interaction design
sound design
Academic project
February - June 2018
The Milan-based publishing house Mimes Edizioni was about to publish some new books and asked the Politecnico di Milano to create a booktrailer for each of them. Among them was Zirkus Suite by Emanuele Severino.
Emanuele Severino is one of the greatest exponents of contemporary Italian philosophy and is presented in this work to rediscover his great youthful passion: music. A book that recounts this experience and Severino's exceptionality, accompanied by a CD entitled Zirkus Suite, a composition conceived by the philosopher in the mid 1940s, performed by young musicians from the 'G. Verdi' Conservatory in Milan.
As a first project step, my team and I conducted an analysis of accessible videos to study the methods of how to make a sensory disabled person perceive a story and the techniques for decoding the narrative. In particular, the video 'Dynamics of the subway' by Keita Onishi, with his highly synaesthetic translation, abstract elements and simple forms that each represents a different rhyme of the song that accompanies it and helps the audience to better understand all the different sounds that make up the piece.
The moodboard is a way of presenting creative thinking, a tool for creating inspiration, evoking emotions and presenting ideas. It is usually a series of images joined together like a collage with the aim of showing a project and related product concepts in a visual format.
After the research phase, we focused on the visual style that could have and best represent Severino's work. So we created this moodboard to tell the thread and style of the project. The images shown were the result of a skimming of the research carried out.
Of great inspiration were the works of artist Richard Vergez, the orchestra itself with its instruments, the videos also present in the case studies to understand the transformation of morphology from instruments to shapes that in turn multiply to create a constantly evolving pattern.
The typeface chosen for the textual component of the video was News Gothic Condensed with the weight Regular for the quotations and credits and Bold for the title of the book. A distinctive feature of the font is the shape of the compacted letters and the less severe tone, thus giving the text readability, a return to the 20th century and a reference to the grotesque world.
The storyboard is an essential tool for visual communication because it allows an outline of the finished product, illustrates the various steps and the most important phases of a video, and helps to communicate ideas concisely and clearly by giving them substance and, if necessary, ideas for modifications.
The storyboard allowed us to understand which morphological transformations to adopt, whether the collage effect could work, to mark the transitions from one module to another and thus give linearity to the story.
If the rational module seemed to work immediately, it was different for the irrational world: since it was an evolution of the figure to form a pattern, it was only possible to understand its actual and coherent development once the design on Adobe After Effects had begun.
For the music of the booktrailer, we decided to use the fifth composition entitled Burlesca, one of the seven Zirkus Suite compositions created by the author. It is a piece with cheerful and rhythmic tones (irrational world), alternating with parts in a more relaxed and calm mood (rational world).
'Thinking of the Stimmung of the composition, of the grotesque that it wants to express, I entitled it Zirkus Suite - as if to say that it does not intend to do so and therefore should not be taken seriously'.
To make the video accessible, we opted for the insertion of a voice-over, with the task of reading the title, the quotation and the credits to help a sensory disabled person perceive textual information useful for decoding the project, and a stereophonic operation on the music: on the left the rational world, on the right the irrational world.
To promote the booktrailer, it was decided to export the audiovisual on the social platform Instagram. The booktrailer became usable in 3 different formats: horizontal (1920 x 1080), square (1080 x 1080) and vertical (1080 x 2160). For the posts, the focus was on the composition of the individual squares: the aim was to visually recreate the arrangement of the instruments of an orchestra, which would come to life on tap. The stories, on the other hand, were organised to reflect the alternation of rational and irrational modules that characterises the video.
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