Impactist: Birthday

Impactist never fails to surprise me. Their latest project is a poetically disturbing mash up of two occasions that seem diametrically opposed:

Injured veterans from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have two days with which to recognize and celebrate their lives. Like all of us, they have a birthday, but special and unique to them, they also have an “alive” day which commemorates the day they were injured and had their lives nearly extinguished in the theater of war.

Observing these two important days, we combined, shifted, and restructured them conceptually. Without being overly graphic or unduly exploitive, the use of the simple head bandage and claustrophobic setup hint towards a more internal injury like those emotional injuries that are not as easy to recognize and diagnose as physical trauma.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Like much of Impactist’s work, this one lingers for a while after the last frame has been played.

This project was created as an ident for shots DVD magazine. All visuals and audio were created by Kelly Meador & Daniel Elwing.