El Fenómeno

I was tasked to create artwork for Bleacher Report's long form article on the 'original' Ronaldo, 'El Fenómeno'.

Conceptualising art direction based off the era in which both the piece is set and and in which Ronaldo was at his best— the mid-to-late 1990s— I wanted to echo a visual style of the time.

The merging of analogue and digital styles was becoming more apparent during the time; the internet was more prevalent in day-to-day life, and yet analogue content was still the norm.

VHS was the main video format, 35mm film as the go-to. The digital revolution was still not yet happening, and yet it was starting to make in-roads on popular culture.

The attempt was to take visual resources of the time and 'hyper-stylise' them to reflect the mediums of the time period the piece talks about.

Typography is warped as if the tape on which it is stored is melting, images are distressed with VHS effects and noise filters are applied to mess with the images just a little more and reflect the photography format of the moment.

To really drive home the point of merging visual cultures, a level of digital pixel glitching was layered and composited onto animated GIFs using AE Pixel Sorter.