D&AD

(don't) Join the Army

Have been doing lots of brainstorming on ideas for the brief, and Lindsay gave some good advice on researching TEQUILA\ , who set the brief for the army. Looking at their work, theres a lot of print media there, big photos with single images, nothing cluttered or too busy. This gave ideas for posters with a single iconic image.
The idea of using a computer game 3d model of a soldier is a promising direction to head in, it being accessible to the 16 year old market who the ads are targeting. These of course would be subverted - a maimed 3d soldier in a wheel chair, or perhaps lying immobile on the operating table in a field hospital, while a mud soaked surgeon amputates an arm etc, something ommited from Call of Duty 4 and the like. We also like the idea of doing an animated sequence, which could appear on the web splash page. I also wondered today about using the image of toy soldiers and putting them on crutches, or in court fighting to get compensation, but the computer game characters are more contempory and could have more impact with the yoof of today. I'll play with these ideas more to see where they take us.


I played around with the clone tool for a while today on this image after thinking about war cemeteries, and the countless lines of identical gaves. I just did a quick job to see if it would work. I quite liked the idea, theres something very poignant about war cemeteries. I remember walking around one in Kanchanaburi ,Thailand - built for all the British soldiers who died building the 'death railway' in WWII and finding it very moving.
I think the submitted work will have to be ironic and somehow lighthearted, theres so much disturbing and unpleasant imagery of the horrors of war, we don't want to make it to bleak. Not an easy task considering the subject matter and all the things I've been researching just now.