Jan 27, 2009
Media contact: Patty Wellborn
Office: 604-795-2819
or 604-504-7441, local 2819
patty.wellborn@ufv.ca
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CIS student Jeff Perntisky sticks in a blue push pin as part of the background in the Mario work of art. |
UFV’s pushpin Mario gets virtual, and some very real, attention
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It started as hijinks. Tired of studying and filling time between classes, a handful of computer students at the University of the Fraser Valley pulled a few push pins off a bulletin board in the campus hallway. The students pulled out a few more, and then almost absently-mindedly made a colourful image with the brightly coloured tacks.
A few pins later, Ryan McCann and fellow Computer Information Systems students Robert Turner, Jeff Pernitsky, and Brent Hunter had an idea. They made a face, added a few other pins, and their idea, now almost a year later, has grown into a four-by-three-foot image of Nintendo trademark character Super Mario that is made completely with pushpins. The image is gaining popularity with more than 211,500 hits since it was posted on the Flickr photo-sharing site in November.
“At first we thought it was kind of cool and we started doing the art free hand,” explains Chilliwack resident Brent Hunter. “We didn’t really know, or even realize, how many push pins we would need.”
Don’t get the wrong idea. As soon as the students realized this project was going to take on a life of its own, they purchased their own push pins. Turner, who lives in Agassiz, ended up using local connections to special order the right coloured push pins through that community’s print shop. They also ordered a large quantity from Staples and Pernitsky laughs as he recalls the look he got when he went into the store and requested 1,300 bright green pins. No matter how hard they tried, they could never find packages of more than 100 pins at any company.
“When purchasing pins we found out that each company makes slightly different sizes and colours, and that there are no standard batch numbers for these things,” Pernitsky says. “Each time we went to pick them up we got slightly different sizes or colours so we ended up having to wait for the next batch to come in. In total I believe that I personally bought about 180 packs of 100 and had to return about 30 to 40 because of size and colour issues.”
And when they couldn’t find any flesh coloured pins for Mario’s face, Pernitsky painted them himself — five coats of model paint, three days of drying time.
It was Turner who downloaded the first image of Mario. He then shrunk it down to a resolution where it would all fit on the bulletin board, but still look like the original pixelated game. But the students soon realized it was hard to keep the pins aligned across the image, so during the summer they transferred in onto a grid system. To get it from a coloured image to a pattern of distinct symbols on a grid, Turner then used his mom’s computerized cross-stitch program. That way they had a pattern with large identifiable sections that everybody could follow. All other students and friends were welcome to add to the artwork, but they had to follow the pattern, explains Brent Hunter.
“We decided on Mario because he is a simple, recognizable figure, and he’s basically the same primary colours as the pushpins,” explains Turner. “This has been really fun and it’s been great to watch the work in progress as it has developed from day to day. It just continued to grow.”
In fact, explains Pernitsky obtaining the correct coloured pins delayed much of the project. It took more than two full semesters to complete, with much of the work starting this September. When you need 17,000 push pins and can only source a few hundred at a time, it means a lot of trips to the store.
The project, located in UFV’s Student Computing Centre on the second floor of the Abbotsford campus, became the centre of attention with dozens of students stopping by to add pins or fill in the blue background. There was no leader and not one student will take any fame or glory from this project. “It was a group effort,” they insist.
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Some of the CIS students who worked on Push Pin Mario are (from left to right) Preston St Pierre, Brent Hunter, Jeremy Klix, Jeffrey Pernitsky, Helmut Wollenberg, and Robert Turner. |
And yes, there were a lot of comments about the time taken up to make such a masterpiece. Pernitsky, who travels from Chilliwack to the Abbotsford campus, says they often wait for other students to finish class so they can carpool together.
“Most of the work was done in small bits here or there while waiting for classes and rides,” he says. “When doing the background, I stayed and did about 3,000 pins in one night while waiting for someone else to get out of class.”
These students are in their fourth year and it’s not certain what will happen to the work of art. Pernitsky has toyed with the idea of looking into a Plexiglas cover for Mario, but nothing has been finalized. It’s still an attraction at the Abbotsford campus, but the Student Computing Centre is a tiny room and Pernitsky says they would love to have it displayed somewhere so other students can see it. As soon as it is moved to a new location, the team wants to start a new push pin project and is looking for ideas, images, and funding for the next project.
Pushpin Mario, by the UFV computing students, can be seen on Flickr
at www.flickr.com/photos/ranadok/sets/72157608990502708/
Applications are currently being accepted for study this September at UFV. The university offers one-, two-, and four-year programs of study in computing, including a Bachelor of Computer Information Systems degree. To learn more about these programs, please visit www.ufv.ca/cis.
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