#conceptualising

Maneesh Sharma spills the beans on conceptualising Ranveer Singh’s ‘Jayeshbhai Jordaar’ trailer

Maneesh Sharma spills the beans on conceptualising Ranveer Singh’s ‘Jayeshbhai Jordaar’ trailer Acclaimed film-maker Maneesh Sharma, who is currently directing ‘Tiger 3’, had discovered Ranveer Singh for his directorial debut ‘Band Baaja Baaraat’. After the humongous success of ‘Band Baaja Baaraat’, Ranveer and Maneesh have both not looked back. While Ranveer has become a bonafide pan-India…

In this post we will outline the process we have gone through in the last week in order to get closer to what problem we should design a solution for. 

Getting more ideas

The second staff workshop was an interesting session in the sense that we heard some different ideas than what came about in the first workshop. We went through the workshop by first presenting our progress, then presenting the workshop activity, and finally moved on to doing two rounds of the activity. 

Affinity Mapping

We had now amassed a considerable amount of ideas - quantity over quality! - and we took a step back to group the ideas around common traits.

These groups included among other topics networking, student-to-student, library-to-student, during studies, after studies and physical space ideas.

Qualified Critque

Looking at these groups and the amount of ideas, we said to ourselves that we would not have the authority to simply pick and choose the ideas we liked the best. It would somehow be disingenuous at this point, as well as maybe counterproductive for the later process. So we decided to put together a group of students from different academic levels, and have a qualified critique session. This was essentially a focus group, but we were very clear about having an equal discussion. Namely, we did not simply ask the students: so, what do you want and what do you think?! Rather, we sent them the list of ideas that had been generated as a sort of homework, and then shuffled the ideas on the table in the room so they could spark conversation without directing it. 

In doing this, the conversation filtered through the different groupings of ideas, and some concepts were highlighted as more interesting and workable than others.

Revisiting the Conversation

After the session, the two of us sat down and went through the recording of the focus group and wrote down keywords and phrases, and connected these with our notes. In doing this we could then highlight the essential points, and outline the ideas that took shape during the conversation.

Developing Concepts

We now have so much of a direction to go in and try to develop some concepts to eventually prototype and think from.

Over the course of two days we freely write out concepts that somehow relate to the points that have been made during the sessions. These concepts are generated as low fidelity scenarios. We will then sort through the concepts and present them to 1) our contact person in the library and 2) our university supervisor.

I don’t shut down in all situations with pressure of judgement. Never in a realising situation have I ever had any issues, everything is very logical and straight forward, there is a job to do and I can work 1 of 10 ways, each one is going to be more or less beneficial and will be determined through having time/budget/information/people etc There are concrete things that cannot change and we work with the restrictions and exploit them.

Conceptualising is different, it’s not logical at all, to me it’s like blindly wading through a never ending swamp, bumping into things at random. The only thing I can grab on to is the research which seems to be factual things like research around the text, what people have done previously. It’s hard for me to stand up and defend, sell, seduce people into my ideas when it’s not logical but another way of looking at the world.

Lani said to me yesterday that she believes that I am heavily right brained and with Plant as my highest it definitely makes sense, so how come I cannot work with it in that way when I am designing?

When I design I like to start with a set idea, ie I have to design a person with personality x and they do x throughout the text, so what I like to do is get a picture in my mind straight away and create that physically ASAP either through sculpting or through drawings. Through the making I start to make decisions, I use my instinct here to choose what is right for the character and what isn’t through the process of elimination. I then have to re do that like 10x before I can fully see the thing from many perspectives, each sculpt or drawing is a facet of the final thing from here I get a better idea of who the person is, what their character might do.