SR Designs
Sabrina Rayner
Illustration for a news article

Phones at the movies

Newspaper illustration, ART 266: Illustration Studio, Fall 2024

The assignment was to create an illustrated image for a newspaper that represents the article “Phones & the Traditional Theater Experience.” I used recursion, with a phone filming a phone filming the screen, to illustrate the removal that one might experience when looking at a screen while looking through another screen and how we ultimately lose ourselves and become the screen or screen(s) we are watching, an idea from Marshall McLuhan.

Illustration: hands in a dark cinema hold up a phone streaming LIVE, whose screen shows another phone filming the screen, with red hearts floating up.

Process

01 Mind map

A mind map about phones and the traditional theater experience.

Handwritten mind map on phones and the traditional theater experience: popcorn, screen light, likes, loneliness, theater as a church.
02 Thumbnails
Thumbnails 1 to 15: phones, popcorn, heads filled with app icons, and phone screens within screens. Thumbnails 16 to 30: rows of theater seats, a church, crowds holding up phones.
03 Alternate draft
Draft: a lone moviegoer lit by her phone among empty red seats, with emoji and hearts in a thought bubble.