Awards & Nominations
prints has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
The Art of It All
HQuarantine: where there's hope, there's a way
Summary
“HQuarantine” uses different forms of art to impact life quality during social distancing rather than solve it. The project is a series of short comic stories with a hopeful future perspective to fight loneliness and improve mental health, not relying on words (an attempt to potencialize the reach and leave more space to the ludic) allied to authorial music, increasing emotion to the narrative, and video editing, reinventing the usual comic book into the online form.
How We Addressed This Challenge
As a group of five brazilian students of the field of arts living under a government that constantly devalues and attacks Art and Culture, “The Art of It All” challenge inspired us since the very first moment. Social distancing and its consequences have been bringing new insights about life and the way the world works, and art has been showing itself increasingly essential in the new COVID-19 routine. Exploring deeply all its roles, art can: be an entertainment, a way to increase humor and fight depression or loneliness; be a source of self knowledge and reflection; encourage empathy and solidarity by making representative characters in which people can see themselves; bring social development and reinsertion; make awareness about important subjects.
Our team’s main proposition has been defined around the roles art can assume in the maintance of sanity and its essentiality. Our proposal is an embracing work of art, something simple, accessible, but not ordinary. The videos are captivating and short, like a sigh of relief at the end of the day.
Here’s our demo: “MARKS” – about how we deal with loss and isolation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR_BxTxlUDM&feature=youtu.be
How We Developed This Project
As our biggest commitment is with mental health maintenance during quarantine, our project doesn’t focus on solving the public health global issue of Coronavirus, but improving life quality during social distancing. NASA data shows how concerning the state of mind during isolation is, no wonder astronauts have several different ways to entertain themselves with art and culture during their journey in outter space. It also reflects in our physical health, some symptoms can be: mood decline, sleep disorder and nutritional deficiency. We transmuted the astronauts’ experience to our main character of our comic series pilot and protoype. We looked for something instigating and inspiring, at the same time an idea that corroborates and reaffirms our biggest commitment: taking care of our public’s mental health.
Our methodological approach was a soft, embracing language we found in the comic books and representative characters people could bond with and see themselves as. The innovation was the animated video form, used to adapt the usual paper comic book to online viewers. Also something easily spread and intuitive, so we chose YouTube as our upload plataform. Furthermore, we added an authorial music to increase the sensible part of our narrative and give some “brasilidade” to our work. The project’s title has also a reference to our contry through an “easter egg”: ‘HQ’ in portuguese is shortening of “História em Quadrinhos” which means “comic books”.
About our concept, we elaborate our visual identity around red and shades os grey. Also, the ‘H’ in “HQuarantine” can be understood as a reference to History. Although the project forecast a series of particular stories showing life during pandemics from different points of view, all those particular stories united represent thousands of lives and seeing them as whole can’t be less than History. Our team believe we’re going through a new historical moment, with new feelings, concerns and thoughts.
The softwares we used to perform all our ideas were: Reaper (DAW) for the soundtrack; Premiere for the video editing; InDesign for layout and digramming. We also used online plataforms. This way we lowered the costs but also increased the manufacturing time in an organic proccess, lowering also the peridiocity.
Our main problem was addressing a challenge about art during pandemics. As all the solutions are turned to solve problems considered “bigger” than mental health issues, we had to think outside the box to bring na actual innovating solution and not creating necessarily a capitalized product.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
- Social Isolation in Context (from NASA database): https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/social-isolation/in-context
- The Human Body in Space (from NASA database): https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace
- Long Duration Psychology (from NASA): https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/long-duration/long.htm