Mohawk Blog

A Holiday Card’s Cross Country Journey

Words
Ariel Smullen
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Olivia Booth and Ariana Shank are senior design students attending the University of Wisconsin. 

For a recent class project, the students were tasked with an assignment designed to make paper ‘cool’. The duo decided to create a stop motion video that highlighted the tactile aspect of paper.

The video follows the endearing journey of a holiday card as it travels from its sender in San Francisco to its recipient in New York.

We spoke with Olivia and Ariana about the video and the inspiration behind their project.

What inspired you to create a stop motion video for this project?
The inspiration behind the video was a video by Honda called “Paper” by PES. We saw the Honda video long before our design project was introduced and once it was, we knew we wanted to make something live. We wanted to make a video about why it is important to make things with physical objects as opposed to on a screen. Ariana suggested we make it holiday-themed and from then the video became about the physical richness in all the objects used around Christmas.

Why did you choose to feature Mohawk paper in the video?
We chose to use Mohawk in the video because we liked the relationship you have with designers. We noticed your Instagram features a lot of neat work by designers. Your logo was the final touch. We found it trendy and the green color scheme was going to fit in exactly with the holiday feel. We have been to design conferences, and are always so inspired by what you do.

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Behind the Scenes
Oliva Booth and Ariana Shank
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Behind the Scenes
Ariana Shank setting up

What was the biggest challenge you faced during the production process?
The biggest challenge was just making a video, which is something we had never done. We had to storyboard like crazy and really plan out the day of shooting.

On the day of shooting, we were locked out of the lighting studio and had no light kit, so we took over a small conference room and a light table. A friend provided a light kit and we began filming. It took three hours to set up the room and three hours to actually take the photos, and it ended up being over 400 photos.

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Behind the Scenes
Snapshots of how they shot the video

Tell us more about your design blog, Designerds.
Our blog started because our design professor didn’t understand why hashtags on social media were important. When this came up in class, we shared the reason to our professor. As we were doing this we realized there were a lot of little details that many students don’t really understand as they approach graduating with a BFA in Graphic Design, and things we have recently discovered ourselves. Our professor suggested we “start a blog and write about it”, so we did.

The name (Designerds) is what we have been calling ourselves for a while. We are always “nerding out” about graphic design. Our blog highlights inspirations and posts about undergraduate design discoveries; things that might not be teachable in the classroom. It’s just starting, but it is becoming a lot of fun to write about things we think are important to creative majors.

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