~ Secret 7 - Max Richter - initial ideas ~

This is a really beautiful and hypnotic piece of classical music, when listening to it I found myself drifting into peaceful and simple thought. I wanted my submission to portray this simple peace visually. 

His compositions are representative of peace and tranquility and although many enjoy them live; but the main purpose behind his pieces are for a peaceful nights sleep - the length of them being a big part of this - many of his compositions are made to last through a whole night's sleep (8 hours).

Personal input - personally I suffer with bad anxiety that affects my sleep greatly and am constantly looking for new things to help with this. As part of my experimentation with this particular song I played one of his all night compositions while I slept. Immersing myself in the music in this way has allowed me to fully visualise a concept for the brief. 

The biggest relief of anxiety, stress and lack of sleep in my personal experiance is simple things, like adventures, new beginnings, peace, simplicity, the opportunity to escape chaos.

Initial thoughts on things that visually portray the peaceful and simple feeling -

- Plants, growing, spring, emerging

- Sunlight, sunrise, appearing

- Nature

- Minimal environments

- Exploring, a sense of adventure, the unknown

- Clean-ness

- Sleep

- Running/walking

This is just a list of things that personally ignite the same feeling that this piece of music does inside me. Due to this being the first release by the competition with no lyrics it seems appropriate that the design treatment i decide to submit should be informed directly by the overall feelings produced as a result of listening to it.

Based upon my initial ideas and feelings I created these thumbnail sketches. Each sketch uses a minimal approach and layout and only simple line drawings. I wanted the style of illustration to be as representative and informed by the music as possible. 

I want my final outcome for this to be a combination of my initial ideas; choosing the elements of which I find to be the most effective in relieving anxiety and tension.