Directed by Keith Thompson Arizona State University Fall 2021
Healing Wars
Healing Wars is a musical theater performance about war, medicine, veterans, and mental health. For my designs of the show I created typography inspired by historical documents, deconstructed & animated clocks. Some graphics were also created inspired by my own experience with the military as the daughter of a solider.
Co-designed by
This animation features a vintage Civil War era pocket watch from the 1860’s. The face of the clock was rebuilt in Adobe Illustrator while the inner casing, arms, and front outer case were edited out of auction images.
The clock swings, opens to reveal spinning arms, rusts, and then closes revealing the title of the show.
The typing animation uses an expression in Adobe After Effects. The color palette and font where matched to the same colors and font found on actual medical equipment and brain scans.
The appearing text animation was inspired by the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. The heading of the note has elements from a historical archive of some of Clara Barton’s notes and the text that I added in (the show and chapter title) were font matched as closely as possible to the text on the original document.
Throughout the show a series of title cards like the example seen from the appearing text animation were projected onto the balcony of the stage. Keeping with the same theme as the preshow and in order to help show the switching of time periods within different chapters prompted by a subheading in the script, clocks from different time periods were also projected.
The handwriting animation was inspired by the notes my mom wrote me while on deployment and the idea presence of non linear timelines which is present throughout the show. The animation was timed so that as Clara’s performer read the note out loud it wrote itself on the surface behind her.