Design hero project — video

Audio

8 min readApr 26, 2022

The story that I want to tell is very complementary to the narrative of my poster and my booklet: that design should be without thought. I tried looking for similar clips that has the word “design without thought” or “design dissolves in behavior,” and I actually find so much audio footage of him talking in lectures and interviews.

However, I thought about it and I don’t want to be too redundant with the words, so I looked for about 1–2 minute audio clip of him talking about something that in its core reflects his design philosophy. These are some clips that I’m thinking of using.

Music Choice

I started looking for music before this project even began, and finding the right music was really challenging. I want to add background music that is pretty uplifting and fast paced so there are more beats to match my animation off of as my designer talks very slowly. I’m looking for something consistent but has some variations in dynamic and melody so it’s not boring throughout. I’m looking in some K-R&B, movie bgms, K-pop, and some chill pop genres…which is pretty much everything I listen to.

These are okay, but it doesn’t seem to be the perfect match to what I’m looking for. For some reason, I want to use the instrumentals of an actual song instead of sound library track, so I will continue looking for these for now.

I found the perfect song.

Mac Miller — Missed calls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rk62YrRUcY&t=37s

Storyboard

Scene 1–1

I looked through all of MUJI’s “oddly satisfying” series, which is a 1–2 minute footages of people cleaning, and took out the most fitting ones that captures moments that are natural, soothing, and very daily.

Scene 1–2

Naoto Fukasawa utilizes rounded rectangles a lot in his products, so I wanted to show the similarity in their resemblance by creating outlines that morph into other outlines. I thought that using sound effects could be just as effective in illustrating what he says in the audio, which in this case is “does not make the humans stress,” I got inspiration from asmr to add clicking sounds as each stationery object appears.

Scene 1–3

I wanted to provide an example of how he gets inspiration from daily things, and how his designs are not radically new but just better than existing objects. It was really difficult to figure out how to create the transition between the chain and the handle of the CD player without making it look like a drastic change. So I tried coloring in a few sections of the chain so that to the human eye it looks like a transition.

Scene 1–4

Like how I did for “normal” in scene 1–2, I wanted to incorporate work into text for keywords like “radically” and “totally”.

In the beginning, I had the CD player from the previous scene shrink into the shape of an “i” for radically, but the size change was so drastic that it seemed a little silly. Brett suggested that I just translate the CD player and not scale it down. I like this version better, but I’m not completely sold on just diagonally moving the CD player, so I might fix this part later.

Scene 1–5

My idea for showing a lot of his works was to incorporate the products into the contents of the video, text, in this case. In the beginning, I was going for a more random assortment of objects that each resemble the letter the best, for example, the rice cooker for the ‘O’, but I realized that showing a series of objects that are of the same type could represent the meaning “normality” better. However, there is too much negative space on the top because I had to scale down the chairs way too much, so I think I’m going to find a different way to align the chairs.

The new approach:

I wish I knew a simpler way to create grid and fixate images into it like in inDesign. I wanted to incorporate the inverted image that I did for my book cover that shows only the chair or the background environment of the chair.

I played around with random order of appearance to add a sense of playfulness that the designer has in his every work. I think this part makes it a little hard for the viewer to look at each chair, but I think the overall intention is communicated.

I used all caps for the first try because I wanted to morph the “A” in “WHAT IS A” into a similar shaped chair, but that was not cohesive with the overall type system, so I changed the type to lowercase and decided to add a transition where the “a” turns into “A” before the chair morphing.

Scene 1–6

When making my storyboard, I envisioned this part to be the highlight of my video. This was really difficult to do in terms of computer capacity, but I was able to use the reshape tool in After Effects to mask a shape into another shape. This was really really fun to do.

Scene 1–7 Last Scene

Curating the words to put in to this scene was a little more difficult than I thought, because I was thinking about how many words to put in because I could either split it by two beats or three beats per word. In the beginning I had 2–3 more words, but that felt a little redundant and some people told me that it was hard to catch onto all of them because it went by too fast.

Reflection

I think this project was my favorite out of all of the design hero projects, and it cured my fear of making videos. Also, I think the more I look into Naoto Fukasawa, the more I get excited. His work truly seems timeless.