Monday 22/10/18
'There is no easy way of becoming a good painter.' -Joshua Reynolds
Do you think analysing the words of the sentence you were given helped you come up with ideas? If so, how?
Yes, although at first I did not think this would help my group and I come up with ideas I think analysing the text we were given helped us reflect on the meaning of the sentence more and it broadened our ideas of possible outcomes or different ways of exploring the themes.
Trying to understand why someone would say that sentence also initiated conversations around the ideas of talent vs. skill and if, in order to be a good artist/painter, you need to have an innate talent or if you could achieve that by just working on improving your skills.
Did trying to visualise your ideas help you and your group develop your thoughts furthermore? If so, how?
Yes, I think drawing out different ideas and discussing how we could take these ideas from being 2D into 3D was the most helpful element of today's lesson because we were able to not only decide on one particular idea to pitch but we were also able to analyse and evaluate the weaknesses in our main idea and what we could possibly use as a backup in case things would not work with the first one. From visualising my ideas I think I was also able to give other people an idea of what the outcome would look like which enabled me to gather more feedback and improve it.
Tuesday 23/10/18
Today we had a group meeting with our tutor to discuss our idea further and get some constructive feedback.
Did pitching your idea help you and your group? If so, how?
Yes, I think pitching our idea really helped us understand and discuss the weak areas of the interactive piece we want to create. Especially when we discussed whether to use real money or fake money to hang on trees the feedback we got made us understand the implications of using real money more and how that changes the interaction between the audience and the piece of work.
As initially we wanted to tie the fishing wire to two objects e.g two traffic lights or two trees, one of the students said that it would be more effective if we hung the money from one tree only as we would be able to also use the phrase 'money doesn't grow on trees' to accompany the piece. I thought this was a very interesting insight which is why at the end of the day we all decided to use that idea and hang the money only from one tree.
Thursday 27/10/18
Was the filming successful?
Yes, I think the filming was successful. We tried to film the interaction from different angles such as close up of the children and their families trying to catch the money but we also mainly used a wide angle to portray the main scene and all the notes that were hanging from the tree.
Are there alternative locations that could have been better for you to use? Why?
Yes, I think an alternative location we could have chosen that might have been better could have been a place in central london near banks or perhaps places where we would have been able to interact more with adults and study their reactions instead of having mainly children. I think a more ‘formal’ location would have been better as, by changing the context of the interactive piece, we would have been able to see how people’s reactions differed from the first place (if they differed at all).
Did the project go as you expected? Did people respond as you expected?
No, the project did not really go as I expected. On the day in which my group and I were supposed to carry out the experiment/interactive piece I woke up sick and I couldn’t go and help them. This resulted in the fake notes of cash being less than we wanted them to be but nevertheless it still looked good on the tree. We were expecting more adults jumping to try and grab the money but this didn’t happen and that’s maybe because of the location but also because the money was clearly fake. Perhaps if we would’ve put some real money more people would’ve jumped to grab the money.
What would you do differently next time?
Perhaps next time we will include some real notes and try to have the interactive piece in a place where there are more people of an older age. I think this may attract more adult people to interact with the piece which would make the work more interesting.