THE ASK:
Create a digital collage about desires and/or aversions.
THE ANSWER:
An advertisement for a social media campaign inspired by an aversion to ignorance of natural beauty, focusing on astronomy. It was expanded upon post-project to become a larger campaign, as the piece contained many elements suited to additional merchandise and campaign outreach.
The flat collage.
Screen mockup.
T-shirt mockup.
Sticker mockup.
PROCESS
First steps
To begin the project, I listed my desires and aversions and chose ones suited to a digital collage: an aversion to ignorance of natural beauty. This would be represented by two figures falling through a beautiful scene but looking away from it, representing how our culture prioritizes moving through life too quickly to appreciate its beauty. It would also focus on light pollution as a metaphor for the needless tarnishing of the Earth.
The assignment also required twelve layers of collage, so I got to work figuring out what those could be, and which layers I could photograph myself versus which ones I had to find online. Above are photographs of the other model and I as well as satellite and space images from NASA.
I created the first drafts in Photoshop, playing with the images I had gathered and getting a sense of the layout and colors I wanted to use. I presented these in a peer critique and got feedback that I should combine the color palettes and make the figures fall in the same direction.
Animation & Finalization
After sketching a new layout, I rearranged my images in Photoshop to make it more clear they were falling. I also added the text, "can you see the stars from where you are?" a callback to the light pollution metaphor. I used a dotted line to break up the image's symmetry and draw the viewer's eye to the text.
Then, I gathered three videos of natural beauty from Pexels and matched them to my layout in Premiere Pro. The images and video were then combined using Photoshop's timeline feature.
The project was named after Kessler Syndrome, a theoretical situation proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in which satellite collisions in our atmosphere create a cascade effect of space debris, making it impossible to launch new satellites, repair old ones, or travel to space. I thought this was an apt summary of the detrimental effects of humanity's ignorance towards the beauty of the sky above us.
After the collage was created, I expanded its scope to become an advertisement for a social media campaign focused on caring for our world.