Feature documentary · 2020
Traffik 'N Sex
A subject that does not allow for style for its own sake.
A subject that does not allow for style for its own sake.
Opening titles for a documentary exposing the underworld of human trafficking and the ways to help women at risk. Art direction and style frames for the full sequence of credit cards.
The film exists to expose human trafficking and to point at what can be done about it. An opening for that can't be beautiful in a way that aestheticises the subject, and it can't be so careful that it says nothing. The entire design problem is finding the register between those two failures.
Excerpts from the interviews were the starting point. From what the women themselves recount, the images illustrate what they went through as trafficked and sexually exploited people — and every one of those images had to pass the same filter: sensitivity. A subject this delicate allows neither literal illustration nor aestheticising. Hence the system that holds the sequence together: a halftone screen over black-and-white portraits, oversized letterforms building the background, and colour reserved for the name on the card.
The approved frames become the sequence, timed to the track. Nothing is discovered here — it was all decided in the stills.
Colour appears only on the name. Everything else is black, white and halftone.