As part of the teaching programme of the Master of European Design Labs and the Master of Product Design Labs, the Slovakian designer Tomas Kral proposed the FILMZE workshop, which takes its name from the streaming cinema website, with the aim of transforming a film sequence into a specific product.

The proposed brief challenged designers to interpret and translate part of the history of a film into a true three-dimensional object, either functional or abstract, from any  narrative genre: science fiction, comedy, war, romance or documentary, among others.

Capturing from that cinema moment the key detail in the plot, or finding inspiration in the main or secondary characters, or even in the space where everything takes place or begins, was the starting point to transform ideas into objects.

The young designers drew sketches and brainstormed a range of issues to find the chosen concept for each feature film, without leaving behind the drawing process and the production of models of their ideas as an essential phase of their task.

The inspiration from the films was transformed in a range of ways depending on the product, the use of the object, the materials used and even the production processes and the application of textures.

Delving into films from the history of cinema, such as Beauty and the Beast, Voces Inocentes, The Help, The Birds, Beatlejuice, Bailar en la oscuridad, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Closer, among others, gave students the chance to conduct research that has offered glimpses of the creativity and critical analysis abilities of each of the participants, reflected in their original objects.

It is true that “the stories that films tell us always make us dream of worlds and characters that don’t exist, and influence our real lives”, as Kral points out.

This post is also available in: Spanish