Final Concept

After discussion with and suggestions from Neil McCann, I have finalized my concept and am now satisfied with both my intended design, intended visual language and the connections between them.

After generating numerous concepts (thumbnail images in my sketchbook) I have turned away from the "puppeteering", "strings-attached" idea that was my previous primary concept (and which, despite all the sketches and alterations I was never 100% happy with) because of its limited visual language options and lack of confronting impact.

FINAL CONCEPT:
My final concept is AUSTRALIA (the geographic representation) made out of skin and blood, hooked up to tubes injecting/withdrawing various life-supporting substances into the country. (Life-support-tubes idea was from Neil, based off my strings/puppet ideas)

The tubes trail off the image in different directions, with Australia as the centre; probably the background looks very much like the globe (seas, surrounding nations etc. -- Photographic!Globe rather than Map!Globe). The tubes are pumping in imports and pumping out exports -- represented by images and statistics(? still not completely decided on how to represent this). Where an "import" tube plugs in the skin/country "bulges" outwards. Where an "export" tube is sucking stuff out the country "contracts" inwards.

There will be a tagline to the effect of: "International Trade" with the word trade striked out and DEPENDENCY written over the top. I think I could do more word treatment but I'd kind of like to leave it very basic with more impact in the simplicity (always one of my favourite design elements) than in over-saturation of opinion. This leaves room for people to develop their own interpretation based on what I've already thrown at them. I think this is still definitely propaganda; it's a little bit more subtle but still has the "YOU SHOULD THINK THIS WAY" general theme.

I really like this whole country-life-support idea because it links in a real world "dependency" (hospital "tubes" -- life support) with my propaganda issue of too much world trade, and how this has left us in a pracarious, dependent situation (what happens if you start unplugging the tubes...).

Also the blood/skin/living entity sort of personification makes my depiction of Australia more personal as it's almost as though I'm not saying the COUNTRY is dangerously dependent on international trade I'm saying "YOU" (audience) as part of the country are. (AKA, the feeling that Australia isn't a place it's a collection of people).

Plus it's got the disturbing blood-skin-hospital impact that will draw people to look at it!

HOW I'M GOING TO DO THIS:
I think photographs of skin, meat, blood (from meat or some fake gluggy liquid etc..), tubes, maybe needles.. all that stuff shouldn't be too hard for me to do (I have a very good SLR digital camera with which to take the photos, and a couple of macro filters to do closeup texture shots).

The background is a little harder -- I want it to look realistic like the earth but I obviously don't have any of my own images from space. I could just "suggest" at the earth background - using water texture or a plain, slightly textured dark blue bg in photoshop.

The shape of Australia I could trace out in Photoshop using map reference images.

Neil and I discussed the use of Illustrator's bulging/warp tools to get the sucking/expanding effects where the tubes enter the country which I think would look awesome; I could also make the whole thing look more 3D/curved like the earth using some of Illustrators tools.

Colours would initially be deep reds (blood) skin tone colours (browns, peaches, creams) and dark blue (ocean). I'm thinking a sort of desaturated background (so more grey-blue than blue-blue) would draw attention to the central image as navy is such a strong colour it might need to be somewhat washed out. Can do various colour combination tests in Photoshop during production.

The text will probably be textured in the same skin-blood as Australia, but I could also make it out of gluggy tubes? Or something a little less ostentatious and simple. If I do the strike through TRADE/DEPENDENCY over the top thing the fonts have to be completely different. Maybe the underneath font can be more "safe" and boring and "dependency" can be all "bloody" (textured somehow).

This whole project is definitely a photo-manip image; heavily texture based and with lots of merging of seperate images. I'm feeling pretty happy with the concept & how I'm going to go about making it though. I think I can make several simple alterations on the main image for the final selection of images; all with the same fundamental tube-blood-life-support-australia image.

I'm not sure about the vessel though: will probably be a newspaper ad; although it would be really cool to make stickers designed to go over the top of existing maps or something like that. Not media-y enough though.