Finding Alex
Visual Communication Design Honours Project
In 2017 I completed my Visual Communication Design Honours project in which I worked solo on a short film, which I then continued working on in bursts throughout 2018-19. It was never completed for a myriad of reasons but I did a lot of pre-production work and animated some segments.
The film’s premise was that the protagonist, Alex, finds a mysterious mirror while on a walk at night. The mirror is able to make copies of her, the main two being reflections of different aspects of her personality: Alice, the film’s antagonist and Daisy. It explored a lot of themes of friendship, isolation and being okay with yourself. For the film I specifically wanted to show both the kinds of landscapes I grew up with in country New South Wales and show some different Australian voices in my choice of folks I got to voice the characters . I’ve been slowly coming back to this project in the background as a comic rather than a film and below you will see a mixture of concept work from various stages over the years.
Film-making is Decision-Making
Research & Exegesis
One half of my honours project was Finding Alex, but the other half was a research project. Originally the focus of the research was in creative editing techniques and looking at the history of film editing, but this gradually morphed into a project all about the structure of film and how film-making is all about making hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions that all lead toward a final product. Below are some pages from the exegesis I wrote and designed. The document didn't need to go to print so I designed it around the 16:9 ratio I've gotten so used to from animation and film. The priority for me with the layout of this exegesis was simplicity and modularity; building varied page layouts from the same very simple 6x6 grid working of the old reliable rule of thirds. It's not flashy, but sometimes design doesn't need to be over-bearing, it just has to do it's job.
