January 2012
This past week i have been online researching in the hope of finding some direction for my dissertation. I found the research i done for Deirdre’s essay on the public sphere, spectacle and urban space interesting. I realised it was an area that i had a fair bit of personal experience in having for part of my life made a living as a street performer whilst travelling through Europe. I had always felt a sense of freedom on the streets, a place where creative expression was shared and audience interaction brought people together in a way where language barriers stepped aside and made way for such things as joy, curiousity, playfulness and a lot of laughter. Cultural debate and exchange of information between nationalities brought a hands on education which was the real deal in comparison to what information you found by scimping through The Lonely Planet ( travel book).
A reminder via my research that the public sphere did not actually belong to the public, but instead was manipulated in a way where media spectacle moulds controls and directs the masses, i have made a decision as regards the creation of the artifact for this coursework. I am not interested in creating anything for the advertisng industry or to promote any corporate capitalist agenda. i have decided to move now into an area of research of social consciousness and corporate responsibility.
In 1970, Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman wrote a magazine article about “corporate social responsibility,” an earlier term for something very much like creative capitalism. Friedman said the responsibility of corporations was to maximize value for their stockholders–period. Anything else was a betrayal of those stockholders, who can always give their profits away to worthy causes if they want. But the choice should be theirs. It was argued in reply back then that social responsibility benefits the bottom line because it makes the corporation look good, thereby attracting more customers and better employees. Gates makes a similar argument. But this reasoning is a bit circular: if creative capitalism makes good business sense, then corporations deserve no special praise for practicing it. If it carries a real cost to stockholders, then Friedman has a point.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1828325,00.html#ixzz1m1kY7Hox
below is a detailed summary from The Economist on an analysis of research on The Importance of Corporate Responsibility.
They conducted two global online surveys on the topic
of corporate responsibility in October 2004. One
survey of senior executives gathered 136 respondents.
The other of institutional investors received 65
responses. To supplement the survey results, they also
conducted 17 in-depth interviews with senior
executives and analysts.
http://graphics.eiu.com/files/ad_pdfs/eiuOracle_CorporateResponsibility_WP.pdf
Below are some early brainstorming ideas i have processed.
February 2012
Last months research on corporate responsibility got me looking and thinking a lot of the power of advertising. It was everywhere and let’s face it is hard to get away from unless you live in the countryside. For the most our private and public domains are constantly invaded by advertising. The idea behind culture jamming is that individuals are not given the choice as to whether they are exposed to ads or not. Jammers believe everyone should have the opportunity to voice their opinions just like the corporate advertisers. They believe in the opportunity to respond to the advertisements, just because advertisers buy their way into our public space does not mean that it must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow. Culture jamming is the practice of fighting back against the corporate advertisers and an attempt to get their own voices heard. The messages that Jammers are often exposing are anti-corporation, anti-consumer, anti- materialism and overall anti-advertising.
The thought processes i had around this subject are very well reflected in this article i was reading
http://embody3d.com/2010/05/27/the-sustainable-design-lie-consumerism-vs-environmentalism/
‘Our expectations and demand for new and exciting products is absurd and unimaginable even 20-30 years ago, and is simply not sustainable. We demand the newest and the best products instantly, they must be well built, beautifully packaged, more powerful and of outstanding quality. But like us products get old, they loose their strength and efficiency and they bare the marks of old age and wear and tear.
Consumers need to understand that a scratch on their Ipod doesn’t warrant the replacement or the repurchase of another Ipod.’
I thought for awhile about creating a culture jam as the subject for my artefact. For the most it could be said that many people or most people are passive consumers, both of products but also of media. I felt i would like to address this. Mary Gallagher was working with the class in an effort to pin down the type of artefact we would like to make and i progressed through her workshop. She asked us to speculate in more detail on how we envisioned our project, for example who was the client who desired the artefact to be built, for what was it’s purpose etc;
Here is my Speculation on the project idea.
Client: Myself
The Project: Reclaiming the public Sphere.
To create a a Culture Jam through the creation of a series of animated projections suitable for both internal and external projection either on digital screens or as projections onto buildings.
As a result of this I felt a culture jam would be the best way forward and so i had the idea of creating a series of projections suitable for indoor and outdoor display. The subjects of each projection would highlight individually such topics of, for example consumerism versus environmental sustainability , consumer over consumption and perhaps take a look at media control and manipulation of the of the masses.
I shall create an event in the manner of a nature trail or a treasure hunt. The idea is that members of the public follow the trail to specific locations both internal and external. Each location shall have a short video animation displayed.
The Target Audience:
Members of the general public.
Animation one
Synopsis
A shaman journeys into the underworld to free the minds of people against the greed of consumerism, corporate control and to heal the effects overconsumption has on the planet.
The Animation Storyboard
The animation begins in very scenic unspoilt nature somewhere where there is a very pure clean looking environment. A journey begins across the landscape and into a forest where sitting by a fire is a man. He is a shaman, he is looking into the fire and then begins his journey. As he passes by the animals in the nature are looking at him and following him as he climbs a mountain. We see him step on ice which cracks and as he falls, he sees into the underworld of consumerism and capitalist society.
In this world he sees the greed of consumerism. He witnesses overconsumption and it’s environmental effects. He has a vision of the corporate monster with people on puppet strings made of chains. He bangs his staff. From the staff come words of empowerment. They become emblazoned on adverts, they fly around people and move into their energy field. They touch different aspects of the images of consumerism and they disintegrate. We follow the words which surround one person, he reacts by taking out his mobile phone and destroying it .
We then see video of a burning Barbie doll and desecration of other iconic consumer goods.
below are some statements i have been contemplating while i am working on my storyboard
Who’s pulling your strings? … Corporate control
Disconnect to Reconnect
Designed for the dump
Game Over! sick of inserting coins to continue
Dis-count the planet…destroy it now Pay Later!
Why buy me?… I’m a useless piece of shit anyway!
Mood Boards
below is a mood board of the styles i am looking to recreate.
In the first part of the animation when the shaman is travelling through the nature i am looking at the first 5 iumages on the mood board below.
When he falls into the under world i am looking at using mixed media. photo collage and video.
I have ‘t put onto my storyboard a time line sequence. My reason for this are that i am considering music to acompany the animation. As much as i am aiming it to be an outside projection, i feel it must be flexible and also suitable for indoors. If i add music to it then then edit should be in sinc with the animation sequence.
The Story line of the animation.
First draught
May 2012
During critical analysis of the storyboard, it was discussed repeatedly why the shaman featured in the narrrative. It was never fully understood. I could explain it, but not eloquently enough that it was fully understood. I had backed up my reasons through reasearch, but it was pointless in that if the target audience also did not understand the significance then the message behind the animation would be diluted and the end result would be perhaps confusion as to what the animation was really about.
It was at this point that i decided to do a turn around and rethink the storyboard and adjust the narrative so that it became clearly obvious what it was about. I began to do further research and discovered the movie They Live directed by John Carpenter in the 1980’s. The main character in the movie finds a pair of sunglasses and when he puts them on the adverts in the billboards and in shop windows change to show words such as “Obey”, “Consume”, “Sleep”, “No Independent Thought” etc. I began to think about the way advertisers entice consumers with eye catching adverts on TV and on Billboards and persuade them to thinking that by buying this or that product they will be better looking, be more attractive or intelligent. The message behind the attractive packaging of any advert is always ‘buy me’. On analysis of the movie I felt that using an excessive use of signage in my animation would be a suitable way to get my message across to it’s target audience.
When i first researched the movie it was images in black and white that i viewed first. The movie is actually in colour but what i liked about these images were that they made the streets look drab and lifeless because of the lack of colour. Many people refer to the city as the concrete jungle and i knew myself that it was the bright advertising and neon lights that lit up the city. I began to think along the lines of using a monochrome style where only advertisements were the colour in the animation.
May 2012
I came across the animation style of Phil Mulloy. His early work has an absence of colour in it and his characters were drawn very basically. He alsoo used a very rough drawn style which used mainly black and white colour
I decided to rework my storyboard and give it a different style to which i used Mulloy’s style as inspiration.
I began toi rework my Narrative completely. The shaman was in just about every scene in the original storyboard and so the narrative needed a complete reworking.
Newly Developed Mood Board
New Narrative.
The journey begins when a young girl by accident enters a packaging machine and gets loaded onto the back of a truck where she travels along a street over saturated with advertisements. Eventually she falls off the back of the truck when it travels through a mountain of consumer waste. She sees the corporate monster is in control of the consumers. There then comes onto the screen an interruption which is in itself a news flash but also an encouragement to keep on shopping. The news flash explains that the revolution will not be televised. This is a reference to media control in that they will oppose any change to alter the consumer driven capitalist society that we live in. The revolution begins in the personal changes each individual chooses to make in the way they choose to interact with consumerism. Adverts and labels fall onto the screen until one of them falls which says ‘DISCOUNT THE PLANET…BUY NOW PAY LATER’. Another one falls on top of this one saying ‘TOO LATE!” It is at this point that the young girl who has fallen off the truck pulls on a string to which the final shopping label swings onto the screen which says simply “THE PRICE OF A BARGAIN!”
Animation development
June 2012
I am panicking a good bit now and thinking i am not going to get finished in time for the deadline. Mainly the documenting of the evaluation of the final project and feedback from the target audience which needs to be written into the dissertation. I have taken a risk deciding to create relevantly huge changes. I am also thinking did i do the right thing? Considering three people from the target audience who had been following my progress felt that i should have kept to the Shaman narrative and said that it was not rocket science to understand it. So understandably i am confused. I should have assessed the proposal to create changes with my target audience before i went ahead with them. It is too late now and so i shall reconise this as a learning curve which has helped me to gain experience.
New Storyboard
The new storyboard can be viewed by clicking on the link below
Build up of the animation
Below are some images i have loaded onto the blog so as anyone can see my progress.
motion graphics 