I have two choices as I write this post. The first is to deceive you into believing how fascinated I am of flight, and to justify how this fascination, along with my love of machines and engineering, inspired me to bring one of the most complex and aerodynamically advanced paper planes as part of an assignment for my English class last week. The second is to tell you the truth.
Image courtesy: Anil Kaya (a still from a short film by Anil Kaya) http://quelquechose.deviantart.com/art/paper-plane-I-104336676
Alas, no matter how tempting the prospect of deception might be, I have decided to be honest with you. The truth is that since I considered my time too precious for “these things”, I just got a paper plane – the simplest one. A few folds here and a few folds there and one’s done in thirty seconds. I made it before my Chemistry class the same day.
But I wasn’t the only one to have done that. Most of the others had gotten paper airplanes as well, although of a different variety. Some of them had made paper birds. The most dedicated, however, had brought complex paper boxes. So I felt completely at ease with my “invention”. After all it was a homework legally done.
But really, my plane, howsoever simple it may be, isn’t the kind that is generally made by people. A normal paper plane has 6 folds. Its spine runs along the first fold that divides the paper vertically. Since the length of a normal paper plane is the same as that of the paper that went into making it, it has shorter wings in comparison to the size of the plane body. In other words, it’s more like a rocket that goes straight, follows a simple somewhat elongated parabolic trajectory, and lands nose down. On the other hand, the plane that I make – one that was taught to me by my father in the early days of my childhood when I was learning to speak – has more folds and is, therefore, more sturdy. Its length is one half of the paper that goes into making it, and so the wing to body ratio is much greater than that of the normal paper plane talked about above. This gives my plane much greater stability and grace while it’s in flight. And instead of following a boring downward parabolic trajectory, it first goes up, stabilizes, seemingly hangs in mid-air for a little while, and then smoothly lands nose-up on the ground. Modifying the plane’s wings, moreover, enables it to perform all sorts of maneuvers. It may be a little slow, but then again our aim isn’t to play darts when flying paper airplanes.
When I came to class, I realized that the object we’d brought was supposed to inspire us for our collaborative project. The class was divided into groups of four, and my group had three paper airplanes and a paper bird. We were rather uninspired.
As we entered the CULC building to further find inspiration, each of us was clueless, and so we first discussed our majors and our residential halls. All of us were international students, so we then discussed our respective countries. Somewhere, someone said something about AE majors, and I tried to get back to our project and our paper airplanes.
After some forceful thinking, we zeroed down on using video as a medium to showcase our final project, as well as the process that would go into making it. This was not only because all of us were limited on resources but also because making a digital video using a simple camcorder and free editing software would provide tremendous flexibility and accelerate the process considerably.
Drawing inspiration from three paper airplanes and a paper bird, we decided to explore in our video the aerodynamics of different varieties of paper-planes. One of our group members knew some AE majors, so we decided that we would interview them about different aspects of paper flight at three regular intervals in our video, adding improvements to our basic planes with each additional input we would get. Our final aim would be to use those fundamental aerodynamic principles to create the perfect paper plane.
But this seemed too cumbersome, and inconvenient. Firstly, building a plane, even if it is of paper, is no easy task. Improvements would’ve required instruments. Simply folding paper and adding tape could only take us so far.
So we decided to go a little abstract – towards something that wouldn’t require tangible input and refined scientific instruments. Since I had some experience with photography, I proposed we made a photo as our final project.
As soon as ‘photo’ was said, it was eureka moments for everyone. Up till now, we were quite bored and dull, looking for random stuff to do, not wanting to think about what had to be done. But now, once we had gathered enough of the right things to build on, everyone got excited and brimmed with energy. And all of us had this joint idea of using the ‘process’ of the paper plane project for the photo project.
So we finally decided that we would document the process of “building” a good photograph. Admittedly, the best photos have been spontaneous captures of “the right moment” rather than deliberate shoots, but then our project was to be more about the abstract qualities that go into making a photograph, and exploring what makes a good photograph. Besides, as Ansel Adams said “Good photographs are not taken, they are made.”
Since I was the one with the paper and pencil, I tentatively assigned tasks to everyone, according to whatever he or she specialized in. We planned to discuss the details over the weekend. And that was it.
It was quite surprising, really, to observe how we came about with the final idea. The transition from paper planes to photographs was rather random, but I got to know that paper airplanes could indeed inspire!
I guess ideas just come pretty slowly. It’s certainly not like you open a faucet and you have your drink. You have to very patiently stand there with a cup underneath that faucet, ever prepared to collect whatever idea your head decides to pour, if at all it does.
