The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham is fortunate to possess a world-famous
collection of European works of art, including paintings, great sculpture, ancient coins
and other works of art.
The Barber Institute’s Collections and Learning team uses its fabulous collections in many
inventive ways to connect with a great variety of audiences.
The Barber’s distinctive collection, the Learning and Access Team’s openness to new
ideas and our commitment to collaboration have inspired a number of workshops and inter-disciplinary
projects.
We’ve collaborated with photography students, with visual artists, poets and dancers, with
film-makers and story tellers and most recently with computer scientists to produce really
exciting responses to works in the collection.
The Barber’s wonderful bronze sculpture of Miss Clara, the rhinoceros, has played
a key part in a number of these projects.
The real-life story behind Miss Clara’s journey from obscurity in India to fame in
Western Europe is absolutely fascinating.
Miss Clara is currently the focus of an interactive comic for children, developed by postgraduate
students from this university and we hope that technology will help to re-animate this
tale for our younger audience.
This digital comic is about a particular exhibit at the Barber Institute which is a rhinoceros
called Miss Clara and what’s interesting about this exhibit is that it’s a very unique
exhibit.
It’s a puzzle piece so no-one really knows who did it but it has an incredibly interesting
back story.
We’re hoping that with this comic we can complement what’s already going on at the
Barber Institute.
They’re already doing workshops and things with kids and adults where they get to learn
about these exhibits in the same way that I’ve been learning about it.
The only thing is that these workshops only happen at certain times and not everyone has
access to them so we’re hoping that by translating some of what goes on there already onto the
internet we can reach a wider audience.
Creating an interactive scenario like this takes you through the whole sort of spectrum
of the development process.
There's the research and development which obviously started as soon as I met Tess and
Robert.
Reading through the archives, finding other materials, just researching this Miss Clara
story and turning that into a narrative, that’s the first process.
After the research and development process we go onto the storyboarding where we just
sort of do rough sketches, concept sketches of characters, environments, that sort of
thing.
After the storyboarding stage we then start to build animatics using Flash where we test
the interactions, test the dialogues, see if the story is working and see if the information
is getting across and is engaging people.
And Andrew did a series of concept sketches for the project.
I then used a selection of colouring techniques and we hit upon the idea of using a different
look for each of the phases of Clara’s life.
So for growing up in India we have a washed-out sunny sepia toned feel.
For touring 18th Century Europe we’ll use an etching style reminiscent of contemporary
print media such as plunge magazines.
And for retirement in England we’ll use a rather more painterly, realistic feel.
After the animatics stage we’re pretty much there.
We just basically polish everything up, make sure that the end user gets what they want
out of it and of course the Barber Institute will be on hand then to sort of check that
it does what they want it to do.
Ultimately this is a project for them so it’s important to get their input at that stage.
And once the final colouring and interactions are all sorted then we’re ready to put it
on the website.
The story of Miss Clara is great.
It’s one of those wonderful examples of how having further knowledge of an artwork
or a museum piece can really enhance one’s enjoyment of the exhibit.