“There’s 7 billion 46 million people on the planet, and most of us have the audacity to think we matter”
George Watsky is not an artist, nor a graphic designer. This young man is a rapper. Not a rapper who reads off a piece of paper someone else has written for him, not a rapper whose words speak no meaning or doesn’t delve into any emotions. Quite the opposite. Watsky has grown up with poetry. His art, his design, his love is for poetry.
As Watsky writes in his bio on his website, he is “a versatile lyricist who switches between silly and serious, technically complex and simply heartfelt”. His winning of the National Poetry Slam in 2006, and his numerous trips around America performing spoken word, his young adult life has revolved around the ideas of emotion and word play combined together.
“How to ruin everything” is a series of essays he has written about his life. This video above visualises the book’s telling, with Watsky’s narration in the background. All words that are spoken by other character’s are also written in the book, therefore the whole video focuses mainly on what the book reads.
Regardless of the picture in your head, as we read, the creative mind we have is slowly working on how to visualise the printer the author has spoken of, whether it is our own printer or one we’re seen in our past encounters. The video provides an excellent and close cinematography which has a similar design to how one would imagine a prop, character or scenery when reading.
Some well-known directors take a similar approach. To name one, Wes Anderson. His filming of The Grand Budapest Hotel was notably inspired by the idea of X and Y axis combined with symmetry. Anderson worked with a cinematographer named Robert Yeoman. Yeoman hand operated the camera, the crew pull, push and slide him along on a trolley as he holds the camera perfectly still for the right shots. A fascinating thing to watch him do. These scenes are almost like how one would imagine the scene in their head whilst reading the book. Perhaps the cinematographer for Watsky’s small book excerpt was inspired by these techniques, and used them time and time again.
Let’s look at two scenes from the two medias. On the left, we have a screenshot of one of the scenes in the excerpt. On the right, a screenshot from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. The similarities of the two scenes would be the level of saturation and contrast, along with the almost symmetrical camera angle. The differences, although not that much, would be the idea of focus points. On the right, the focus point would be the character, therefore her position will be in the middle for the audience to immediately draw to her. However, the screenshot on the left doesn’t really have a focus point. Although the three postboxes are different to each other, the audience is not forced to look at just the middle one. Perhaps it is to do with the use of colour. Because all three postboxes are blue, there is no spotlight point or true difference; whereas the right one has a colour difference, the model is in orange clothing and appears brighter to the rest of the colour palette around her.