Violence to Love: Sam Zou interviewed by Madeleine Parker
Sam’s animated poster “Violence to Love” was created as a response to a rise in violence in the media. Sam explains his concern about the amount of cyber bullying due to the prevalence of social media in today’s society, as well as the violent war in Ukraine. Using a friendly colorful design, Sam targets all age groups with a fun and creative animation to spread the message of positivity to everyone who sees it. – Madeleine Parker
Madeleine Parker Okay. Hi Sam, welcome to our interview here today. So the first question I have for you is what is the inspiration behind your poster?
Sam Zou As you can see, the animation is very simple, you’ve got balloons that are hooked to a number of letters that reads violence and the animation is basically when a couple of balloons rise to the air, leaving the four letters of love. My inspiration comes from just social media. You know, there’s so much animosity and so much verbal violence that we see on Twitter and just everywhere when we turn on a phone and connect with everyone in the world. This sense of anonymity sort of gives us a weapon to demonize each other and to just pit against one another. Sometimes when you sit down with someone else and literally talk with them in person that kind violence and animosity sort of just all goes away, just like a balloon. So that’s where my inspiration comes from, but of course also physical violence, especially when we see the war in Ukraine right now, a lot of unnecessary violence that is targeted against specific groups of people, all of these categories of violence, I think it’s especially traumatizing today.
MP That’s really interesting. Especially what you said about social media having an impact and people. I feel like there is so much more bullying online because it’s easier when you’re not facing a physical person and you’re just doing it online. That’s really interesting, the difference between social media being used in a positive light. Like I was saying in my interview, spreading awareness about things online versus all the dangers of social media too, and the downsides that come with it. Thank you for that. Your design is super cool and I really enjoy it, especially the play on words and disappearing, changing violence to love with the physical letters. What was one of the biggest challenges that you faced in making this design?
SZ My biggest challenge, you would think it would be trivial, but in actual practice, it’s a bit difficult to hook the strings of the balloons to the letters and to make it appear that gravity is pulling on those letters and that it is swinging in the air very naturally. So in order to render that and to hook the strings to the letters I used several techniques. Avery suggested several techniques but it didn’t work and I had to figure it out myself by watching YouTube tutorials on how to hook strings to objects. So that was possibly the biggest challenge that I’ve faced, but in terms of the innovation of the balloon rising up to the air, that was, actually to my surprise, not that difficult, but sometimes you’re just surprised that a lot of the small details that you didn’t expect to be difficult, turn out to be extremely difficult, and you have to find creative solutions, to solve these problems. And one thing I also want to add is that, sometimes we think of a solution that is a lot more complicated than what it actually requires in order to make one thing work. Maybe our thought process went through 10 steps, but in another scenario, actually one step would work and sometimes you just really need to sit down and find the simplest and most elegant solutions instead of trying to figure out ways to just simply make it more complicated.
MP That’s so true, especially at our kind-of beginner level. I would say working with applications like this, definitely our mind seems to over-complicate everything. But that’s great that you really just persevered, sticking with trying to get those strings attached to the letters and got it to work! Who exactly is your intended audience with this poster and what type of platform do you think would be the most effective to share their poster on to target them specifically?
SZ As you could see, the animation is not something really violent. I included balloons to inject this element of positivity. And balloons are present in a lot of theme parks and children love balloons. So I think that my target audience is for everyone basically, and to sort of just inject this attitude of positivity and happiness in life. When we look at negative things, because sometimes we’ll be overcome by these challenges, whether it’s verbal bullying or cyberbullying on the internet or actual physical signs of violence. The first thing that we need to remember is that there is love and there is hope. And I think that these balloons and the action of the actual process of the balloons rising is symbolizing that there’s hope at the end of the day, and there are friends and family and people who support you all around you who you could seek help from. So I think that’s what I want to convey through this poster. And I think everyone needs to understand and see that message that there’s positive things and positivity around you. No matter what kind of situation you’re in right now. In terms of what is the proper communication like media or medium to spread it, I think through social media because my original argument is that social media has a lot of animosity. So I think to resolve that using the original medium to combat these cyber bullying actions is also very important.
MP That’s really great. I also agree with your particular message. Like, anyone can be a victim of violence, verbal, physical, whatever it is. And so really making the target audience everyone of all ages makes a lot of sense. And I also really like your idea to just spread the positive message where the problem already is to really combat it right there. One last question, if you had unlimited time and unlimited abilities, what would you continue to work on with your poster?
SZ That’s something I’m definitely constantly thinking about when I was making this pollster. One cool element that I want to add is I want to see if the balloons can pop, if they can explode so that the balloons can just disappear completely instead of being elevated in the air. And another thing I wanted to try is to move the balloons more dynamically because right now, what you see is the balloons just sort of float into the air. I want to make it, you know, a little bit more bouncy and a little bit more realistic. That includes a lot of extra techniques that I wouldn’t be able to explore in this project.
There’s No Planet B: Madeleine Parker interviewed by Sam Zou
As climate change becomes a global and increasingly urgent issue, Madeleine designed a poster to remind us that Earth is our only home in the foreseeable future. With the Earth on fire and slowly melting, Madeleine’s animation is a metaphorical exaggeration and powerful representation of the disastrous effect of global warming and rising sea levels. The background, filled with infinite stars, stands in stark contrast to the burning, melting, and dying planet that is our planet Earth. – Sam Zou
Sam Zou Hi, Madeleine! Talk us through your artwork and what it means and how you came up with it? What are your sources of inspiration?
Madeleine Parker Yes. So, my poster is inspired by the climate change movement protest. And basically, my inspiration for my design came from an experience I had in high school. It was probably 10th grade. My school did a walkout for the climate strike to protest, to local government about changing some laws and my school together, we all made a bunch of posters and we basically put up a strike from school and we walked to the end of the block and a bunch of other schools in our area like met up too.
I did a similar design on this like piece of cardboard. , and it was really like inspiring experience. And it was something that all remember for the rest of my life. I think like being part of that was really, and so I wanted to take some my experiences from there and put it into this poster that I was going to create a 3d animation.
SZ That’s really cool! I think climate change is certainly a very important topic that everyone of us should be aware of.
MP As we sit outside and watch all these people protesting on college green.
SZ Yeah. That’s so on topic. We are literally sitting right next to student protests against the unsustainable development at Penn! To shift gears a bit, talk us through…I was especially interested in how you, , make the design, especially we see that the planet is melting and, you know, the earth is kind of on fire. What techniques did you use and what’s sort of your thinking process behind making this 3d animation?
MP So I made my animation in blender, and I first imported using sketch fab. I imported an earth as my starting new design. And from there I created an animation where it was melting by following a tutorial and using bures to stretch it out and give it a melting effect. And then I ran into trouble with my fire, which I spent a lot of time on a fire animation that didn’t end up working out.
So, I had to switch up my plans a little bit and go to this new fire animation, but it still works and it gets, it gives the same effect, I would say. So that’s good. And then I also imported an HDRI background, a 3d background, and of like the sky, the stars, the universe to give it that outer space look and then added some words in Photoshop and got, find a product.
SZ I totally agree with you that sometimes you have something in your mind that you thought is absolutely going to work. And then when you put it into the actual canvass, it’s totally different than you expected. So yes, I could relate to that.
Tell us a little bit more about especially of the melting. Why the melting, because you see the earth is on fire instead of exploding, itself just turned to ashes. What was the thought process behind that? Why, that composition?
MP So in my original brainstorm, I actually didn’t plan to have the earth melt melting, and I was just going to have it on fire, but then once my fire wasn’t working, then I was like, maybe I’ll just do melting. The concept behind that is when something gets really hot, it melts, it turns into a liquid. And like the animation I made it’s like, almost like earth is like boiling.
You can see it like moving and then it starts to just like drip downwards and melt. Once I got that done, that was a little bit more straightforward, and I was able to get that done. Then I had a bit of extra time, and I was like, how can I still incorporate the fire somehow? Do you, I feel like without the fire, the melting doesn’t really make sense for my design mm-hmm. So I thought the fire was pretty key, and I still wanted to be able to include that.
So that’s kind of how I got there. Yeah.
SZ Yeah. That’s, that’s so cool because even though it could be an accident, but it’s a, I think it’s a really happy coincidence because more than 70% of the Earth’s surface is water. And underneath that we have tremendous amount of lava just lying below Earth’s surface.
If you would print this or distribute this 3d poster and where would you want to put it? What do you think is the best place to put your poster?
MP That’s a good question, because it’s an 3d animation and digital, I definitely would want it to be somewhere online. And I feel like, for me, one way that I feel protest poster-esque type things are really relevant. It’s like on social media. And I personally know a lot of other people that do a lot of advocating and protesting through posting things on their social media. For example, Instagram stories and just like moving posts through there. So that’s probably the first place that comes to mind for me somewhere that would be, get target a wide audience. A lot of people can be very easily found through social media.
SZ Well, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me. Of course. Thank you.