Okay. Let’s get down to it.
For the last ten to twelve years one of my main interests in the model making area has been building kits from the various Japanese animation shows which are produced. To say my interest borders on the fanatical is something of an understatement. I have around seven or eight hundred kits that still need building (one day) with about two hundred completed at the present time.
Whilst Roy’s not as fanatical about anime as I am he is still something of a fan in this area. Were we going to include our anime kits in the exhibition? You can bet your boots that the answer was YES. After discussing the layout of the anime section, we also decided to also branch out into box art, as this is an area I feel is much taken for granted by many model builders. In Japan box art seems to have become an art form in its own right with many of the model company’s openly competing to have the best artists in this field working for them. Some of the artists even go on to extend their original work into an entire series of pictures based on the same subject and produce these in book form.
Exhibition room two had a large wall unit/cabinet in it, which would be perfect to kick-off our box art display. The shelves in the cabinet would also allow us to display the models from the box art. The cabinet turned out to have so much extra space in it that we were even able to feature and entire section on Space Cruiser Yamato and Captain Harlock, two classics in the Japanese animation world.
We extended the box art display outward from the large cabinet to all the available wall space in room two. The museum were able to supply us with about twenty five very large photo frames and these allowed us to feature nearly every piece of box art we had available. We also had quite a few advertisement posters from various Japanese anime shows and we used these in the spaces between the photo frames.
We knew from our pre-planning sessions for the exhibition that we would have a lot more models available for display than the museum had space for at the time and I had managed to persuade them to build two additional cabinets for the far end of room two. Into these we put our hotchpotch sections. These were kits which were few in series number but large in variation. One of the cabinets held our Gerry Anderson section featuring models from Thunderbirds, Space 1999, UFO, Captain Scarlet and Terrahawks. This cabinet also held our Doctor Who and Warhammer 40,000 exhibits.
The second cabinet held our displays for Batman, Robocop, Nightmare on Elm Street and Predator.
That left us with one large pedestal cabinet left at the far end of room two. This was devoted to models from the films Alien and Aliens.
It took us three days to set the exhibition up. I can honestly say it was most enjoyable and exhausting three days I have ever spent. That was Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, July 10th to 12th July. The museum had organised a special preview night (14th July) for the day before the exhibition was due to officially open, so Roy and I got to give talks to the guests and make a couple of speeches as well.
Has the exhibition gone well you ask?
It was my hope that we might get attendance figures for the exhibitions seven week run in the region of about six or seven hundred. By week six we had, had eight and half thousand.
The museum contacted me on week five and said that as it was going so well would we be interested in extending it until Christmas if they could re-shuffle all their other planned exhibitions for the rest of the year. As it turned out they were only able to re-shuffle until the end of October, but an eight week extension is better than nothing at all I suppose.
Final attendance figures for 3SF 3D have now been in the region of nineteen and half thousand. Not bad I suppose for two local Yorkshire lads and two hundred and forty something exhibits.
Feedback from the exhibition was also very positive with 95% of people saying that they not only thought the exhibition was excellent but that they would also like to see it repeated again in the following year. This would mean that they would have to nearly the same layout again with for the most part the same models and artwork but this did not seem to matter.
And finally
It seemed a shame to have to break up the exhibition, but that’s what we had to do. Roy took his kits home and they now reside on shelves in various rooms in his home.
For me I decided to do something little bit different with my kits from the exhibition.
I have two rooms under my house which have stood virtually empty for the last few years and were only used for occasional storage. Whilst the exhibition was running I had decided to do out the larger of these two rooms as a special display area for the kits from the Science Fact section of the exhibition. The walls and floor of the room have been repainted with special paint to keep out the damp (Made sure of this by painting them twice). Special “decked” display shelving and display lighting has now been installed and the Science Fact section of 3SF 3D now has a new home, beneath my home in Yorkshire. As it turned out I have put up so much shelving in the room that it now also houses my Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman and Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds kits with enough room to house quite a few of my Japanese animation kits as I run out of space upstairs.
The second room I plan to work on during the summer 2001 months and it will be mainly used the house the two models I have of the International Space Station when they are completed.
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