Studio Brief 02: Product, Range, Distribution: Interview

Interview with LCA Photography Member 

This is an interview which I carried out with a Photography Student who deals with anxiety: 

How does anxiety make you feel? 

1. Over-whemled 
2. Powerless
3. Stupid 
4. Why should something make you feel like that? 

When you think of these things how would you visualise them? 

1.  Everyones anxiety is different 
2.  Small spaces 
3.  News 
4. The world (current events) 

What calms you down?

1. Things with open space 
2. Home 
3. Green space
4. Landscapes 
5. Peaceful and simple 
6. Landscape
7. Photography 
8. Taking a Deep Breath 
9. Accepting your anxious 
10. Realize that your brain is playing tricks on you
11. Question your thoughts 
12. Be an observer without judgement 
13. Use positive self talk 
14. Focus on right now 
15. Focus on meaningful actions 

Would you say that there is a need for campaigns for anxiety, campaigns and posters that would advise you and calm you down during an attack? 

1.  Yes, because advertising today just tells you about the issue and not how to prevent it. 

From finding these findings I then collaborated with the photography student Izzy to get a better feel for what she visualised when trying to calm herself down from an anxiety attack, to do this she took three photos. These are the following results: 

What I found from these results is that, photos were taken of landscapes, this links to fresh air, open space, calm, landscapes can hold different memories for different people (Izzy), Comforting, homely. Colours which link with landscapes like these are colours such as: Blues, greens, whites, which we would class as calming colours. 

From further research with Izzy I then started to look at colours which made her feel calm which were blues & oranges, natural materials such as light or water. Warming colours such as orange can often be linked to comfort, just to the link with fire & then sun which ignite your senses and feelings. Colours such as blues are seen as calm as they link to blue skies, and water which again ignites your senses. 

From gaining Knowledge of what made Izzy calm, relaxed & homey, and gathering information from what she did to calm her anxiety down I decided that It would be an idea to create a series of posters/banners that advise the public what to do and also help people going through an anxiety attack and remind them the steps they take to calm them self down. 

Experimenting with photography and imagery: 

We then started experimenting with photography and typefaces, using the typeface Young which is a sans serif font, we wanted to create the text to flow like it was fresh air being blown to make it seem relaxing and clear. However the images in the background are clear and relaxing, the text just seemed to disappear into the background, we wanted the focus to be on the type and the text however this idea failed to do that, so because of this we started to think back to our research and think if we could use shapes to put calming imagery into it. We then remembered the idea of using a head silhouette and started to play around on that idea.