HACKING AUSTIN
Austin Recycling Project
Before coming to Austin from Turkey about 9 months ago, the pictures I had found about Austin were mostly the Frost Bank and the UT Tower. They were almost the symbols of the city. After coming to Austin, I met another symbol; the hero color of UT. Orange.
For sure, apart from that I was so busy with observing this city, I had some adaptation problems. It was almost a vicious circle; smoking and eating. In Turkey, in most of the places (YES; inside of the buildings too)smoking's free...FREE, FREE LIKE OXYGEN, FREE LIKE FREEDOM. Anyway, it's a sad issue for me. As a good friend of nicotine, how would I live in that country?
Food. Everything had millions of calories. Cookies and snacks became my enemies. Eventually, the less I smoked cigarettes, the more I ran to fridge.
Finally, I decided to recycle Austin. I was aware of the fact that recycling was so important here in Austin. I took cigarettes and food as my case studies. I intended to find a solution by using the problems themselves.
It didn't work.
Then I looked at the city again.
The scene was weird...(Keep Austin weird. Ok. But it's too weird.)
When it was so HOT in Austin, what the hell was doing the Frost Bank???
Secondly, what about this tower like a long, long, long candle on the UT cake?
And the orange...orange... UT's famous for its diversity and this university has so many international students. Cool. Then why is everybody living in the orange republic?
I took the 3 things; Frost Bank, the UT Tower and the color, orange as trash and decided to recycle. In my story. These 3 elements'd change each other. The changes'd bring another and so on. The problems'd create the solution on their own.
First of all, I developed the story. Since I was planning the "synergy of the changes", the connections had to make sense. The chain had to be strong. At first, I developed a brief story but when it came to drawing the storyboard, I realized that I had to develop more connections and recall what I had learned in my screenwriting classes at college.
Drawing... It was so nice to create the scene in my mind and then reflect it on the paper. Until I realized that I used pounds of paper. And pastels, time and patience! It was fun though...
And finally, placing everything in the powerpoint. I too don't like it! But who can say that it doesn't work?
Here we go.