DAY 008 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Make certain your concept is active

Responding to design students in the KC/ACTF Southwest region has been a huge boon for me to both learn more about myself and about how to communicate design principles to students. Last year a student said in their presentation “My director came to the design team with the concept (timpani roll, please) Mad Max: Fury Road.” All I could think in the moment was “you poor, poor students to whom this flaming turd has been given.” Mad Max: Fury Road, while an excellent film, is not a concept, and these students’ storytelling was hamstrung by these four words.

If I take off my cranky educator hat and put on my curious designer hat, here are the mental gymnastics I need to go through to extract a concept out of what was a reference to style (at best). Oh, okay, Mad Max: Fury Road. Cinematic? No….probably not. Explosions? Bondage wear? Pursuit? Metal prosthetics. Water. Verticality. Also a strong horizontality. Female protagonist. Monster trucks. Journey…

Based on the costume renderings, turns out the director just wanted some distressed black clothing and maybe a few KISS-style embellishments. There are so many other ways to get there! Even when you get there, what does it tell you about the story? How is it capital “T” True?

When we come to the stage, the last thing we need is prescription. We get our share of that already. Social media and organized religion have dogma covered. What we seek when we approach art is a knowledge of something other than black or white, somewhere in the infinite space between zero and one.