I'm Luisa Charles. I graduated from Interaction Design Arts last summer, so in
2018, and I am a multimedia artist interaction designer and filmmaker.
I came from a really wide background. I did the BFI Academy when I was 16, and I
always thought I would study film and then on my foundation course
I specialised in film animation and photography and then by the time of my
like grad show of foundation I was really into virtual reality and from that I was
like I have no idea where I'm gonna end up now. Being on Interaction Design Arts
and meeting Joel was the only space that really understood that it doesn't make
you directionless to have multiple skills, and if anything it kind of equips
you better as a designer to be able to express yourself through all these
different types of mediums and different types of jobs and stuff you could do.
Since graduating I mainly been working in the action vehicle department on Star
Wars Episode nine and then on the side I've been I did a project for London
Design Festival I've done a couple of talks and I've directed a short film I
did a piece called in organisms I kind of called it every robot no one ever
asked for it was a series of physical computing pieces made up of everyday
object that used the affordances of the objects as they've been designed and
related them to natural traits that you find in plants and animals it was all a
piece mainly about human disruption on natural spaces looking at how things
affect other things and how you as a person even through passive action can
affect the things around you
also I direct short films I've done too with my producer Lucia we did too for
the 48 hour film project our first one was nominated for Best ensemble and best
sound which was really exciting recently I've been working for the last nine
months on Star Wars Episode nine in the action vehicles department the
fabrication was taking working drawings and figuring out what materials best to
make things out of and literally just creating what was on the paper in real
life dressing was getting lots of bits involved helicopters and airplanes
making spaceships actually come alive and doing the inside of them so that
your dashboards look real and everything around you looks real for the actor as
well as the camera and then standby with being on set with the vehicles opening
the canopy so the actors can get in and out if any one eye rips a joystick out
you have to run in and figure out how to fix it as quickly as possible and try
and make sure that filming can go as smoothly as possible while people are
ripping buttons awful knocking bits of this they're off and the most rewarding
thing I think is see when you actually get given a bit of creative control so
especially on the vehicles that are either new or haven't been seen since
the original movies and you get to do a bit more creative dressing and create
something that no one's telling you exactly what to do you're not copying
your drawing you're doing your own thing getting it signed off by the art dredgen
then seeing that being filmed on screen and seeing on the monitor while you're
shooting a scene seeing an actor interact with the bit that you made
that's like a really exciting feeling also looking forward to the toys coming
out and just very happy like I paid that little bit and I made that and I made
that art is often self led it's an expression of something that you are
feeling inside whereas design is seeing what other people are feeling and
bringing something to demonstrate and representing things for them so I
consider myself more of a designer than an artist purely because most of my
piece is a very audience driven they're thinking about what can I say to the
audience what can they feel how will they experience something
and I try and make sure all my work has some sort of meaning so especially since
University my works moved on to quite a political social kind of view of
different things I like everything I make to say something but something that
makes you want to continue thinking about it want to continue talking about
it and possibly make you want to actually go out and do things about any
particular issue beyond just standing and staring at a piece of work