The Elements: Branding and conceptualization 1

By Mark David  

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The Elements: Branding and conceptualization

I love making puzzles, I love visualizing them and I love teasing the mind with greater perspectives. Being a designer-photographer I have a passion for creating. 

My fictive universe is in many ways a real one, concerning as it does the deeds of the 20th century: The birth of a stable Europe and many of the tales of those type of people who became a part of something greater than themselves born out of strife and sacrifice. Weaving stories about belief, fate, deception is something close to my heart and is the reason why this project has increasingly consumed my life - and my efforts in creating an ambitious mystery-thriller series set near the end of the cold war. 

This blog marks therefore, a time to sit back and look back on what has been produced as I complete the first true branding part of the project which I call The Elements.

The Elements is a mystery-thriller project for fiction. I have been working on this project since 2007. It's something I keep telling myself since I need to keep an overview of where it came from and where it has to get to. I have therefore worked recently on containing and branding the entire package. I want each element to have something unique to say, illuminating a part of the back plot that has influence on a certain, unique to each book, constellation of characters.

Being a designer-photographer by trade I guess I work the way because I just can’t work any other way. I’m not sure if this is a unique way of working, but I let threads develop in the directions that are the most interesting, thematizing, conceptualizing, constantly realigning the whole so they fit into within new and altering perceptions.

The sort of plot I wanted was something that resonates, while keeping the real events determining what is going on, kept in the background. I call this the back plot. I have been inspired by the British TV series called the Shadow Line. It too, is a conspiracy thriller series, with a noiresque feel that is stunningly visualized. A complex tale, the viewer is kept on their toes at all times.  

Now, it takes years of hard slog to get the picture into place with all the references and subplots worked out to play with the individual pieces and fine-hone them to the same extent as I wanted in the Shadow Line.

Still, by working this way, it also ensures that the core plot is very ‘mature’, and the bricks are in place to add additional dimensions of interrelationship that simply would not otherwise be possible. It has surprised me though, just how useful it has been to take a step beyond any book and look at the entire project. 

The 'branding exercise' as such, has been to come up with simply identifiable motifs that visually provide a quick reference to The Element. Here is the overview: in order of release:

IGNIS - TERRA - UNDA- CALIGO - A'RIS - GELUS

What I hadn't expected was that the concept for the whole project would take ALSO take a big step forwards, snapping the whole into sharper focus:

For the first time since starting I can see everything now and how it all fits together. The process of grow and divide by organic development has, therefore, come to an end. (As previously stated, there can be no more than the six elements, since this fits into a cosmological perspective I'm still developing - and will illustrate another time - that relates to existing doctrines of thought.)

The Elements will now also play a direct role in terms of plot. Each element is a code name, for the powers that be, doing what they do, in line with their objectives. Which is all core back plot material. So each element, while being a thematic filter on the nature of the story, also relates to a particular deception being made by the puppet-masters. 

The deception aspect had been written into the stories, it's only now I can see that each book can illustrate its own deception. The Elements as a whole now has three levels of meaning:

- Thematically (thematic play)

- Figuratively (meaning)

- Strategically (plot and structure)

The story will start at the end. Then it will work through the myriad of events and subplots, characters, timelines and developments building up to and explaining in details what is happening in the first release which can be called ‘starting with chaos'.