Sydney Grant interviewed by Erica Edman
Erica Edman My first question is what inspired you to make a poster around this message and can you describe exactly what message you’re trying to send?
Sydney Grant Yeah, so the poster is heavily inspired by a little bit of Pennface honestly. Basically, the message is that people see something great on the outside and something completely different might be going on on the inside- I just kind of used a mirror to represent that. So the crashing ball is kind of like someone’s “inside”-really not doing so good. And the bouncing ball is what everybody else sees. You’re fine, you’re perfect, or you’re a circle, you’re happy and bouncing.
EE Well, who’s your target audience?
SG Really could be for anyone. I think it can send a really strong message to high school and college kids. We all just post the best versions of ourselves on social media and just the way we carry ourselves, always keeping in mind our “image”, but really, it’s all kinda fake, a little bit. And that’s more than okay to recognize. But really anybody can go through it. You know this feeling of feeling bad on the inside but trying to fake it.
EE Did anything inspire like the color choices behind?
SG Honestly, not particularly, I started with like the bright. *Looks at poster to reevaluate* Yeah… I guess bright blue ball. And then I just kept it and I worked my other colors around it. The message is a little bit sad and dark, so I was like gray can function well for the background and finally I just tried to have the words you know just match it a little bit, but nothing really intentional.
EE What about the shapes? Like the abstractness?
SG Yeah, so that’s actually funny because my original idea was pretty different. I wanted to do something more with a face. For example, someone’s face in reality was more distorted than that of its reflection in the mirror, but I knew that I couldn’t really execute that in Blender and whatever other like softwares that I know how to use. My limitations forced me into an abstraction, but I kind of like that. Now it can represent anyone or anything versus like a face, people might, I don’t know, think it is only targeted to one type of group; an age group, a certain identity, but really we can all be represented as a circle.
I also think the sphere specifically is such a good way to represent the idea. And the bouncing ball, in my opinion, is a good way to represent the perfectness and I’m gonna quote that because it’s perfection we are talking about. There’s no bumps, like it’s just bouncing there continuously and then the other one just crashes down, like a boulder.
EE Yeah, and also like bounces perfectly up and down, yeah?
SG That’s really just Blender, honestly.
EE My last question is, what was your greatest challenge?
SG Uhm, I think there were two challenges. One was trying to get this mirror feature to work because there is a mirror feature in Blender, but then you know it’s a literal mirror so I would have either like the crashing ball in a mirror of itself, or the bouncing ball in the mirror of itself. It was hard to do this, but really, it’s just the positioning of the objects and glass plane between them. But it all ended up working. Then I would say, choosing a definitive theme. I kept changing my idea. I was like maybe I want to do something plastic surgery related and how Photoshop is for like the virtual world and not for our physical bodies. And then I wanted something to do with self-image in some way.. so I think just getting a hold on what my idea and my message was was really kind of challenging, but I think I like the final product.
Erica Edman interviewed by Sydney Grant
Sydney Grant So my first question is. The words look like it’s a statistic of some sort, I was wondering what this came from and what inspired you to make this poster.
Erica Edman I actually started researching food insecurity in Philadelphia for my other class, urban journalism. And as my assignment for that class, I went on a ride along with a volunteer who brings food to community fridges around Philadelphia. So I got to, on a very minor scale, experience what food insecurity looks like in Philadelphia because I saw a lot of the people who were going to take this food. On that ride the woman I talked to gave me a lot of statistics and just told me a lot about how big of a deal food insecurity is. So I started researching food deserts in Philadelphia, and just the problem as a whole. I was really impacted by it and thought that it would make a good topic for this project.
SG That’s really interesting. How often did you do that with her?
EE I only rode with her for one day, around 4 hours.
SG That’s a long enough time to learn a lot of things honestly. So you chose 10 junk foods and one healthy food. Did you pick these purposely?
EE At first I was going to do an orange for the healthy food, but I didn’t think it work because I wanted the red letters and yellow backgrounds and I didn’t think the orange went with that. Also, In my mind an apple is like the epitome of health. Just like the saying goes “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And then for all the junk food the first couple ones just came to mind. But then I started slowly running out, so when I looked up food insecurity statistics and food desserts, I would look at the pictures and see the food in those pictures and go from there.
SG What was the software that you used to make this poster?
EE I entirely used Blender and I used a plug-in to get all of the different food.
SG Where do you envision posting this? Where would you advertise this to spread the message?
EE Yeah, I feel like it’s very instagrammable. I’m actually talking to the woman that I did the ride along with about volunteering more for her organization and maybe working on marketing and stuff.
SG Who are you trying to target specifically? Specifically people in Philadelphia?
EE I think it is very Philly-central, but I also think that there’s a lot of cities where people who don’t have to think about food insecurity don’t see it right in front of them. And even though this poster is very clearly for people living in Philadelphia, I feel like that message could also be spread to people living in other major cities.
SG What would you want someone looking at this poster to take away from it?
EE I would like people to think about and acknowledge that even though you might be able to get healthy food because you have the time to go to a grocery store a little farther away or have the money to buy organic foods that doesn’t mean that everyone around you also has that same privilege. I felt like having unhealthy food raining from the sky dramatizes that idea.