Visual Communications - Illustration Brief

For the second week of Visual Communications we focused on communicating the meaning of our metaphor purely through an illustration, no text allowed. For me this proved much more challenging than the typography brief, and it wasn't really until Thursday night (and typically the weekend after I finished Visual communications) that the ideas started coming. I spent so much time each day racking my brains, and when nothing was coming I started to panic. This made it even harder to think of an illustration.

I had some weak ideas, like a pair of hands holding small calender days, with the days slipping through the fingers. But that was all just disgustingly literal.

I took a walk around town on the Wednesday in the hope that divine inspiration would intervene. No such luck. On my travels I happened to pass an arcade. I remember being told once before that compulsive gamblers get so consumed by the slot machines that they never know what time of day or night it is. Somewhat relevant? Kinda. Anyway I had to try everything. I thought, for people in the arcade the days really do slip by. I knew getting photographs wouldn't be easy, but I tried to be as discreet as possible. As soon as I took the second photo I was approached by an angry manager. However I reassured him that the photos would not be made public (I feel bad now) and managed to haggle myself out of the situation without being forced to erase the pictures from my camera. I printed the photos below in black and white because I felt it communicated that sense of lost time and time not acted upon more strongly. I was hoping to incorporate these photos somehow into an illustration that would communicate my metaphor 'The days slip by';

I had some more thoughts on it too. I was looking at the idea of animals in a zoo, particularly those with long life spans, elephants, tortoises etc. I tried to illustrate how the days must slip by for these animals by using photographs of all the decades of people they must have seen pass by throughout their lifetime. For example, a tortoise lives for about 250 years. The back view of the animal was then in the foreground looking out at this line of people from all the different decades. Compositionally this was complicated, with the strength of the communication being lost. While I could work on simplifying the composition, I wasn't satisfied that this idea communicated my metaphor clearly. I then moved onto looking at objects I had when I was a child and looking at those I have now. Things that were indispensable to us back then and things that are indispensable to us now, then looking at the difference and the change in between.

I then started looking at children's toys, for eg. a play-doctor's kit. I was then looking at equivalent items to people my own age. Using photoshop, I placed half of a childs open toy doctor's kit containing a syringe, a jar and a stethoscope beside an open kit containing illegal drugs - a syringe, a bag of cocaine and a bong. All the items mimicked the shape of those that were in the toy kit. I looking at the idea of how innocence can be lost quickly (The days just slip by) and what events in between might lead up to this. Again this was over complicating the meaning of the metaphor which weakened the communication of it. Getting desperate for an idea, I retreated to looking at the movement of the sky (the changing from day to night). I made reels of abstracted cut outs of the sky ranging from day to night day to night.., all taken from magazines;

I cut the pieces at a slant to communicate movement and the idea of speed. I was intending on making an animation with these pieces to communicate the idea of the days slipping by. The plan was to turn off all the lights in the room, and with a torch and a video camera move along the row of sky cut outs, with the pieces of sky merging from the darkness, being illuminated as the camera and torch pass over and then retreating back into the darkness when the camera has passed. However this failed, miserably. These are some of the stills regardless;

Things were getting critical. It was 8 o' clock on Friday morning, and my assessment was at 11. And still, I hadn't an illustration I was happy with. I needed to use what was around me. I thought of my clothes and the things I wear everyday. All the combinations of outfits I must have worn since college started. So I landed a big ball of clothes down on the kitchen floor and started recreating lots of the outfits I've been wearing to college these past few months. The amount of variations I had made, made me realize just how unknowingly quickly the days slip by.These images were much more visually interesting too than anything I had done to date. When I was finished I ran into college and printed out these photos thumb nail size in a montage on A3 paper. I loved all the colours and I was happy with the piece compositionally. It wasn't perfect in terms of communication but it was the best concept.