| P R O C E S S E S |
Here is the list of my chosen artists:
He is an Italian graphic designer and the creator of his own digital art project #LoosingMyMind since 2014. I noticed his works from iGNANT magazine and I’m instantly in love with his headless project. “Since the head is the primary part of our beauty, I decided to create a project that reflected the secondary [body] part instead.” he explained. He collaborates with many different instagrammers and removes the heads of their provided photographs for this project. I really love his concept!
0 2 / / Jeffrey Madlambayan
He is an amazing artist who makes cool collages with his phone device. I discovered his works through instagram when I was in high school. His works are very inspring and I really like his aesthetics, his use of colour and geometries and compositioning. Simple, minimal and clean yet rich to look at.
She is a LA based designer that works in a range of graphics, typogrpahy, packaging etc. I found her works through instagram couple years ago and totally attracted by her typography works. Her hand-written typography works are full of characters and very inspiring and pleased to look at.
She is an art director, designer and content creator based in Hong Kong. As an active and popular user of the Instagram, she is a well-known Instagrammer within the community and she is also one of the organizers ofInstameetHK that organize regular meet-ups for photo enthusiasts. Her amazing photography is what I always admire, very bold and full of content. She has such a broad collection in her photography, ranging from travel, portrait, architecture to urban exploration. She is also one of the early rooftoppers before it came mainstreamed. (I know her in person as she is my sister’s friend)
She is a popular Instagrammer based in Melbourne and I of course discovered her works through Instagram once again! I love her amazing photography and Instagram posts as she tells great and inspirational stories through her texts (caption) and images. She often incorporates beautiful hand-written typography in her photos as well.
I have started to approach my first three choices and sent them email about this interview project. Surprisingly, Pepe (my first choice) had replied me after a day and YES! he agreed!! I reach him through email and Instagram direct message.
(bahahahahahahhaaa wohoooooo!)
Then I began to draft my five questions, sent him and waited for his reply again (this time it took him almost a week to reply, but it’s okay he’s busy). He sent me his responses through a word document. Initially, I thought he is a native English speaker (even tho he is Italian) because his written posts on Instagram and Facebook page sounds like one. However, it actually took me a while to digest his responses and I have tried my best to correct some of the grammatical errors (english is not my first language...). But I’m pretty happy with his responses, it made me understand further and know more about his life, his perspective, his art.
Here are the questions that I had sent:
#1 How did you find yourself in love with graphic design/ photography?
(I wonder how he gets into this whole graphic design/art thing and what intrigues him to enter to the creative industry/ his career atm)
#2 What would you do when you’re lack of inspirations and ideas during your creative process?
(I want to know his way in seeking inspiration, it’s something that I may learn from him cause every one is different when it comes to “creativity” “art” and “design”)
#3 How would you describe your headless project #LoosingMyMind to the society today?
(I hope to get to know his insights and concept about this project in more details and also the message he wants to convey and reflect to today’s society. I really love his collection of #LoosingMyMind, they turn out very dreamy, surreal, unique [ surrealism fan here] yet meaningful and powerful )
#4 What is body language to you?
(This is what the focus of this entire collection, how does he think about it)
#5 The new Instagram logo that every one talks about, love or hate? And why?
(This is what every one was talking about whether they like it or not. I wonder what Pepe thinks about it as a popular Instagrammer and something that he uses a lot. I want this to be the last question in order to be a more fun and interesting approach to end this short interview)
At first I was thinking and planning to do a zine but I ended up doing a video as my final presentation. Pepe constantly shares his artworks through his social media (Instagram & Facebook) and I also discovered his work digitally through Instagram. This powerful digital sharing method is something that I wanted to portray through the final presentation of the interview, so I decided to make not an article, not a website, but a video instead that creates more flexibilities and a sense of movement.
I created a “headless” figure in my video (out of pillows and my mustard yellow hoodie) to draw connection and resemblance to his #LoosingMyMind project. I create different coloured balloons and write my questions on them as symbolising the “lost heads”.
I filmed them in the sofa area at my place and and placed the “headless figure” on sofa like a real interview setting (what a paranoia, pretending Pepe was there doing an interview with me). I got rid of the tie-dyed fabrics that were originally there for a more cleaned and simple look for the video. So this is how I filmed (tripod on coffee table, reluctant fake person like he’s dying). Kinda creepy huh haha it was almost six getting dark...
I wrote the questions with white and black marker pens while they were blown up and these were how they looked like when they reduced.
After recording everything I need, I started to edit them using Final Cut Pro.
It took me quite a while to complete, more time than I have expected. Firstly, I had chosen the music background that suits the atmosphere (fun, chill) and I arranged the orders of the footages and some of the clips needed to reverse in order to create the effect of “growing heads” from a headless body. After that, I had to rearrange the questions for a better flow. I introduced a little bit of Pepe in the video so I decided to start with Pepe’s responses of the project #LoosingMyMind then continued with some more personal questions towards art/design. Then I added all the texts and the popping speech bubbles (resembling iMessage we use [the sound effects] and the digital world we are so into now). The bubbles point toward the figure to suggest the headless person or the balloon head person as the artist Pepe (sorry). Lastly, I did a final touch with the overall tone and colour of the footage (clean, minimal, light) to give a more cohesive theme and connection to Pepe’s actual works.
And this is the final outcome of the work.
So all in all, I think this is a perfect final assessment to do before ending this course. It has been such a great experience and great times during classes, I have to say that I have learnt a lot more depth of communication design and typefaces throughout the course. This final assessment really gave us opportunities to reach to artists and professionals that we admire and interact with them even just through emails or any digital platforms. I have never thought I would get to contact them at first I thought I would end up interviewing my friend. But hey, nothing is expected, expect the unexpected! What I really find challenging in this assessment is to create appropriate questions for the artist. Sometimes I think I just overthink much when simple and direct question are good enough to receive great and inspiring responses from them. Another thing is that there are no limitations to how we present the interview, it could be challenging yet exciting as we have such an infinite space to be as creative and crazy as we can. Even though my final video work might not be the perfect way to project the interview with my artist, the result came out as what I had pictured beautifully at start. If I could improve the work, I wish I had filmed everything during morning/noon for better lighting/quality at my place. Well, I am still happy that I could have the chance to interview Pepe, one of the amazing artists in my why-you’re-so-inspiring-artists list. This whole thing here, I am truly enjoyable about it.
