Imagine you get a brief to develop a concept for the "9th of May, our grandfathers fought" theme.

A new look, so to speak — "a symbol of bright memory, without an emphasis on grief," without the smell of gunpowder; a sort of mono no aware, but on demand and for an exhausting occasion.

I don't have to imagine 🙂

Overriding militarism and heroics with something new is, to put it mildly, an ambitious task. The country has been saying the same words and showing the same images for more than twenty years. The ribbon itself is twenty years old. Red flags, stars, c-a-r-n-a-t-i-o-n-s.

And what do you do with that?

First, you have to settle on new keys:

• blue sky, not graves and blood
• a careful link to "the archive footage"
• memory, light sadness

Remembrance Day works roughly in that key, but it has a strong symbol — the poppy — which doesn't suit us, and there's the allusion to a wound.

Right: colour palette settled, stars removed from the foreground, thinking about the overall vibe — peaceful sky, sun, rye and wheat and all that, wildflowers where the fighting was, life goes on. We need a dried flower, a symbol of memory, something that hits you like it hits Harry Du Bois, oof!

And such a flower exists.

It's the forget-me-not.

Plant everything with forget-me-nots: blue fields merging with the sky, crystal-glass stars in the centre of the flowers (five petals, fits nicely), careful transitions through pseudo-archival footage of dried forget-me-nots from soldiers' triangular letters.

• Memory as the core message: the flower's name literally means "do not forget" — a direct reference to remembering the war generation.
• Colour symbolism: a soft blue peaceful sky, the complete opposite of blood-death-attention!
• Fragility and resilience at once: a small but stubborn flower that grows in all sorts of conditions — a metaphor for the human spirit, the "simplicity" of a wildflower.
• Plus the personal history: during the war soldiers often gave these flowers as a symbol of fidelity and a promise to remember.

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None of which, of course, will ever happen.