Celebrating an event in Leeds: Research

So the idea was to produce a piece of work related to the Leeds Bridge and the work of Louse Le Prince, the first cinematographer. Like it was previously mentioned, the main idea was to get a picture from the same spot as he did. Unfortunately, this is not possible as it is taken from a high position that is not reachable. He probably used some type of platform or shot the video through a window.




I went over there to investigate the bridge further with a pantone colour book to see what could be done with it.

The design was going to consist in merely showing the bridge and some text alongside with it. The intention to keep it very simple was to follow the style of the bridge itself which fits the purpose of showing something about the first movies. They were rudimentary, primitive and a screenprint effect can also represent this. It was also added a picture of Le Prince on the bridge, filming with a phone. This is an obvious anachronism with a message: without him we wouldn't be able to film the way we do nowadays.

The bridge architecture is very simple and plain, but it has very ornamented victorian details. At first, the design was planned to be a vectorised photography or something that would merely show the bridge. After a few tries, it wasn't coming out very well, so I decided to go down the victorian approach. So then, I started to research more about victorian designs in the 1880's England.

After this research I started to notice patterns of design in use of typefaces as well as shapes and combinations of these. I downloaded a bunch of typefaces I considered victorian enough as well as vector shapes, played around with them until I came up with a rough draft that started the production of this project.