A Record-Setting Prank?

The morning before Prize Day at 6:00 a.m., eight intrepid Sixth Formers walked over to a faculty member’s garage to pick up the secret project they had conceived in October and planned since March.

 

Carefully, they gathered the 2,972 pieces of paper and 1,824 feet of tape, plus several tarps and lengths of rope, that connected into a mammoth work of tiled printing. The determined pranksters—Jack Fanikos, Rand Hough, Anson Jones, Zizi Kendall, Will Norton, Elle Santry, Victoria Wahba, and Chris Ye—moved the print from Classics teacher Andres Reyes’ garage to the Schoolhouse.

Their inspiration: another tiled print that the Form of 2008 had hung from Groton's Chapel, leaving a legacy that is still mentioned under “Tiled printing” on Wikipedia.

To create a tiled print, a special program places a grid on an image, then splits the image into tiles that can be printed individually and pieced back together. “We printed Saturday and Sunday of last week, cut all the pages Sunday night and Monday night, and taped all of the pages to the tarps Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday,” said Zizi Kendall '17.

 

The students believe they have broken the Form of 2008’s record, and perhaps even a world record. The Form of 2008’s print, made of more than 1,500 sheets of 11-by-14-inch paper, according to Wikipedia, was the largest ever, at least at that time. It immortalized three faculty members, while the Form of 2017’s featured a different icon: Bart Simpson, writing over and over and over, “We will not pull a prank.”