Impactist: Birthday

Impactist never fails to surprise me. Their latest project is a poetically disturbing mash up of two occasions that seem diametrically opposed:

Injured veterans from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have two days with which to recognize and celebrate their lives. Like all of us, they have a birthday, but special and unique to them, they also have an “alive” day which commemorates the day they were injured and had their lives nearly extinguished in the theater of war.

Observing these two important days, we combined, shifted, and restructured them conceptually. Without being overly graphic or unduly exploitive, the use of the simple head bandage and claustrophobic setup hint towards a more internal injury like those emotional injuries that are not as easy to recognize and diagnose as physical trauma.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Like much of Impactist’s work, this one lingers for a while after the last frame has been played.

This project was created as an ident for shots DVD magazine. All visuals and audio were created by Kelly Meador & Daniel Elwing.

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

5 Comments

Aaron Mustamaa

Very Chris Cunningham tripping on a hit of Aphex Twin. The wheelchair and panicky, glitchy psychosis leads me to believe it was inspired by (or at least homaging), Cunningham’s vid, .

gus gavino

you can never go wrong with Impactist. I’ve been a fan since seeing them on your cremeO’the crop list.
great new piece!

Steelo

That’s cool. I often wonder though with something that important to be said are we losing people in the execution instead of the message?

I suppose that’s art though.

Simon

I just saw this without reading the introduction. I didn’t get what it was. Great visual stuff, but the message did not get through to me, but I liked it, I read, so it did it’s job anyway :)

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