BTS: Conceptualizing a pitch using the dreamy visual history of Black Mountain College ⛰️
⛰️🎨👩🎨
High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process, art in general, or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.
(The best experience is on the website or the app, in my opinion!)
🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )
Conceptualizing “Foundation Year “
One of the things I did recently is go back and look at the pitch deck I made for the Foundation Year editorial I concepted, pitched, and eventually shot for CAP 74024 exactly two years ago.
I live very close to where I went to college and so I’m constantly reminded of my time there and the friends I made. I think some of my happiest days of my life were spent in my darkroom there, printing at night and on the weekends when I could have the place to myself. Even back then, it was such a nice reprieve from my phone, not being able to use it in the dark for fear it would expose the paper. The closest thing I’ve had to a real meditation practice and I was 19, 20, 21 years old. I miss those days sometimes...not the school or the homework but the time to think only about pictures and trying to learn how I like to take them, what makes a good picture to me. I was very self-serious then but I put in a lot of time and that was valuable to me...to fall in LOVE with pictures, sometimes even my own.
Before all of that, though, we had to go through a Foundation Year of fundamentals: nude figure drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. I wanted to pitch a styled story (styled by Herin Choi) that highlighted the most quintessential art school scenes from my romanticized, fictionalized, sometimes fever dream perspective.
In art history, we learned about Black Mountain College, which was was an experimental college founded in 1933 in North Carolina and was a teaching home people like Josef Albers and John Cage for a time.
Pitching the idea to CAP 74024
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to High Thought to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.