Some absolute corkers here in King Zog's best and worst uni projects

Date
21 October 2014

Don’t know who King Zog are? SORT IT OUT. Okay fine, they’re four strapping lads who all went to uni together who absent-mindedly, perhaps drunkenly dreamt of forming a collective upon graduating. Unlike most people who have dreams, they actually went and bloody did it. Now they’re all rather successful and clever I thought it might be funny to humiliate them online and ask them to show us their best and most catastrophic university projects – turns out even their shit ones are better than most. Oh well. Take it away boys.

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Felix Heyes: Privates

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Felix Heyes: Privates

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Felix Heyes: Privates

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Felix Heyes: Privates

Best: Privates.

In the last year of uni Ben (West) and I began the private investigation of a Private Investigator. We took to the task with the great enthusiasm, drinking milk when things went well and whiskey when things went bad. The target of our investigation was a detective called Mark (no pun) Robbins.

The sting involved framing a good friend, forging a diamond certificate, an array of classic disguises, two hidden cameras, three days stakeout, an 80mph car chase and a little breaking and entering. We used a dictaphone to record every word of the investigation which was then transcribed. Interviews were taken with neighbouring businesses. Hand writing samples and the soil from his car tyres were taken and collected as evidence. We watched Training Day. All of this evidence is available on request.

‘Don’t look don’t find’ – Mark Robbins 2012

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Felix Heyes: Perfect Picnic

Worst: Perfect Picnic

Regrettably I fell into the augmented reality trap and started to build a picnic blanket that your phone or tablet camera would respond to. Resulting in a complete waste of my time, the perfect picnic was both pointless and difficult.

I went as far as teaching myself how to model a tree in some 3D program before noticing how a picnic blanket that faked you sitting somewhere aesthetically better than your real surroundings would, in practice, be quite sad. Why wouldn’t you just sit somewhere nice? One for the bin.

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Ben West:

Best: T-Shirts

No fault to my tutors, but the time at uni when I learned the most was actually in the summer between second and third year. I got myself real poor – £90 in the bank – and recklessly decided that getting a job wasn’t for me and I was going to art my way out of trouble. I was going to make T-shirts, everyone was going to buy them, and I’d splash the profits on some bread and eggs.

I spent my last cash on some screen printing stuff, which I’d never used before. I went in the garden. I fucked it up, then fucked it up, then fucked it up, then fucked it up, then did it. I sold about 90 tees in the end and I was still pretty poor but I had a belly full of pride. There were other projects I was involved with at uni which were more attractive, more clever or more fun, but that one taught me a lesson I still use: to always recognise the difference between failing and giving up.

When things go wrong it’s easy to assume you have failed and there’s nothing to be done about it. But if you really think about your situation there is almost always something else you can try, and if there is, you haven’t failed, you’ve given up. That’s not always wrong (giving up is occasionally worth it) but I find that most of the time I hate giving up, and realising that’s what I’m choosing to do gets me off my sad bum and back to work.

Worst

I pretended to be David Bowie in the shower. I didn’t bring headphones to the crit so my terrible impression blared all over the place. My tutor said it was the worst project she’d ever seen.

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Josh King: Ice Cream Van project

Best

The most enjoyable project at uni was when we hired an ice cream man and his van for the day, with no idea what we were going to use him for. We paid him £100 to drive about while we pretended to be making some sort of documentary. Thankfully we interviewed him and he told us that he once saw a cat and a fox dancing together and when he turned his chimes off, they stopped dancing. The video then turned into an ice cream man’s search for the dancing cat and fox. A much better story than we could ever imagine.

Worst

I once spray painted “why does it always rain on me?” on an umbrella. I burnt all the evidence and still pretend it never happened.

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Jake Slee: Pierce Brosnan’s Big Idea

Best: Pierce Brosnan’s Big Idea zine

This isn’t the best thing I have ever created or done, but I chose it for what taught me. It got me into the whole “networking and talking to strangers” thing, and the willingness from designers and artists I greatly respected to help out a little old student trying to put together his first zine was vastly encouraging. Even though I did half the imagery in the zine myself it also made me realise how much I enjoyed coordinating and curating projects.

To summarise – it taught me there are joys within art and design that aren’t just the making and creating that I still continue to do a lot of today.

Worst Project: Harold Shipman on Acid

Five likes on Tumblr for £140. Not ideal.

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Throughout the month of October we’ll be celebrating the well-known autumnal feeling of Back to School. The content this month will be focusing on fresh starts, education, learning tools and the state of art school in the world today – delivered to you via fantastic in-depth interviews, features and conversations with talented, relevant, creative people.

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About the Author

Liv Siddall

Liv joined It’s Nice That as an intern in 2011 and worked across online, print and events, and was latterly Features Editor before leaving in May 2015.

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