Boston University — MFA Graphic Design

First Year Studio — Spring 2020

Project — Collection

Prompt

Find something you are curious about or would like to explore. Step away from your computer and think about different ways of capturing content to tell your story. Think about the process of blending content, story, and design.

Learning Outcomes

• Collaboration
• Research
• Narrative
• Authorship
• Print & Screen outputs

Step 1 — Raw Collection

After reviewing examples provided by our professor, James Grady, our group (Michael Rosenberg, Jenna Benoit, and Claire Bula) decided that we would cast our net for collection broadly. Prof. Grady provided three potential categories of collections we could explore -

raw collection and a translation of that, documentation of an experience or event, or personal data collection. Our group had interests in all three, so we left it open for each of us to explore, over the course of a week, what caught our attention. In conversation, I mentioned that I don’t collect things anymore and I try to own as little as possible, whereas Jenna said she collected lots of mementos and trinkets. One idea that resulted from that conversation was to try and look around our homes and see what kinds of collections existed there, as opposed to gathering collections in the outside world. The resulting collections were of mostly everyday items, but tended to gravitate to objects that held a deeper meaning to us or a memory that was special. We also collected a little bit of data and drew some charts.

Raw Collection Photos

Data Photos

Step 2 — Feedback on Raw Collection

Having brought a massive amount of collection items to class, we knew we had a large enough ‘database’ of content, but the question was: how should we use it? What story do we want to tell?

The first thing we needed to do was create a system out of the wide variety we’d collected. Our objects were different, how we laid them out was different, the photography was different, our visualization was different, so we decided to create consistency through quality of image (consistent lighting, cohesive layout, etc.), and from there we could start thinking about how a print piece and a motion piece would evolve out of this variety. There were three distinct visual styles employed by each of our group members, so we also thought about how to use pacing to tell a story through three visual styles. We thought originally, since we’d collected so many personal items about creating a “biographical” movie through the still images without any people in it, in the vein of “if you disappeared and someone had to find you, or understand you, or figure you out based on these objects, what would a movie look like?” The narrative would talk about who this person is, what the narrative of their life is, and what can you learn about someone through their possessions if you’ve never met them? What is the story you can glean if you just go through a person’s things? With that as a base, we thought we could create the motion piece and make the printed piece like teaser movie posters. We thought about creating a triptych of videos for each of us playing in tandem. We also thought about illustrating the story of a day through the movement of light throughout a room and seeing the same spot in a room over the course of a day. We discussed using a scrapbook or journal that would have different objects memorialized in it to represent each of use and delving into the memories related to that object. We decided to pursue a project around memory and how objects, simple, everyday objects, could hold great value because of the memory associated with them without actually being worth anything. We would each create a book of our life with photos of objects in it with memories that were important to us. We would zero in on one of those memories to tell a story.

Refinement of Collection/Formulation of First Idea

The next step of our project was to narrow down our collection, photograph the items, and create a type system. The photography was key to the success of the project because we needed high quality images and consistency to ensure they looked like a system. We rented a lighting kit and camera and ordered a photobooth to achieve the image quality we were looking for. The idea was beginning to form that we would explore memory through object collection, objects as a form of personal data, potentially only explainable and understandable by an individual’s unique experience with that object.

We came up with a new concept for the video that would be a futuristic setting where an unseen “user” could access a memory portal or bank to see an object and understand those memories. We concepted a black screen with green writing to harken back to the old digital repositories and then once you accessed the repository it would change to a white environment with the objects on a pure white background to signal getting into someone’s mind and then text information and sounds that recalled the memory related to that object would come up around it. The print pieces would be posters that signaled a “memory bank” and what that might look like to tease the concept of entering someone else’s consciousness, or being able to see that object through their eyes. We discussed some movie references, Memento and Being John Malkovich, to get some of the visual ideas across

We storyboarded this concept out for a video and extracted ideas for the posters from that concept so that the posters would tease the content of the video and the video would tell the story. We also did a great deal of research on typefaces and how to make them look “futuristic”, looking heavily into san serif and monospaced options, as well as interesting display typefaces. Ones we thought we would use were OCR-A, OCR-B, Sans Forgetica, Graphik, Helvetica, and others. We tried a number of them across many poster iterations.

Typeface Research

Poster Drafts

Storyboarding the Video

Feedback on Refinement of Collection/Formulation of First Idea

The feedback we received on the idea was to create a more simple system and put the type in context. The images were really beautiful and the type was deadpan, straight, so maybe there was something we could do with that…

Prof. Grady suggested putting the type in context, doing some more research, and iterating the posters, coming up with a variety of iterations related to type, image, and scale. What other elements of narrative? For the printed pieces, Prof. Grady asked us to think about someone who hasn’t experienced the objects before and how we could allow the viewer to put their own narrative in. The object should be banal enough and in combination with the typography allow the viewer to unpack it. Think about the content so that if someone reads it, they want to know more about it, but we don’t “give” it to them, they have to come up with it.

We took a few days to ingest this feedback and think about what we wanted to accomplish with the project andand what form that would take given our objectives. We took the high quality production photographs once the lighting box arrived and re-drafted the posters. We kept moving forward with the memory bank video idea.

New Posters

Feedback Round Three

Feedback about the posters and the video with our entire class pushed us in a new direction. The question was posed as to whether, instead of making three distinct posters, we could mix our three styles, and thus our memories, into a single collage of posters, overlapping many layers of posters and memory. It was suggested that we push the poster making to experiment with form, justoposition, cropping, zooming, etc. to create contrast, form, and scale.

Michael suggested that he always wanted to do a wheat pasting poster project and from that suggestion we pivoted our entire idea for the execution of the concept to one large 8’ x 8’ “poster” that was actually comprised of many posters pasted overlapping one another over the course of a longer time period. This would help us represent the individuality of memory, how memories can become layered over time, how they deteriorate, and how they crop back up, and get forgotten to time.

This also changed how we wanted to approach the motion part of our project. Since we were now actually going to create this “poster” at a specific day and time, it became an event in itself that we would document and be creating a memory of at the same time. We discussed lots of iterations for the video — time lapse, stop motion, a collage type video where we would pull images into illustrator, but ultimately settled on documenting the wheatpasting event and creating a motion video from that.

Wheatpasting Installation Poster & Video Creation

Creating an installation entails 90% of the effort going to planning and 10% of the effort going to execution. Everything about this process was designed, and the design of the posters and the overall big installation poster was very important, but to be able to execute that correctly, creating detailed timelines, supply lists, gathering supplies, scouting a location, drawing up plans, and planning out every detail (including accounting for ideas that wouldn’t work out) was essential

.

For this project to be successful, both as an installation and a timelapse video, we needed to map out how long the filming would be and how to sustain that length of time. We started by figuring out how long it would take to make videos of :30, 1 minute, 1:30, and 2 minutes by calculating how many frames per second we needed and how long it would take to adhere posters of various sizes to the boards we were going to put up. Based on those calculations we decided how many posters we needed to print to be able to put up posters for a minimum 2 ½ hours of filming, but allowed for up to 5 hours.

We also carefully scouted the location so we knew that we could install boards on the wall, would have the correct lighting, ensure we could fit the camera with the correct framing, and be able to work for up to five hours without being disturbed or disturbing anyone. Based on that location scouting we made a list of supplies and bought some at Home Depot and ordered some from Amazon. We thought about making wheat paste from scratch, but after researching on youtube, it seemed more efficient to purchase it and mix it the day of the shoot. We made sure to have everything completed and ready to go the day before the shoot. We thought about installing the boards the day before as well, but it was just as easy to do that the day of the shoot.

Shoot Day

As with any event, the shoot took longer than planned for. We aimed to meet at 10am, get filming by 11am, and film until 5pm at the latest. The installation of the boards took a little longer than expected and there were a few other groups up on the fifth floor filming, so we had to work around that as well.

We set up the area by first installing the boards that we were going to paste the posters on. Then we made sure we had enough printed material and did our last prints. We brought all the posters up to the fifth floor and created a plan of what should go up in what order.

The plan was first the title sequence, then our photo posters, then some big posters, then to improvise a bit, then go back to big posters, and ultimately end back on the final ‘Remember’ posters. We wanted the process to be free-flowing, but we also wanted to create sound compositions throughout the process. Not every poster necessarily created a “specifically planned” composition, but, because we were doing a time lapse we had the luxury of assessing the evolution of the composition and designing it along the way. Every so often we would step back and assess the composition and adjust accordingly to keep it flowing. A lot of what we wanted to do was to create the feeling of memories changing over time, distorting, resurfacing, getting mixed together and one of the ways we did that was for each person to “respond” to what someone else posted before them. It was kind of like a large collaborative drawing process. We each made individual design decisions, which infused each of our own aesthetics and styles, but we also collaboratively decided on certain design moves, such as the beginning sequence and towards the end when we decided to streamline the final composition by covering the entire surface with black and white poster iterations, so that the final ‘remember’ posters with pink would stand out and we would have a cohesive final piece. In that way the final composition was designed as a stand alone, rather than the organic nature of what preceded it.

Given some of our delays and doing test shots we actually started shooting at about 2:45pm and ended around 5:45pm for a total of about 3 hours of filming, which resulted in 1,557 individual photos. The overall composition will be an exercise in memory itself, as the event itself is a memory, and the posters underneath the final composition are now only a memory. We can also remove the panels from the wall and slice them into eight four foot by two foot boards and each keep some of them. The video itself is a documentation of the process, so the editing will be simple to showcase the process of the poster creation.