i just realized i never blogged the end of image class!

eli and i presented first in our class, and i had only just been shaken out of a coma-deep desknap, so while it was not a bad presentation, it was not exactly as stellar as it might have been. here is what we showed, in nifty scribd form.

for our "expressing a condition" work for national geographic's 6 degrees could change the world, we wanted to focus on the narrative of mankind's careless destruction of the planet. between the various applications of imagery, we sought to create an easily legible story from the  relationships between the images. from the figure and his gas can, to the oil-dripping globe, and the empty can, to the stopmotion staccato flames of the dvd menu, and eventually the charred husk and ashpile. this story is not just in the passive voice. it has an actor, an identity-free villain that represents the carelessness if not malice that we all demonstrate towards the environment in our quest for energy consumption and our domination of nature. it was critical to our concept of personal responsibility that we not only take our own photos, but also do our own physical damage, to remind ourselves that we are not excluded. our images are also linked through the use of a red screen bar, often with a sense of progression up or out of the frame, representational of the feed-forward cycle of warming and destruction increasing exponentially and getting out of hand. our image system has the push the national geographic needs. it's not neutral and distant. it doesn't candycoat. it may even be accused of being melodramatic because of the simplicity of its narrative, but it is not afraid to implicate the viewer, or themselves, because we are all responsible and we are also all capable of doing some good work to fix things. 

Six Degrees Could Change the World Presentation


our final digital imagery, just so you can see a bit more clearly than in the context shots, are as follows:


outside covers, back and front

interiors, left and disc-tray right

disc label  

the poster 

and finally, here's a screen grab of the dvd menu. the background is a stopmotion animation of the globe burning all the way down to the grey pile of ash depicted in the tray under the disc. this stopmotion was a good example of what pros probably call "rolling with it" because we had a video camera that, as electronics often do, went from an ostensibly full battery to a low alert to dead immediately after we lit the globe, and that's not really a thing you can do twice. so instead we snapped lots of photos and stitched them together which, honestly, probably was a more interesting formal solution than just film in the background, anyway.

i really enjoyed this project because i love collaborative work. i just feel like two or more designers working together can create so much more than the sum of their parts, and eli and i reinforced one another's work and had a pretty excellent partnership.


now: summertime!