Story of Simon Birch
People often ask about my inspirations and how I developed @the14thfactory. This is my story...
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Story of The 14th Factory - Part 2
With the overarching root concept in the region's history, I then had to divide the content into a series of elements, almost like chapters in a book. I developed these around the well-known hero/mono-myth structure, the same used in Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, and a thousand more stories. Karl Jung, Neitzsche, explored these ideas but a brilliant writer, Joseph Campbell, put it all together in the book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
This narrative became the structure within which to build the elements necessary, (leaving the ordinary world, tasks and trials, battle, transformation, etc) creating a procession of content.
From there I was interested in the constant tension between border and borderless, a thousand pop culture and historical references, aesthetic relationships that would tie each piece to each other, and many universal ideas. This led to the composition. Gardens, planes, disaster, crowns, fights, car crashes, porcelain, metals, and on and on, each fulfilling its task as a representation of one of the narrative stages and it's composition, in procession.
I then approached creatives far smart than I who felt right for each part and fortunately had many brilliant people still keen to work with me after many previous projects. So together we built it all, 14 chapters; music, film, structures, stuntmen, dancers, punk rockers, car crashes, pitchforks, and paintings, delicate porcelain flags ... each piece a part of the story. All created on a shoestring but very high quality by very experienced creatives.
