October 2012

FREAK

Brief 
"a sane person to an insane society must appear insane"  - Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome to the Monkey House

- Explore the deviation from the norm that is freak.
- Choose/ invent / subvert an aspect of this phenomenon.
- Then produce a dynamic piece of graphic communication which explains your concept.
- To begin with, you need to interrogate what is normal.

We struggled with this one.. 

First ideas that popped in my head:

- Alice in Wonderland ( am i mad? )
- People after plastic surgery 
- Child beauty pageant 
- Weird phobias or fetishes 
- Odd one out  - Danny Treacy 
- Victorian portrait 
- Giant/ Circus/ Dwarf 

After talking about our ideas, we started thinking about the word freak and what it means to us. So we asked some people in our class who they would call a freak? 
We got lots of different answers. Hm... does 'freak' exist? There's so many different people nowadays.. who would we call a freak? or maybe being a freak is normal?

We wanted to present 'freak' as a normal person. So we thought of a few ideas:

- A series of posters 'Am I freak because I...'  
- A picture which shows a monster/freak standing in the middle of the crowd and no one is looking at him ( so the audience thinks there's nothing wrong with the picture, but then they look closer and they can see a 'freak' or someone who looks odd. 
- A series of photos showing freak in different places library/shopping centre/ supermarket/school
- A photo which focuses on normal people and the freak is out of focus ( again, normal photo but then the audience realises theres something wrong with the photo) 


After two days of brainstorming we decided to make a series of posters which included famous people who have some kind of disability or anything that people find 'freaky'. After doing some research we got names like Oscar Pistorius, Stephen Hawking, Rainman
The results from our questionnaire showed that most people have two different opinions about them. Oscar is 'lame' but a 'superhuman', Steve is 'a retard' but 'a great physicist' and Rainman is 'morally defective' but a 'complete genius'.


AFTER TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW WE WANT OUR POSTERS TO LOOK.. we decided to give up

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAAH actually it's not funny, shit...

but we thought about another idea. Which was our final idea. It wasn't a great idea, but it was better than nothing. Also a funny ice breaker for us. Basically the idea was to write one word which describes someone in our group and stick it to their back, so that other people can see what it says but the person can't. It's about people talking behind your back/ first impressions ( judging the cover not the book ). Some people think that they are completely normal but for other people they look or act like a freak. 







IMPROVEMENT

- what is normal? 

What’s normal is what most people do. or what typical people do

or what most typical people donormal is the average, the mean, or the typical.  
'If I’m in England, and discover that, insane as it seems, everyone drives on the left, then driving on the left is normal in the statistical sense' 

'One man's trash is another man's treasure' 

- so basically, something might be normal to you, but to others it might be weird

things that some people find normal others find weird:
- your second toe is longer than your big toe

- licking your nose with your tongue 


things we don't expect certain people to do e.g. a teacher being a raver, a yoga instructor being a striper, your dad watching porn, a man behind you is actually you're stalker 












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