FINAL APPRAISAL
OUPH503 - RESPONSIVE APPRAISAL – INDENTITY IN THE CITY KATIE BEALEY
For this brief I had to create a minute long moving image piece paired with a minimum collection of eight images. I chose Identity In The City as my brief title and decided to make this project personal to me, which I have never done before with my work. It touched into what I’m going through in my life at the moment, it doesn’t show it obviously in the video, but the purpose for my idea derived from my current situation.
At first I found it hard to think of an idea, as cinematography was completely alien to me, I knew I needed to do quite a lot of research for my creativity to come out properly.
The research part for this task was a big part in how I came to find my idea. I always find doing some work that isn’t as related to my current project helps my mind to flow through all the ideas properly.
I used the trip to New York to really push my research forward, as the brief was orientated around city as a theme, I found exploring NY very helpful in motivating my work. I have never been confident with street photography, yet the trip really pushed me forward into that genre and I’m actually very proud of the work I achieved while out there.
Collaborating with a Graphic Design student (Alex Robertson) really helped me express my research in the right way. I enjoyed every part of working with him, as it gave me more of an insight into the production of publications. I was a bit nervous at first about approaching the recruitment for what I wanted but once he’d responded it was so easy to discuss through what we both wanted to achieve with the publication (HAVAGANDA). From this year publications have been a real inspiration to me and have influenced my work a lot. Doing this collaboration has made me realise printed photography journals are something I definitely want to pursue after and through uni.
HAVAGANDA is something that I’ve had on the side of uni for about 3 months now, I enjoy doing the work set at uni however I like giving my mind a bit of a rest with being told what to do and just expressing my creative juices the way I want to. It started on Tumblr and now expanded to Instagram, these two are the best tools to promote photographers work. This will hopefully get me noticed and lead to bigger things.
The module was the first time using Premier Pro, when I first tried it out in the tutorial I found it really hard to get the hang of so I went to ask help from an Animator student (Max Ardron) as I knew Animators use the program a lot to produce their work. He gave me loads of tips and shortcuts that helped me tremendously and aided me get the hang of the software really quickly after that. Even though Max had helped me I still wanted to practice quite a bit as this was the first time I would be submitting work from a medium that is completely unfamiliar to me. This is why I decided to produce the video showing the process of the publication I collaborated with Alex to make. After creating this video it helped me run-through all of my skills and prepared me for the quality I needed my final outcome to meet.
I think my display of research and the final idea went well. Technically looking at the video I’m sure people would find things they would change, like the shots where the camera is looking through the misted dirty window, however these were chosen on purpose to show the truth of what my eyes actually see, so I thought it worked perfectly with what I was going for, through the eyes of a student. The only thing I would have changed would be the angling of the tripod when filming for the night-time part of my movie, I think it still works but I could have just gotten a little more of a birds-eye-view to see all the different dynamics between people clearly. The only reason I couldn’t achieve this properly was because at last minute my tripod tilt broke so I had to improvise and set a weight on the back leg with the front two legs shortened to create the downwards shot I needed. I feel I came over this problem well.
My time management in this brief was really good and the best it’s been throughout my whole university education. I got all the practical work done and printed two weeks before the hand in which meant I had loads of time to do extra work and make sure my blog was exactly how I wanted it to be, this allowed for any problems or implications to be solved easily.
Overall I feel this module went really smoothly, I got all my work done way in advance and producing the extra work (publication collaboration) helped spur me on to achieve a high quality outcome. I found this project challenging as it’s something I have never done before but after learning new skills with Premier Pro and booking binding I definitely want include these new skills in my future projects. I tried book binding before in my Specialist Photography Practice but as it was my first time the quality didn’t come out the way I had wanted, from this I learned from my mistakes and created something I’m really proud of this time. Collaborating with different students really helped my work output and I would definitely do this in my projects from now on. I loved all of my final outcomes in this assignment because I made them personal to my life situation at the moment and would definitely want to use them in a portfolio in the future.