VIDEO SERIES, WEB + PRINT
TE KOREKOREKA
Billy and the team at Tokona Te Raki were looking to create an immersive website and video series to visualise their project, Te Korekoreka. The aim was to create an engaging, easily digestible way to gain an understanding of the kawa and vision of Te Korekoreka. A virtual journey of sorts.
Te Korekoreka is an indigenous social innovation framework, 'A Kawa for Māori Future Making'. It is used to evolve our lives using cultural knowledge and reclaim the future making mindset of Māori ancestors, rather than the imported Western frameworks that currently exist. A guide to examine your present, learn from your past, imagine a new future, and commit to a deliberate course of action that will enable you to shift from your current reality to a better one. It has been developed from a karakia which describes four key realms of creation, displayed in the graph below. It is a cyclical system - once you move through the four realms, you return to the beginning, and can start the process again.
VISUAL DIRECTION
It was important to be curious, listen intently, and soak up every single idea to successfully translate this complex, nuanced process into a visual experience.
Overall, we wanted to create something beautiful, textural, and emotional, that people would want to experience again and again.
To reflect the cyclical nature of the process, we emphasised distinct times of day for each realm video, so while watching them in order, we move through the day, into the night and back to the morning again to restart the cycle. We also utilised circular design motifs throughout the video and website to reinforce this idea.
Our direction was heavily influenced by the ideas and feelings of Te Korekoreka itself. We used light flares, cross-fades, and played with opacity layering to create an otherworldly, ethereal feel. A soundtrack of subtle, atmospheric music and an ambient soundscape added to this feel, and helped the viewer connect to the storytelling.
The colour was inspired by Tokona Te Raki’s existing brand palette. The primary palette for the website consisted of subtly contrasting warm and cool purple tones. Purple is associated with wisdom, creativity, imagination, spirituality, and mystery, which felt fitting for Te Korekoreka. We then assigned a bright accent colour to represent each realm, one that suited the themes and imagery within it.
Te Korekoreka was a very collaborative creative project. We worked with rangatahi from Tokona Te Raki who became human representatives of each realm, a face and voice to guide the viewer through the videos.
VIDEO
We decided to create 6 videos to encapsulate this project:
Karakia – An abstract visualiser of the karakia that inspired Te Korekoreka.
Pūrākau – Dr Hana O’Regan and Dr Eruera Tarena explain the origins, development, and importance of Te Korekoreka, giving the viewer an overview of the project in a short time frame.
The Four Realms – Delving deeper into the process of Te Korekoreka by breaking down the four key realms. Through colour, soundscape, imagery, time, and location we were able to create a distinct aesthetic that supports the themes and storytelling of each realm, as listed below.
Te Ao Tūroa (Current State)
Intention: Knowing, doing, reviewing
Feeling: Tangible, bustling, chaotic, loud, monotonous
Key environment: Central city
Sound: City traffic, talking, children playing, typing, phone ringing
Time of Day: Afternoon
Te Kore (Insights)
Intention: Seeking, reflecting, understanding
Feeling: Enclosed, introspective, uncertain, refreshing
Key environment: Native bush
Sound: Wind through trees, water trickling, birds chirping, cicadas
Time of Day: Dusk
Te Pō (Innovation)
Intention: Imagining, designing, making
Feeling: Expansive, imaginative, dreamy, limitless
Key environment: Beach bonfire
Sound: Fire crackling, talking, ocean waves, pencil on paper
Time of Day: Midnight
Te Ao Mārama (Future State)
Intention: Achieving, celebrating, completing
Feeling: Clear, confident, optimistic, prosperous
Key environment: Port Hills
Sound: Morning birdsong, gentle chatter, birds flying, footsteps
Time of Day: Morning
WEBSITE
Once we had created the video assets, we needed to create a place for them to be accessed and properly experienced. The Te Korekoreka website needed to be an informative, immersive and intuitive - a guided digital journey.
We achieved this by splitting the website into three key sections – The Origins, The Experience and About The Creators. ‘The Origins’ page displayed practical information about the project’s development and purpose, and ‘The Creators’ page held information about Tokona Te Raki and their collaborators. ‘The Experience’ page is where the majority of the video content is held, the more immersive experience of Te Korekoreka.
Interesting features of the site include bilingual menu items which change from Te Reo to English on hover, and multiple sections of gifs or short clips to incorporate more motion and connection to our videos throughout the site.
In a full circle moment, we finally returned to Te Korekoreka's original format: print. A 20 page deep dive, redesigned to align with the refreshed creative direction.
Behind the scenes of 'Te Korekoreka'