“Zipper” is a visual story about the joy, productivity, and beautiful chaos that can come from zipping up a zipper!
Personal Project with Alejandra Hernández
Role: Creative Direction & Story
Experimented with image collage, posterize time effect, stylized typography
Year: 2021
The See Sound series is 100% designed in a re-creational spirit.
I rediscover myself. I reinvigorate the why behind my love for visual storytelling.
See Sounds is a wonderful personal series that came out of the horrendous pandemic in 2020/2021.
Working from home and starved for inspiration, the endlessly talented Ale Hernández and I teamed up to do something interesting with animation. Both of our ideal aesthetics could be called “exuberant” so we wanted to be a bit reckless, experimenting with textures, colors, movement, and…sounds… that we could never get away with at work.
We investigated hundreds of daily/random sounds - trying to visualize the sound, thinking:
What does it feel like?
What does it make me feel like?
What happened right before the sound?
What is going to happen right after the sound is made?
Who is making the sound and why?
We spend hours talking, brainstorming, storyboarding, researching, and recording, and listening to different sounds - and it is a blast!
A Chipper Little Zipper
Zipping is a favorite sound for both Ale and me. There is so much personality behind it - so chipper, so mechanical, so satisfying! However, a zipper sound is quick, which presented a challenge.
We recorded and listened to endless zipper sounds to find one long enough to tell a story around zipping. We tried longer zippers, but they sounded very much like zipping up a body bag, which is the opposite of “chipper”.
We wanted to play with a collage approach in this series, so I tried to pitch the idea of visually showing something completely different than the zipper itself (think zipping through ice and having spring flowers burst through).
In the end, Ale had the incredible idea of taking pictures of our arms and building the story of “teamwork” around magnificent textures and type. Brava!
