Spaceboy’s shutter art in the can for lager brand’s promo

The project will see six of the building’s large metal shutt- ers temporarily covered in a 150 metre-long mural incorporating spray paint stencils and giant pasted-on drawings.

The work, being carried out by artist Mike Inglis – who also goes by the name Spaceboy – is being filmed and photographed to create a stop-frame animation. It will take five days to create, and will be left in place for up to four weeks.

The installation is part of a campaign being run by Red Stripe lager, which launched in London in November with a 2.5-metre-high sound sculpture by artist Yuri Suzuki, made out of hundreds of cans collected at the Notting Hill carnival.

The Newhaven animation will show the mural being completed and coming to life as the shutters fly up and down and the images begin to move.

Producer Tim Wetherall, who travelled up from London for the shoot, said: “It’s an installation that’s commissioned by Red Stripe combining urban artists and the kind of DIY culture that surrounds Jamaica and reggae.

“There’s a lot of urban art around at the moment, it’s quite in vogue and Mike’s art works really nicely with stop frame. We met about five weeks ago with the creative team and Mike, and we tried to work out the best way to approach this in terms of making a mural but also creating a narrative in stop frame.”

The design features old-style tape recorders and recording desks in tribute to the 1970s DIY recording scene, and particularly The Black Ark studio set up by Jamaican reggae legend Lee Scratch Perry in his back yard.

Mr Wetherall said: “There will be lots of tape players, the Spaceboy character, which is Mike’s signature character, and trying to marry the two together.

“Mike came to us with a few ideas and we said a really good way of animating this would be to have certain parts of the tape players revolving. We wrote some music for it, which we will be using in the final film.”

Mr Inglis, who lives in Fife, hit the headlines in February 2011 when thieves stole several metal figures which he had created as part of the Shale People Project, showing members of the Broxburn and Livingston Brass Band playing musical instruments.

He is being helped on this project by graphics students from Edinburgh College of Art.He said: “I was approached by an agency in London and they wanted me to work on this Red Stripe campaign and I think they were looking for someone who was in the location, but worked in art installations and street art.

“They came along with an idea of a location which involved shutters, and that we would have a stop frame animation and shutters would be involved in that process.

“They had a brief, which was ‘Make the Street Sing’, and it’s based around positivity, around the Jamaican culture that surrounds Red Stripe, and the DIY aesthetic of the campaign.

“It’s a transitional piece that explores the experimental approach to making music that was part of the 1970s.”