To start our Apollo project Kyle recommended us to set out and create a basic mood board to visually explore the Apollo subject. This is to gain more awareness around the Apollo mission and let us visually recreate our own sense of the monumental event to gain a sense of inspiration for our project.
After reviewing and reflecting on the mood board inspiration article from Tony Ho Tran I felt like I was ready and more aware of what mood boards consist of and the different ways of implementation.
For my first mood board, I decided to grab a general grasp of the Apollo event and create a collage of photographic illustrations/images to understand the subject and other people’s tones.
I decided to do this on Pinterest to start off as I feel like the site (although with limitations) is a good starting ground for projects like these.
For this mood board, I tried to gain a broad understanding of the project. I visually displayed my take on the era of that time through historical, commercial and relative memories. Looking at this mood board, we find the use of detailed typography that dissects and mimics a blueprint structure. We can also see the high use of saturated and obscure colours to mimick the historical invention of commercial televisions. Additionally, all the photographs that I have used are bold and striking which is what I intend my end product to endure – a sense of “colossalness”.
From the original mood board, I then decided to play around with elements more to create a more consistent and theme-related oriented collage.
I came up with separate themes derived from the previous mood board:
01. Diagrammatic
For this mood board, I tried to gather a sense of ‘classified documents’ that represent the Apollo space mission using module blueprints and speculation from the media. Structural-wise, this would be a conventional layout with diagrams going into detail explaining different information. This theme could go with the blue and white blueprint type style or a more schematic white and black to create a textbook type document.
02. Cinematic
So far, this is my favorite creation of all the mood boards so far. I put heavy emphasis on everything including the text, colours and imagery. The mood board conveys a sense of vastness and visual clarity. For example, grasping saturated colours, sans serif typography and impactful colossal photos represent the visual interpretation of someone who witnessed such an event in days gone by. It uses both historical and nostalgic visuals to evoke an emotional response in people. It also uses a strict geometric sans serif typeface to match Nasa’s guidelines (although not released until a few years later).
03. Simulation
This mood board recaptures digital nostalgia at that time. The days of digital American supremacy in media including Aliens, Star Trek and Village of the Damned thus the greenish tint. However, this mood board has a strict emphasis on colour and illustrative style. The colour can convey numerous meanings e.g. the interfaces for Nasa’s computers which can also be shown in white and black. Ultimately, this mood board gives off a retro comic book feeling which could be extremely unique and well-executed if done properly.
04. Print
For this mood board, I put major emphasis on the feel and colour of the visuals. It uses the conventional black and white that is seen in many historic media due to the lack of colour in photos/videos, etc. I decided to adopt the red to show American patriotism as it can add to the story and contrasts really well against the black and white background.
Conclusion
I really enjoy the visual style of print, I think it’s minimalistic while still retaining a sense of personality through a single colour. This is the one I will be picking going forward.