, asked to leave their families, work and the familiar spaces around them to train as soldiers ready for action in war. How and when did this happen? How long did it take? Where did they go? When and how did they travel to Gallipoli? How and where did they land? What happened when they got there and how long did they stay?
Putting these events into some sort of timeline seemed to me necessary to understand the context of the objects I was looking at in the museum. I found the Isle of Wight Rifles website http://isleofwightrifles.org.uk/thegreatwar.php helpful in setting out the sequence of events. As an illustrator I was drawn to the process of creating a storyboard as a way of telling a story in sequence. I created a storyboard and printed it onto fabric, embellished with stitch (I like the sense of stitching the story together), but the work can easily be made with paper collage or simple line drawings to represent the event.
- Read through the information and highlight the key points / places / dates
- The dates highlighted can be linked to photographs/memorabilia in the collection and the Carisbrooke Museum archive
- There are some good maps on the internet showing the world as it was in WW1
- It is easier to write down the sequence of events as bullet points first and then transfer to a storyboard
- The number of ‘windows’ in the storyboard can vary - but a minimum of 12 is helpful to tell a story
- I have used Photoshop to put together resized images and words - but the sequence can be laid out in a table in Word or simply cut and paste a collage of paper using photocopies of resources.
Extended ideas:
Older students can use a storyboard as a starting point for making an animation. A simple sequence of drawings setting out events can be loaded onto a timeline (some animation software ideas can be found here http://www.creativebloq.com/animation/tools-animations-10134750
I have responded to the journey of the Rifles from the IOW to Gallipoli but there are many other aspects to take a starting points - a sequence of postcards and letters, a sequence of uniform and kit, or a sequence of all the landings on Gallipoli and the strategic importance of this peninsula in the war.