Where The Giants Walked

‘Where The Giants Walked’ is a cinematic animation and architecture project that inserts itself in the now unused Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, in Stoke-on-Trent. The narrative follows Jiri Trnka, a squatting puppeteer who constructed an animation studio within the pump house, a small building on the colliery site. The film explores his fictional and envisioned Giant Marionette Workshop located around the larger Winstanley Headgear. The envisioned project explores the capabilities of scale in the reproduction and construction of rigs, stands, automata, and the giants themselves, utilising the pre-existing gear towers and machinery present on site. Resident writers from the area will assist in the design and narrative of the bi-yearly Giant Shows. The Giant Shows hopes to address the need for funding to maintain the historic site, creating a spectacle to attract vendors and visitors to the site. The workshop has a series of specialist designers and mobile ateliers that will construct each element of the giant around a central lobotomy table. The project forms a reconfigurable building that can meld to the cycles surrounding each Giant Marionette Performance.