Reimagining Time
Motion Illustration for a Speculative ClientBrief
This individual university brief asked students to create a suite of editorial illustrations for speculative client, Atmos, on their article
The brief required for one hero image and three spot illustrations
Description
These illustrations are for an Atmos article by Melissa Godin. Godin’s article is titled “Jenny Odell Is Reimagining Time to Tackle Climate Change” which features Odell’s new book on how a capitalist view of time leads to climate change.
Tasked to illustrate for this article in this university brief, I had to face the challenges of what to draw and how to draw it. I believe good illustrations always captures what the author is trying to say. So, to understand this, I broke down the article and interpreted its key point to be about paralysis.
To capture the idea of paralysis, humanity, and climate change, I anthropomorphised time into an Orwellianesque dictator looking to grip humanity into its hands.
Credits
- Russell Lee
- Zoe Sadokierski (university studio leader)
What I did
- Illustration for editorial
- Motion
- Fortnightly presentations
- Peer feedback sessions
Tools
- Paper sketching
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe After Effects
Timeline
A 6-week sprint for half a semester in 2024
“Paralysis” – Figuring out what I needed to illustrate by highlighting keywords in the article
Even before asking the question: what do I draw – I have to ask the deeper question: what am I trying to represent?
The article had a many ideas running through it with illustrious examples about the capitalisation of time as a means of measuring human output leading to the depletion of natural resources...and ultimately, climate change. Quite a mouthful, right?
With only one hero image and three spit illustrations, I needed to capture the article’s main point – or reframed: what is the author trying to say? I started by printing out the online article and highlighting words or sentencing that were repeated.
The author kept repeating one theme over and over – the idea of paralysis. How a commodified use of time paralyses humanity into a doom of working and resource depletion.
Early sketches and illustrations to capture ideas of paralysis
Using methods like Crazy 8’s, I illustrated a range of ideas from the article in abstract forms for early iterations.I took my skills to Adobe Illustrator to illustrate ideas of mankind lawn mowing nature into shreds of cash or plucking nature into a meat grinder to churn out money.
However, while the ideas were certainly sophisticated, none of these sketches capture the ‘vibe’ of paralysis and doom. In fact, they seemed to happy and cheerful for the tone of the article.
Capturing the ‘doom and gloom’ vibe by getting inspiration from other sources, like Batman
I looked at other comics and materials that had adequately captured the feelings I wanted. The illustration from Batman comics certainly got my attention. I analysed their art style to see how they achieved such a feel.A restricted colour palette with black to create shadows helped create this sense of mystery and trepidation. Combining the art style with my previous ideas led to the final illustrations I have today.