Visual Skills: Studio Brief 3 (Initial Ideas)

For this week's brief we were given a relatively short article to study and respond to. I was given the article which panned the conditions for animals in European Zoos.

The article in question may be found at the following link:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/16/tigers-pandas-british-zoos-dancing-bears

I was quite unsure what to make of the article at first as I did not agree with the solutions it suggested. The article calls for the replacement of big animal attractions with more traditional petting zoo encounters. I rather think this is impractical as the sort of large crowds which attend our larger national zoos are not suited for one-on one encounters.

I took three words from the article that I found to be the most descriptive of the themes, they were 'squalid', 'addiction' and 'artificial'. I decided that each of these words summed up the main points.

Using these words I generated a lists of associative terminology, after which the lists were passed around the room at random and peers would create further lists and connections.

The resulting words were quite departed from the article, as the removal of context led to rampant associations. I had hoped that I could use all of the associations, but this proved impractical due to the completely irrelevant nature of some of the connections in relation to the article, which after all was the anchor point of the three illustrations I have been asked to create.

However, many of the ideas and themes were most intriguing and I probably would not have thought to  conjure them by myself.

The first two initial idea sheets explore the artificial nature of the enclosures and the exploitation of the pandas. I was particularly drawn to the urinal imagery that the article described, I also pursued the visual metaphors of a pole dancing bear, or prostitute to reference the pressure upon the bears to mate.

This development sheet was used to highlight some of the ideas that I had created for presentational purposes. It also allowed me to further test the use of formats, as each of the three images we must produce are of vastly different composition.