The project responds to the 'Tvastar' bag - by designer Keshav Anand which takes its name from the ancient Vedic artisan god and lord of the womb.
A combination of visuals and digital animations were produced to express its intricate tactile qualities and material provenance on screen. Acknowledging the bag’s construction from deadstock leather and commonplace rings recast in silver, the project set out to challenge preconceptions of luxury and perceived value, and imagined a world where a new ecology was formed among waste.
Positioned in an underwater scene of lost ‘bottom-of-the-bag’ objects, the enduring permanence of waste material is called to mind. The fineness of the surrounding microplastic sediment is defined by long-term photodegradation and places the bag in an unknown future era.
Evoking a man-made rockpool in still life, the project is intended to provoke the viewer into rethinking the characteristics of luxury items by revelling in the implications and potential of digital materiality. The frogspawn becomes glass-like, the plastic bag acquires a satin sheen, the ribbon takes on alien tints of gold.
The environment surrounding the bag sought to reflect the presence of multiple timescales in the object itself, such as the life and growth of the leather as a living skin, followed by its preparation for luxury retail (and subsequent rejection) and then its renewed life as a recycled material.
Placing the bag within a notional, isolated underwater ecosystem seemed like a natural fit, as this kind of setting also embodies extraordinary, self-sustained cycles of renewal - a bag for life.
With such rich textures, my approach was predominantly sound design-led and the underwater setting allowed for distant activity and music to suggest the quiet corner of the party.
This underscores the discarded DNA of the object and its location. You never get to hear the whole track, just a fragment, filtered by the density of water to a sort of blobby bass mass. The only thing really defined in the film well is the bag itself, a moment of clarity amongst a fog of the vague and transient. So all the high frequencies are reserved for the small bubbles that glitter in the water, outside it's all been stripped away. The flotsam is the focus.
We deliberately linger a bit too long on the bag - resisting the urge to speed up or cut to something else...encouraging us to acknowledge a longer time cycle and actually look at the details. In a place that is traditionally full of discarded material, we automatically don't think it is worth attention.
But look again...a transformation has occured.