What is a Line?

"A connected series of events, actions or developments"

I chose to explore the definition of a line in relation to the statement above. I knew instantly that I wanted to create some sort of timeline, and it had to be on a subject that would keep me interested for the duration of this lengthy brief. Therefore I decided to focus on films and the movie industry in general. I knew that I would remain interested in this subject, and I had wanted to do another brief that was connected to film, but before now didn't really have the opportunity. I started off by looking at individual film makers and directors and the films they have made in their careers. I discovered that certain directors had many more films to their names than I first realised, such as Steven Spielberg, and in some cases these films where created in a very short period of time, such as John Hughes in the eighties. Below are a few early timelines that I created on individual directors and their work.

I found the experimentation interesting but quickly ran out of both directors and inspiration. Therefore I decided to move onto another area, and became more interested in the individual films rather than the directors. I looked through my old editions of film magazines; 'Total Film' and 'Empire', and came across something called a 'Predictive Interest Curve', which does exactly what it says in regards to the latest releases in the cinema. In a unique twist the magazine would sometimes make the curve into a shape that was related to the film. For example 'Up' featured balloons, whilst 'Shutter Island' had the outline of an actual island. I found the whole idea intriguing and tried one of my own but quickly realised despite its aesthetic quality it held no real purpose. I hit a brick wall in terms of development and didn't know what direction to take from now on, so I went back to the drawing board.

I settled on a new topic: THE ACADEMY AWARDS

This was alot easier because I had easy access to a wealth of information on the subject and now had an audience and a reason behind my work; to inform people of the best films ever made according to Hollywood and the foreign press. I decided to concentrate on a nice round number so therefore chose to focus on 1960 to 2010. Its fifty years and it ties in nicely with the celebratory aspect. If I was going to this properly I would have to gather the required amount of information for each film. This took a long time, because I had to reference several websites including; wikipedia, IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, and the books; '1001 Movies to see before you Die' and 'Halliwell's Film Guide'. I found information such as; cast, director, duration, rating, tagline, year made, awards and nominations and a basic plot. Below are the sheets I created for the five decades.

It was after researching all the films I realised they work nicely as five sets of ten features. I decided to look at already created infographics because I thought they would provide some inspiration and I would gain some perspective as to where I could take this project. Examples like the one below are where I finalised my ideas.

I decided to look at awards and nominations in more detail because I thought of an inventive way of displaying this information. I settled on using my burgeoning Adobe Illustrator skills to create an 'Academy Award Statuette', whose height could be altered to represent the number of victories. I thought this looked pretty impressive but the idea needed something else. I looked into the other types of awards that can be won and settled on the BAFTA's and the Golden Globes. However the BAFTA's didn't start until half way through the sixties and therefore this information was no longer useful. However the Golden Globes where functioning throughout my time period and the shape of the award is also instantly recognisable so therefore I decided to research the number of Golden Globes won aswell. I came up with designs like the one below.

Once I had designed a graph showing awards won for all five decades I started to think of ways this could be incorporated into an actual product. I decided that the whole reason I was doing this was to inform people who don't know much about films, and therefore realised I should probably make a selection of foldable leaflets that could be provided as a supplement, and then displayed as sort of educational posters. I would need to provide more information on each film and decide on a suitable layout and colour scheme. Below are a few images of my final resolutions.