Courses

Ruairi Barrett

Hi, I'm Ruairi. I am a Dublin based designer. I have always had a love of film, TV and theatre, enrolling in drama classes from a young age. My skills include set design both theatre and film, model making, puppet design, puppeteering, AutoCAD, and SketchUp, along with crochet and sewing. I love to read and create, I hope to be able to help bring worlds to life . I am a very organised person, who likes working alongside others to bring our collective ideas to the stage and screen.

**Crane House exterior** - set in the Phoenix Parklands, Crane House stands on stilts above the tropical forest floor. The house consists of a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and storage space, with an added on lab and living quarters. There is a mix of materials, from concrete, to red Dublin brick and has been mended over the years. I did my 3D modelling using SketchUp.

**Character sketches for Io** - the robot that Nell makes. He is made of spare augmented limbs that don't match, his body is made of a steel ladder, and his head is a kettle. He is tall, imposing and looks very unhuman, but has a sweet and caring disposition.

**Physical build of Crane House** - made at 1:25 scale. Built from white card, using a laser cutter, along with some 3d printed pieces. Just the top floor, Nell's room, has been furnished in this model.

**A view of the kitchen in Crane House** - made in SketchUp. The furniture is a mix of different styles and ages. The kitchen table is old and scuffed, with mismatching legs. This space is purely practical, not a warm, homely place. The stairs connect to Nell's bedroom.

**Construction drawings of Nell's room** - done in AutoCAD. Crane House as a whole would be far too big and impractical to build as a single piece, so I split the space into the 2 separate floors, with the stairs connecting them. I focused more on designing Nell's room, as it is one of the most used spaces within the story, and dressing it to feel like a young person's room, while also being an inventor's room was the most interesting space to me.

**Nell's room interior** - 1:25 model. Half the houses furniture is older, legacy pieces, passed on from her mothers wealthy family who build their house, such as her mahogany corner desk, while the other half is cheaper, practical pieces, like the shelving. The entire room is packed with paper and drawings, sketches of her inventions, portraits, observation drawings.

**Storyboard shot** - drawn in pen and ink, an overhead shot of Nell putting together her creation, Io. She has to build and weld him together from scratch, carefully wrapping his wires around his skeletal form. He is heavy, as all of the limbs are build to balance against he person they have been custom built for. The rain rages on outside, but the light shines through her window, illuminating her sketch of him that she has stuck to her window.

**Storyboard shot** - done in pen and ink, of a mannequin hand floating in the ocean at the films start. This hand inspires Nell, the lead character, to create a computer that looks like a person. She finds it while salvaging scrap with her friend Ruby at the coastline, and is intrigued by it. She later alters it to be the hand of her Creation.

**Initial shot of Gonne Hospital** - edited in Photoshop. Set in the old Clery's building, in the world of Spare and Found Parts it was made into a makeshift hospital during the pandemic, then burnt to a husk to cleanse the space. It is off limits to the public, in case anyone gets sick from it, but Oliver has turned one of the backrooms into a makeshift lab. The interior, other than this room, is burnt and filthy.

**Interior shot** - from SketchUp, of the corridor around Oliver's lab. Every surface is burnt and covered in ash, debris and filth. The doors and line the corridor are also filthy, some covered in ash and dust, others painted red, some even welded shut. Burnt lights and wires hang from the ceiling. Old equipment, like carts, have been left abandoned throughout the space, leaving it eerie and haunted.

**The layout of Oliver's lab in Gonne Hospital** - done in SketchUp. The corridor that wraps around it is completely burnt and covered in ash. The labs interior is the cleanest, brightest place we would have seen at this point in the film, especially when contrasted to the space around it. The lab is filled with glass cabinets, which are filled with old prosthetic limbs, made of wood and ceramics, and some older models of the augmented robotic limbs that most people use. There is a surgical table in the rooms centre, which is to be used once Oliver opens up his alternative prosthetics business.

Spare and Found Parts

Ireland is in the midst of recovering from a devastating pandemic that occurred 100 years ago. The population is being born without limbs, and so must use augmented, robotic limbs to compensate. Nell Crane, however, is the only one with an internal augmentation - her heart ticks. It is coming time for her to contribute to the cities rebuilding effort, and a change find of a mannequin hand inspires her to make a robotic boy, to help her world connect with their history, despite their distrust and condemnation of computers as heresy.

The Use of Science Fiction in the Representation of Disability in Contemporary Anglophone Film

This thesis looks at contemporary depictions of disability in Avatar (2009), The Shape of Water (2017), and Please Stand By (2017). The films are analysed simply on their merits of disability representation and associated tropes, looking at the modern strides and pitfalls that often appear within disability representation. Then the films are looked at in relation to their use of science fiction and how this affects, and often facilitates, disability tropes, given that science fiction adds a fantastical element that justifies a lot of these tropes. Finally, analysis is given to the films genre, and who the intended audiences are. None of these films have disabled people cast to play their lead disabled roles, nor do their have disabled people appearing often, if ever, behind the cameras, and this can lead to issues within the films themselves, as well as leaving disabled actors and filmmakers struggling to find work outside of smaller projects. The conversation around disabled representation within film is relatively new in terms of film analysis, and as such there is a small but broad set of opinions on this topic, that this thesis is aiming to be a part of.