Communication project 3
Initial research
I initially started with watching/ listening to various interviews, lectures and documentaries Paula scher participated in and started gathering some memorable quotes
Rough structure
- Start with general quote on design
- then move onto beginnings, cbs
- talk about public theatre
pictures are straightforward but voices are not
start of career
- use 50–1.10 sec
“I became Completely involved in this notion of expressive typography and imagery that communicated through expression. We were always told that design, graphic design was a phemarel that you made things and they disappeared, but I go into music stores and I see record covers that I made”
“My work is play. And I play when I design.
“Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally.”
Records
“You had to go places and find the stuff. And what I responded to was, you know, Art Nouveau, or deco, or Victorian typography, or things that were just completely not Helvetica…And I taught myself design this way, and this was sort of my early years, and I used these things in really goofy ways on record covers and in my design. I wasn’t educated. I just sort of put these things together. I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist — because I didn’t know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica.”
“And there’s something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things.”
“I spent most of the ’80s being quite solemn, turning out these sorts of designs that I was expected to do because that’s who I was, and I was living in this cycle of going from serious to solemn to hackneyed to dead, and getting rediscovered all over again.”
Public theater
“So, drawing on my love of typography, I immersed myself into this project. And what was different about it was the totality of it, was that I really became the voice, the visual voice, of a place in a way I had never done before, where every aspect — the smallest ad, the ticket, whatever it was — was designed by me.”
environmental design
So, it was a rough — it was a rough go, but I fell in love with this process of actually integrating graphics into architecture because I didn’t know what I was doing. I said, “Why can’t the signage be on the floor?” New Yorkers look at their feet. And then I found that actors and actresses actually take their cues from the floor, so it turned out that these sorts of sign systems began to make sense. They integrated with the building in really peculiar ways. They ran around corners, they went up sides of buildings, and they melded into the architecture.
maps
“I began painting these very big, very involved, laborious, complicated maps of the entire world, and listing every place on the planet, and putting them in, and misspelling them, and putting things in the wrong spot, and completely controlling the information, and going totally and completely nuts with it.”
ending
20:28 “Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that’s how you grow.”
on creativity interview part 1
“I think you can’t be successful without having failures. And I don’t think that success leads you anywhere. Because when you’re successful, you tend to repeat those things you already know how to do, and they become terrible crutches. Nothing like a good, sloppy failure to wake you up and make you reinvent.”
Final script
“My work is play. And I play when I design.
“Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally.”
But mostly, it’s achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don’t really make any sense. (layer all the pieces of work here)
(start deconstructing the work )
“I became Completely involved in this notion of expressive typography and imagery that communicated through expression. We were always told that design, graphic design was a phemarel that you made things and they disappeared, but I go into music stores and I see record covers that I made”
(record covers she made)
Now, I always saw design careers like surreal staircases. If you look at the staircase, you’ll see that in your 20s the risers are very high and the steps are very short, and you make huge discoveries. You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth. As you get older, the risers get shallower and the steps get wider, and you start moving along at a slower pace because you’re making fewer discoveries. And as you get older and more decrepit, you sort of inch along on this sort of depressing, long staircase, leading you into oblivion.
“Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that’s how you grow.”
Initial storyboard
Pivoting
My initial focus was using kinetic typography to illustrate Paula’s words. Based on my feedback for some rough cuts of some scenes from the storyboard I decided to pivot as the general comment was that it would be better if her work was shown or was rather the center focus for this video. Instead of trying to show the meaning of her words in a literal sense use her works in a metaphorical or abstract way to establish a connection.
I went back too doing some more research as a lot of the works I have looked at and were planning on using were all very dense and hard to take apart as well and from a similar time period.
Rough draft with full audio
I started incorporating her work and adding movement to it. I initially put in some gifs that pentagram created too showcase her work and was planning on making alterations to it later on but decided to take them out in order to establish a more cohesive motion graphic style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld0SoOpb3lI
Fixed script
Due to the time constraint I decided to trim down my audio
“My work is play. And I play when I design.
“Serious design, serious play, is something else. (Montage of her work) For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally.”
“But mostly, it’s achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don’t really make any sense.”
“Now, I always saw design careers like surreal staircases. If you look at the staircase, you’ll see that in your 20s the risers are very high and the steps are very short, and you make huge discoveries. You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth.”
“As you get older, the risers get shallower and the steps get wider, and you start moving along at a slower pace because you’re making fewer discoveries.”
“Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that’s how you grow.”
Draft 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XTNvVeuh4k
Final
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw0Bt3iHabA
Final revised
After finishing the animation I went back and added more typographic elements in the segments showcasing the work