The Happy Film

The happy film was more like a documentary to me. It was inspiring to see Stefan Sagmeister's process and thoughts through it and also to know a little bit about his life and stuffs. The most awesome thing about the film was all the element of design in the it, all along the movie you can see Stefan's signature typographies cutting the movie as 'segments' of his research process and sometimes just inspiration notes and quotes.

He made his research in depth and went to talk to specialists about his speculations. He was fearless and did was the specialists were telling him exaggeratedly to get better chance in finding his own happiness. All along the process of his research and experimentation when we got ideas he tried them and executed them and these were parts of his final outcome in his exhibition.

The graphic elements were a lot of his typographies matching the theme of what he was it was about in creative ways. He applied many different techniques and did his typographies in many different ways, with real objects, dance,3D animations, jellies, objects being thrown in the air, balloons, all matching their own contexts. Also at one point in the video he went to meditate in Indonesia or something and he used their Wayang Kulit puppet show to tells part of his story that he was not able to film. At another point where also he was not able to film he used ink to display emotions and it was very well made. He also used some dark humour at some boring part of the film to keep the audience interested and lastly the songs were very well chosen for each scene of the movie. It helped capture the emotion of the moment well.

I also understand why we were asked to watch the film for our course. It contains everything that we need to do in Translation and Transmission. It shows his process from an idea to a concept map to research and experimentations, it also shows how he tried different techniques and that as our lecturer said was really very inspiring for this course and lastly it shows how he displayed his research in the end and conveyed the emotion he wanted to. The movie was the documentation part that we also will have to do.

At the end of the film he failed, he could not get happier, even though he did at one point but the choices he made turned out to have create more frustration to him. And it's a understandable because happiness is something really hard to achieve and nothing last forever. He also turned out to make a film about questions and not about answers as he said.

However his research were very well communicated through that exhibition. There were a bunch of quotes in different ways, the exhibition was very interactive and triggered good vibes that could related to happiness.