isness army

Untitled from Isness Army on Vimeo.

Camberwell Graphic Design brief: 'A minute of your time'

We received a week long masterclass from film maker Alex Reuben

We came up with the idea of re-populating one of Europe's largest abandoned council estates with sound. The vast neo-brutalist blocks used to house up to 1200 residents before Southwark council started kicking the residents out a few years ago. Now it is almost completely abandoned apart from 3 or 4 families that refuse to leave. At one time the bridges and walkways connecting the estates used to stretch pretty much from Elephant and castle station to Old Kent road and you could walk between these two destinations without touching the ground once. It's no surprise then that this monumental design fault would lead to a whole array of murders, rapes, muggings etc.

Being in the estate filming for a few hours is a very harrowing experience. The court yard where this was filmed is looked over by thousands and thousands of windows, some you can still see bunk beds and old posters in. It's deadly silent, no wind gets in there and considering Elephant and castle is less that 100 metres away, all you can hear is the odd magpie. The only human life we encountered where three Polish guys, they looked homeless and were stealing the copper wire hanging down from a lot of the flats. If you want to know exactly how it would feel to survive the end of the world then this is the perfect place for you to visit. It is a truly post apocalyptic environment. After a few hours in The Heygate your mood starts to change and you become quiet and disorientated.. The bus ride back was very quiet.

The task of re-populating the estate as well was a very strange experience watching the footage over and over again and deciding where you would hear certain sounds or conversations and which direction they would be coming from. It's a very un-natural process and it becomes very nauseating imagining sound scapes and making it sound realistic. We must have watched the footage with different sounds about 500 times and the more you watch it the more you expect life in the footage and this starts to become very disorientating. I hope an element of this comes over in the Video.