Perfect Swan: Article/Videos for The Issue MagazineSkills used: Creative Direction, Video Direction, Creative Collaboration
September 2024 - November 2024
For the Fall 2024 semester edition of The Issue magazine, themed Dystopian Now, each article explored how our current society has begun to reflect the horrors we once considered a distant, unrealistic future, now becoming reality.
My friend and I pitched an article originally titled “Judgment on the White Dress,” later renamed Perfect Swan, exploring the pressures of pursuing perfection to please others in a culture where these expectations are increasingly normalized through social media. We developed the article alongside two artistic videos that presented contrasting perspectives of the main character, an unnamed woman played by me.
Cover photo
Behind the scenes
The first video portrayed her idealized perception of perfection, surrounding herself with beauty and purity while embracing extravagance. We chose a wedding dress, traditionally reserved only for one's wedding day, to symbolize her use of extreme elegance to serve her own vanity. The second video revealed the harsher reality behind her pursuit, exposing the emotional costs hidden beneath her polished exterior. Together, the videos created an “expectation versus reality” narrative.
The article extended this juxtaposition through contrasting photographs, balancing an elegant, pure aesthetic with more agitated and artificial imagery. Two accompanying written pieces further explored the character: one depicted the grueling routine behind her pursuit of perfection, while the other presented her experience as a melancholy fairy tale about “the perfect swan.”
Overall, I felt the project successfully brought our vision to life through both photography and video. Co-creative directing the piece from start to finish, while also modeling, was a particularly rewarding experience. If I were to revisit the project, I would collaborate more closely with the graphics team to develop more advanced spread designs that better reflected the visual intensity of the videos while maintaining the simplicity that allowed the photography to stand out.
Written piece 1
Written piece 2 (written by me)