ABOUT

As part of the Creative Conscience Competition, a global organisation who believe that creative thinking and innovation can make positive change, I had to identify something that isn’t working in the world around me and look for a design solution. I understood that my main goal was to create impact through creativity. I was given an audio featuring Sir Ken Robinson, a British author, speaker and international advisor on education, from an interview by Dan Burgess in 2015 where he expressed his thoughts on the climate issues. Starting from here, I created a moving image to match his words and view on the climate crisis.

Thinking of ways on how to display the topic, I came to the conclusion that there are a lot of dark, serious-looking projects around climate change already that create anxiety, stress and avoidance. Projects using irony and humour to convey tragic facts would be more attention grabbing especially for teens and young adults, considering how fast the global attention span is narrowing. We’re also very meme-based generations so what other way to express this issue than making sarcastic visuals out of it? To back up my point, the viral animated documentary “history of the entire world, i guess” by Internet musician Bill Wurtz is the perfect evidence that facts thrown at great speed on humorous levels with unpolished yet relatable visuals are more likely to stick with the audience.

Based on a similar concept, I tried to find the ingredients that would display this exact style: humorous, quirky, primitive, careless and clumsy. I experimented with bright colour palettes, childish type, cut-out images, graffiti-like illustrations, manipulated them and created the visual language.

The final outcome sets the mood in a paradoxically comic and energetic way, while Sir Ken Robinson’s show begins. By the end of it, we can notice a slight transition from happy to tragic that might give us some thinking to do. The primitive, funny, informal style dominates and adds meaning to the animation, creates a sense of urgency and shows that we don’t always need a professional style to get a point across.