Isadora Dantas

Goal: Develop a mini-thesis. You can do anything you want as long as it has a defined design process.

First ideas:

Let’s talk about final project! This word scares me… but that’s how it begins:

“Write all ideas that come to your mind without thinking. Just write it. You will have some minutes to do that.”

My personal result was something like this:

As I tried to organize all ideas that came to my mind, I noticed that they could be divided into five different groups: a) databases with stories from different people, related to how you FEEL the world; b) databases with different images, related how different people SEE the world; c)installations and researchs about how we interact with the space around us, how the cultures are shaped according to the environment and vice-versa; d) Rio de Janeiro and thirld world countries, how introduce the reality in poor places to rich countries; e) random sentences about anxiety.

Proposals:

Time to turn all ideas inside your mind into images that everybody can see. So I did:

In third world countries we are so used to seeing poverty around us that it doesn’t sensibilize us anymore. It looks like here in USA it’s the opposite: Since you don’t usually see it, you don’t feel connected. My idea was to project some images in fancing peoples so you cannot avoid it.

Do you know that moments that you see something amazing happening on the streets and you wish you could share it with someone? This is what this project is for. You can register any happening with your camera and share with people around the world.

This idea is very similar to the above, the difference is that here, the main subject would be the postcards that we receive or that we had never sent. This is about memories that we loose along the way.

Rio is finally entering to the world map. We’re going to present the Olympiads in 2016 and however, it looks that we still have a lot to do. I would like to make a project showing how is your reality so far and how it could look like if everybody worked together for a better place.

I keep all the trash papers that I receive in my purse. By the end of the day, I have an entire collection of different adds of things that I will never use in my life. So it goes all to the garbage to increase the pollution. In this project I would cut in little pieces this papers and you use them in a mosaic about the place where I received them.

Sometimes, when I’m travelling, I have the strange feeling that I’m home. Maybe it’s a specific place, a landscape or a food. Maybe it’s someone or some joke. I think it happens with everybody. I would like to explore the fact that this is a “small world after all” and, instead of focusing on what we have different, focus on what we have in common.

Overall my ideas varied from a database where people could add postcards to big projections of third world country’s poverty in fancy buildings in New York. Although they were all very different from the other, it’s impossible not to notice that it’s all about a sight of a foreigner, someone that doesn’t belong and is trying to look for the similarities between cultures. They all have to do with society and culture, and behind them, there’s always an inner comparison with Brazil, and more specifically with Rio, Rio, Rio. It looks that since I came here I cannot stop saying this word. Perhaps I should do my whole final about it. At least, it’s something that I really love.

Scenario

Going further, I decided to create a campaign about Rio de Janeiro. It looks that everybody has something to say about us, even more nowadays, that we were selected to have the Olympiads 2016 instead of Chicago. But what bothers me is that people only know the extremes in Rio. They only talk about the violence or the nature beauties. Rio is definitely a city full of contrasts, where the poverty and the richness, the beauty and the misery, are really close to each other. I wanted to show how Rio is through a perspective of someone that lives there. It would be called “A Rio to Call my own”.

The final product would be a website about Rio, with it’s history, truths and lies that are circulating in the media, a brief explanation about mains subjects like favelas and carnival and a place where you could add your own image about Rio.

Although the feedback was positive, I noticed that I should nail down my project, otherwise I would never be able to finish it. I cannot change the world in only few weeks. So I decided that I would talk about favelas (which would be our slums). I consider it an interesting topic, because I’m pretty sure that for our favelas are so close to the rest of the city, it gives a different perspective from anywhere else. Besides, our president told that all favelas would going to be destroyed until the Olympiads. Although I don’t believe this is possible, it seams a good scenario for the theme.

Visiting favelas

I have never entered in a favela in my entire life, and I did it on Thanksgiving. It’s a completely different reality from mine and it’s only 10 minutes away from home. It was really impressive and it made me realize that I could never make a strong and well based project about favelas in only five visits. They have a complete different system of laws, they are 100% controlled by the drug dealers, that, are divided into three commands in Rio. They fight between each other for points where they can sell drugs. 20% of the people in Rio lives in favelas, and 5% of the people in Favela are related to the traffic.

I learned a lot in these visits and I talked to some people and it’s a really interesting subject. But I must be honest with myself and understand that if I did it it would be really superficial. Many people may not even notice it, because they don’t know what it is, but I would know that in three visits you cannot understand something that is happening in more than a century.

Although I visit three favelas, I could only take photographs inside one of them, called Vila das Canoas, which is small one and it’s not controlled by the traffic. This is one of the few favelas in Rio that were legallized. The biggest part remain illegal and there are more than 1000 favelas in total.

Vila das Canoas:

Dona Marta:

Rocinha:

Changing concept:

At the same time, I love Rio so much that it was becoming really tough for me to focus only on the bad side. So I decided that instead of making a project about favelas, I would create a movie called “Rio in 5 minutes”, where I could talk a little bit about everything. For you to understand why Rio is like it is and all the social difference, you must know a little bit about our history, slavery and exploration. So I started to write everything I wanted to say and I would never be able to say all that in 5 minutes in a short animation. Besides, it was getting very hard to me to get impartial with so many colors and beauties.

Defined concept:

So, I wondered once again and… which is the best way to be impartial? Numbers, right!? So I decided that I would use only statistics in my movie and no colors at all. This would be the best way to be impartial. My mom always told me that against facts, no one can argue. But it would definitely get boring, so what my main goal is going to be is to make this animation fun and illustrating the statistics.

I collected all statistics that I could, from dates to criminality and nature. I want to make draws to represent each one of them and then, animate it into a movie, that allows people to learn about Rio and anyone will have their own image, according to the facts.

I remained with the idea of creating a site, and since that I have already collected all the information that I wanted to present, I don’t think this is going to be something really difficult to do. That’s how I wanted it to look like, following the same style of the animation.

Final Project:

Introduction:

Statistics:

Website: Rio in Numbers

Rio in Numbers Presentation

Rio in Numbers Paper