In accordance with an ongoing tendency to socially isolate people who are critically ill. Me and a good friend of mine, Mr. Jose John (Photographer), came up with an idea to collaborate on an awareness campaign project. For this purpose, we went through a list of diseases and disorders that a lot of people consider socially awkward and it included mental disorders, physical disabilities, uncurable illness, etcetera. As we both come from Indian origin, we were more exposed to the social discriminations that were present in India than in North America. For that reason, we picked up on a subject that dealt with awareness in the past but faded with time. With mutual consent, we decided to base our project on AIDS. Even with all the technological advancements and growing literacy rate, people still think of an HIV positive person as someone who is not worthy of rich social life. We have seen examples of this type of discrimination on a personal level and that was the reason to choose this specific topic to fight for.
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The ProcessAfter selecting the subject, our collective minds started thinking of ideas to implement our topic. As we were limited to our two-men team structure, we thought of different methods of idea execution including an infographic video, awareness audio, a commercial video, and a series of posters. After filtering out our possibilities, we started developing ideas for each medium. Our early drafts included a script for a motion graphic video which could also be converted into an audio standalone and a photoshoot idea that could be developed into a series of posters.
Our pre-production started with scribbling and collecting references for campaigns that had an impact on society. We wished to create something that stood out of the crowd and at the same time conveyed a strong message. As our research came to an end, we concluded that an awareness campaign will succeed if our audience starts empathizing with the campaign. With this thought in mind, we wanted our audience to feel our tag line and try to see the whole picture from a third-party perspective. ¬This direction made us think of an abstract presentation which people could interpret on their own and at the same time emphasizes the subject matter. We started eliminating ideas that felt harder to execute and started creating schedules for different tasks that were equally distributed among our team. This helped us stick with a specific task at a specific time also, it contributed to reducing the workload on an individual person. For resources, we made use of our academic facilities that helped cut down the production cost. At this point, it was tough for us to choose the best among our ideas. Later, we fixed on the poster idea to utilize both our expertise equally. Also, it felt easier to execute and the best way to reach a bigger audience, both digitally and through print forms. Facial expressions played an important role in conveying the right experience. For that, we found an energetic and talented model through social media to do our photoshoot with. After doing various poses and makeup varieties, we moved on to the design part. We had an effective tag line developed to go with our poster. One of the many abstract makeup variants we tried, impressively expressed a strong emotion that suited our project. |