Last night I went to the screening of Made You Look at the Hyde Park Picture House, where there was also an informative Q&A session with one of the directors, Anthony Peters and other special guests including Leeds based illustrator Matthew Hodson and the owners of 'Colours may vary' aswell as a previous graduate from LCA Graphic Design, Abass Mushtaq to discuss issues raised by the film.
The main topics covered in the documentary were the divided and often contradicting opinions on how the internet is used when promoting work in the digital age and whether it is a useful platform for young graphic artists and designers or a hinderance, flooding masses of talented individuals into an already saturated creative world, making it hard to be heard or even find a voice.
The film discussed different ways of putting your work out there and getting noticed when every graphic artist and his dog is online and has their own website.
The film spoke to creatives wavering between self working practitioners and those commissioned to work commercially, making the film slightly contradictory and on the fence on how people felt about the digital age. In the end it was clear that all designers and artists have a love hate relationship with the internet and digital processes.
Some important points i took away from the film are that analogue and digital work can both work together in harmony; one doesn't necessarily have to replace another. Like Stephen Fry's Quote mentioned by 'professional doodler' Hattie Stewart: “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” The same goes for pens and tablets. It is just whatever is convenient at that moment in time or which would suit your work the most. They are 2 of the same and one will never replace the other.
The film was slightly biased towards promoting 'hand made' and physical methods of creating such as screen printing, paper cut and painting, claiming these are the things consumers are most interested in purchasing. Buyers want the personal touch of 'inky fingerprints' on the back of freshly screen printed posters, and that certain sense of individuality and 'one of a kind' pieces. They also want items like books they can cherish and display or collect. The documentary emphasised that to make you stand out you had to do more than create everything digitally and only post it online. The physical objects are what get noticed. However in the Q&A the joint owner of 'Colours May Vary' in Leeds Stressed that just because something is Screen Printed doesn't make it automatically amazing. It has to be well designed and have substance, depth and meaning for it to stand out. One final thing that was mentioned in the film was processes that have been around for many generations are suddenly becoming exciting and new to people in the younger 'digital' generation like myself. Processes like letter pressing to me are just as exciting as everyday apps like 'FaceTime' on an iPad are to someone like your gran. This is helping a younger generation harness these age old processes and work them into brand new cutting edge designs.
In conclusion, we may be in the digital age now, but there will always be a huge playing field for analogue processes and eventually the digital era will become so saturated there will be no choice but to move on and explore something new.
Watch the trailer for the documentary here:
[ Made You Look was directed by Anthony Peters and Paul O'Connor and features interviews with Anthony Burrill, Kate Moross, John Burgerman, Peepshow collective, Helen Musselwhite, Print Club London, Hattie Stewart & more. ]
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