GRAPHIC DESIGN PROJECT 1

30 SEC FILM ON BEAUTY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN.

I began this project having a very clear idea that I wanted to focus more on the aspect of Responsibility in design and using that to inform the beauty or at least having the two themes on parallel importance in my concept. I didn't want to exhibit a shallow portrayal of beauty. I thought one of the best ways to do this was to look at the bigger picture and exclude human beauty from the subject. In fact in this project human interaction all together was shown as mostly a bad thing which detracts from the beauty of the film.

After some thinking and working out of ideas I decided i would concentrate on mans impact on natural environmental beauty. I wanted it to be broad as a theme but needed a subject which would adequately capture the imaginations of the viewer and decided to follow a herd of deer at sunrise. I thought they would act as a visual vehicle to explain the importance of the subject to the viewer. Below are some pages from my sketchbook of the thought process which helped me arrive at this conclusion:

(I apologize that some would not rotate..)

In my film the role of man is solely within the category of responsibility. This can be broken up into two parts:

His duty to create responsible design ( in the case of designing responsible city growth and its impact on the surrounding environment)

His duty to create responsible design ( in the case of making this short film to raise awareness and promote the main theme)

Thus I hoped I would not design a shallow piece of work rather an important and beautiful one.

I don't think I wholly succeeded in this task, finding the restrictions of a 30 second brief painful to cut out great bits of film and form a coherent narrative which actively gives the message over. However for one of my first attempts at film making I feel it was a part success. I gained confidence with the technical side of film making as well as the planning and rigid structure required to make such a short piece of informative work.

Below are some story-boarding pages from my book:

So with an idea mapped out of how I would translate what I wanted to say into a beautiful short video which would get over the the concept as well, I set out to film. This required cycling at 3am/4am across london to sw15 (richmond park) where I would be finding and shooting the herd of deer in time to set up for the roughly 5am sunrise. I have gone into the hows and whys of continuity and how I shot the film in my book writing so I wont repeat that but I didn't get all the shots I needed on the first trip so had to make a second one later that week. It was a laborious process but a worthwhile one I felt because some of the shots and lighting were so nice.

The soundtrack I wrote myself on a computer programme. I wanted it to compliment the aesthetic of the visuals but not overshadow or distract from them. Therefore I composed this very abstract synthetic harmony to sit over the top of the film.

Hopefully the brief of the film has been met adequately: a 30 second film about the responsibility of beauty and design, shown through the format of a beautiful short film.

HIERARCHIES

I initially had a few ideas of what I wanted to design for this brief, but when a chance encounter with a set of anonymous memories happened on the 16th of April there was no longer any deliberation on what I had to design, and more importantly the purpose for which it served.

I had stumbled across a 24 exposure roll of film, which was contained within the body of a non operational camera. The roll had been shot but not removed. I immediately developed the roll and was surprisingly moved by what I now had in my posession. The photographs, although bland in a sense, had a total and utter importance and beauty involved with them. They were a glimpse into someone's life, a little platform into how they viewed the world. There was a compositional excellence that I'm not sure was accidental or not. All I knew was that this set of pictures with the context of their meaning were an indisputable body of photographic work and that I could not just sit on them. They must be seen. I set about creating a little home-made zine in which each photo would be given a full bleed spread to show of entirely the level of excellence. It had a centre booklet which explained the context of the images and how they came about. I felt this had to be a separate element so as not to take away from the actual images themselves and this seemed like a nice way of including text yet keeping it separated.

Once i had designed the book I looked at what I had created and actually regretted what I had done. These photos weren't mine and the more I stared at them the more this feeling was reinforced. It felt selfish to gain from anothers images, ones they had taken for a reason and had never actually seen themselves. I felt pretty saddened by it. I knew that I had to try and track the photographer down somehow and try returning the pictures to the owner. The zine now had a purpose. It was a vehicle for contacting the owner in the medium of something I could physically send out and give to people in order to gather information. I am in the process of creating a lot more copies. These will be sent to any leads I can find. I am currently researching & contacting the UK hovercraft association which the majority of these pictures were taken at. From there I will continue to follow any leads and send out more copies until he original owner has been located. All the instructions are held within the object so there is no supporting material or explanation needed. Technically, if I had the funds I would just start leaving them around the place to be picked up. This surely is the ultimate gift to someone as it is so personal in the for of a long lost memory of theirs, and the packaging its contained in is its own entity.

GRAPHIC DESIGN INSPIRATION & REFERENCE