Loneliness and Landlines

I think of myself as a ‘selfish’ designer: being someone that likes to create for myself, and think of myself as the audience of my work. I like to create work that I personally enjoy to experience but also to enjoy the process of making itself.

With a background in illustration and visual storytelling, I wanted to push my communication skills further than before; by creating a film.

I wanted to create something that, not only would be compelling to watch on a surface level but would also allow an audience to reflect on their own behaviours where they might not have done before.

My work represents an issue that I have struggled with prevalently in my own life: loneliness. We often think of this contemporary issue as being subject to the elderly generation, living alone, and whilst this is very relevant, I feel as though this has been shown thoroughly through contemporary media already. I want to do something different.

I wanted to share what loneliness might feel amongst a younger, generation where the impact of being in the digital age may have exacerbated the issue.

I created ‘Landlines and loneliness’ based on my own experiences, and conversations with friends also aged 22 within ‘Generation Z’, I found that we are the most connected generation, through our mobile phones, being able to reach each other 24/7, also possibly being he loneliest and disconnected generations. I have found my own mental health at risk of plummeting through this very real and taboo topic of loneliness in the digital age.

Research released by Eden Project Communities, taken by Opinium (2015), found that while loneliness in older people has been widely acknowledged, many younger people are also lonely. 16% of 18 to 34-year-olds comment that they always feel lonely but around half (48%) of people aged 55+ say they never feel lonely. More than two in five (43%) of 18 to 34-year-olds wish they had more friends and 15% of young people who say they find it harder to make friends nowadays are ‘too scared’ to talk to people they do not know. Opinium. (2015)

As most of my previous narrative work has been driven by comfort and nostalgic childhood safety, I wanted to incorporate that here too. I wanted to give my audience a sense of hope throughout the film and encourage reflection so picked landline phones to be a metaphor for that, something that brings myself comfort.

Landlines were prevalent in my childhood, as well as, the switch from landline phones to mobile phones: my family still has a working landline but I haven’t heard it ring in months, a novelty.

As my audience was for people my age, facing similar problems to myself, I wanted to connect with an audience of this generation, now being young adults and would have that nostalgic value of landline phones where people younger wouldn’t have the same effect.

I also made it a point that this film would be a short one, simple and easy to follow. It would be posted on social media where the audience would more than likely be using their mobile phone to view it. The hope was to have an audience reflect on the use of their phones and to be less passive to social media retention tactics.

While it was important that this be a digitally explored piece, I wanted to make an effort of creating a discomfort between the digital and the analogue juxtaposing one another. I wanted to emphasise the tension between new and old; the digital age and the traditional; represented by the metaphor of a lonely landline phone.

I used traditional methods of stop frame animation, making puppets and building miniature sets, also lighting the background scene deeper and darker to contrast with the digital overlays of people on their mobile phones ignoring the landline phone.