The Happy Film (Week 1)

This Monday, we are asked to watch and study a documentary which named "The Happy Film" by Stefan Sagmeister. I haven't seen this film before. It is a film which about a designer tries to find happiness. He records the progress of finding his own happiness and come out with this film.

Before he starts to find his happiness, he does some research about the topic of Happiness. First, he starts doing research through talking to many psychologist. Then, he write a script, making a plan, list as well as concept. After doing a plan, he find out that the topic of happiness is too big, so he decided to narrow down the topic to his own happiness. When he already figure out the direction, he reads a book which named "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathan Haidt. He tries to meet the author and asked him to be a scientific adviser of his project. The author tell Stefan that there are three ways could help people become happy. This three ways may help people to change their habitual thinking. First, meditation. You have to concentrate and learnt let go. Second, cognitive therapy. You should catch your distorted thinking, and learn to it. Third, drugs, such as Lexapro and Prazac. Stefan decided to try this three method by doing experiment. These three methods will be done in a year, and each of it need to continue doing for 3 months. He also decided to record and collect his own data of being happy. He measures his happiness daily on a scale from 1-10, and double check it with a MRI scan, do an EGG. He will track his behaviour on every week and also tries to record a video once a week.

Typography designs are shown in this film. Stefan uses different methods, techniques, and materials to design the typography. He also use the "playback" technique to showcase some of the typography. Balloon, rice, bananas and many other materials are used to make a typography. There is one typography design really impress me, which using the shadow and hot dog to showcase the typography. This design really need experiment to confirm the place of the hot dog. You should also take note of the sunlight direction, so that the shadow is going to the right direction.

Besides, Stefan tries to use egg to represent people. This method is shown in his talk, such as Paura and Paul. They find each other, fall in love and get married.

In addition, when Stefan talks about his ex-girlfriend, he will use shadow play to represent he and his ex-girlfriend. This is a very interesting way to tell a story. The details of the character was nice and clear.

Not only that, he show his happiness level by using a glass of water. He will fill up a glass of water after doing a experiment. This is a very special way to show audience about the level of happiness. People like to use infographic to show data and information. This is my first time seeing people use a glass of water to show the data.

Last but not least, he uses two drops of colour water to represent a girl and himself. During one of the experiment, he finds a girl and he think that he may can fall in love with her, unfortunately he can't. When he would like to tell audience about this story, he use two drops of colour water to be the character. One of it is blue, and another is red.

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Through this video, we could see that Stefan is good in using different materials when he would like to create a new design. For example, he uses tree trunks and clothes to create the word "Having". For this module, we are asked to tries new and emerging method to complete the project. We can learn it from Stefan. Besides, Stefan is a person who will do a lot of research before he starts doing a project. For us, we should do a lot of research in this module as well. What we can learn from him is to try using different methods and collect different data when we are doing research. Record the data we collect, so we can know what we have done.