Frozen Conflicts Magazine Idea

 

After a tutorial with Phil I started to think about creating a magazine not just about one article or event but many. Looking into many different 'frozen conflicts' and creating a magazine around it. Perhaps working with other people on my course doing war and conflict. The main conflicts that I am interested in at the moment are the conflict of Armenia and Azerbaijan, North Korea and South Korea (as well as USA) and the not very well known Western Sahara conflict.

Using these conflicts and experimenting with ideas of photography used in magazines I created some quick edited images to show frozen conflicts as literally frozen.

My Chosen Articles

A Quick End to a Dangerous War

The Unthinkable: What Would Happen If North Korea Nuked Los Angeles?

I chose these two different conflicts as I really liked the big contrast between them. Armenia and Azerbaijan is a civil war, all be it backed by superpower countries, and North Korea is a much bigger fish. With implications of nuclear power and a 'frozen' stalemate between North Korea and the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. I really liked how it would go from a 'smaller' conflict to a much bigger and more dangerous conflict. Especially in a magazine it seems to me that it should have variety even if the magazine is centered around one subject, it can still be vastly different on each page. 

I printed out my articles and started to highlight them to draw out some ideas that I think could make for some good imagery.

Ice-cube Experiments

As suggested by my tutors I took the digital images that I have already created and printed them off and let them freeze into ice-cubes. I took images of these the best I could to make them perhaps presentable as a spread in a magazine. I took images of them as whole ice-cubes and as smashed ice cubes, as well as them when they were melting.

Wireframes

Continued Wireframe Development-

Front Cover Roughs

After researching into my topics I started to create a front cover to my magazine using an image I found showing North Korean soldiers.

Although this may or may not be used as my proposed front cover it was very useful for me to complete and I am very happy with how it looks.

Contents and Manifesto 

For my contents and manifesto page I'm toying with a simple idea of icicles and the idea of a war bunker. Mostly just to set the tone for the magazine. Although my magazine is talking about very serious topics I dont want it to be this overly serious and bleak magazine.

Armenia and Azerbaijan Double Page Roughs

In this idea for a double page I wanted to focus on the foreign intervention from Russia, portraying them as some godly figure. Its not exactly what I want to show, I want to show them as more sinister and these came out as more 'magical' and 'good'. I also took inspiration from the statues in Armenia dating back to Soviet controlled times, as if the soldiers are being frozen by being turned to stone.

After creating this drawing I realized that what I have drawn hasn't really illustrated my opinion. I looked further into this and after a tutorial I started to focus more on my opinion that having cease fires in long fought wars is a bad idea and want to show how because of the bigger players in the war it would be even more catastrophic than the cease fires that came before. I show this development in my sketchbook.

I then started to create some work focused on the opinion that frozen conflicts dont work, and that they just make things worse.

Continued development of this-

I want to show how leaders are oblivious of what frozen conflicts do and what cease fire does to elevate tensions in war. 

I thought it was important to define 'Frozen Conflicts' in the magazine so I created a double page on this just before the meat of the article.

I decided after creating this definition page that it, although, important to the magazine, wasn't part of the Armenia and Azerbaijan article. So I started to develop some more ideas for one of the double pages for this article. I flipped back through my original ideas and this one idea stood out. It was of icebergs and frozen soldiers floating in water. I think what I want to show is that although these two sides have stopped fighting the hatred and war is still there.

 I wanted it to seem like nothing really have changed, they still hate each other and the only thing stopping them is the 'rules' e.g the stop sign. They are simply paused or stopped until eventually they either melt slowly or smash into each other causing them to become free of the 'rules'.

I continue this idea of it just being paused in a two page comic that I have been developing for this project, centered around a game of chess.

North Korea Article Double Page Roughs

For the first roughs I made for this double page I portrayed Kim Jung Un in front of an explosion pressing the button. For this article I wanted to show how easily the world could be destroyed and the amount of destruction Kim could cause. I also want to portray Kim as some what of a 'child' or an incompetent person who doesn't understand the chaos that he has caused.

These roughs were only a start and I do not think I will continue with this design.

Continued Development-

Ideas to to do with LA, taking the walk of fame in Hollywood and depicting it being dismantled and broken to show the destruction.

For one of my double pages I have played around with the idea of a nuclear missile being made up of people or having people strapped to it to try and comment on the disregard for peoples lives. I also found that there is a Korean saying that they use to honor the dictator, 'live long' so I wanted to try and make a kind of ironic illustration of having these people being sent to their deaths but they are still shouting 'live long'. They will not live very long.