Wednesday 5/2/20 - The Final Evaluation

Overall this project has proved to be my favourite both in topic and in terms of my creativity and ideas generation. This is because I am able to cover topics and issues I feel really passionate about, it makes my work feel more personal compared to the last two projects. It is also because I have always had an interest in art related to propaganda, specifically those meant to undermine or mimic it but with a more moral intent. One artist in particular who I’ve always admired for this is Banksy, I love the style of his work and how he goes about doing it, especially because of the message behind it. Another reason this project really appeals to me is due to the workshops that have allowed me to learn new skills that I want to make us of in the rest of this project and the final project.

Throughout this project I have been constantly writing down my ideas and trying to make concepts and designs of them. In-between different assignments and tasks I made blog posts to show my thoughts. I felt a strong need to have a representation of what I wanted to achieve by the end of this and to plan ahead of time so I was ahead of my work. It also shows the development of my ideas over time and how I changed them, something important to myself.

My ideas have changed a fair amount since the start of the project. Originally, I wanted to create posters with the intent to have them vandalised, to see how people react and what they would do to vandalise them. I wanted to give people masks to wear at random in the university and take photos of them blended in with the public. Whilst I liked the idea of these, they didn't coincide with our set task for the project. I developed these ideas into ones that I feel are better and fit the specifications, focusing even more on the topics I feel passionate about. Thanks to the planning and ideas generation I did, it left me with a strong idea of where I wanted to go with the project and what I wanted for the final posters. It has also allowed me to think about the final project and start planning for it, I already have a set idea in mind ahead of time thanks to my previous planning.

This project had multiple tasks and workshops throughout before we actually made our posters. It all started by looking at recreating fairytales and creating fake news articles. The fairytales were a really fun but creative start. I came up with the idea to re-brand three little pigs to a dark story of communist Russia and the Soviet Union. I had fun with this but still kept serious themes and ideas related to the project. I did the same with my fake news article that claimed climate change didn't exist, going as far to poke fun at common arguments against climate change.

We then moved onto the coppafeel and breast cancer awareness campaign, what really motivated me for this was that these weren't just for practice in making posters and advertisements. These had the chance to actually be used by coppafeel. I used this as the chance to get practice with poster idea generation using influences from different advertisements and the pre-existing posters from coppafeel. In the end I was happy with what I made, they had plenty of room for improvement but were a good effort considering the skills I have and the tools I had access to.

Next was the workshop on foley and creating our sandwich boards. Foley really interested me as a subject because it's something I could use in future work and the final project. The workshop gave me a chance to learn what goes into foley and skills for future reference. Whilst the video I made from this workshop wasn't amazing, I had experience which I want to use in the final project.

The sandwich boards gave me an opportunity to create my first poster concept. I went through multiple ideas and designs but in the end I made something that I felt relatively pleased with. It was scruffy but that was a stylistic choice, because I didn't have enough time to create a very professional and clean look I went for something more homemade and chaotic. Though I would have put more detail into it if I was going to use it for the final poster. This also gave me a chance to think about typography and font choice, I went with more modern fonts because I felt they best fit my ideas. I want my work to be clear and simple, not too fanciful.

One of the final workshops before moving onto the posters was one that helped us with designing the graphics, typography and placement for our posters. This was something that really helped me because I had to work with set prompts and still managed to create coherent posters despite some of the weirder combinations. It gave me good insight into what I'd be creating. This involved using photo-shop to make quick posters based on prompts.

There were two other workshops however I didn't feel as if these helped me in my propaganda work nor did I feel too pleased with the outcome of my work from it. One was life drawing, this time with a male model. It gave me practice on anatomy and using analogue, whilst I was happy with it I did notice many ways I could have improved. The other was a 3D analogue workshop, this didn't particularly help me as most of the work I made was of low standard. I felt that the workshop didn't really teach me much in the end.

As to the final posters, I put a lot of effort into creating these. I used different aspects of the workshops I had learned over the term in these posters. I chose to do this because I wanted to move out of my comfort zone, instead of relying on what I am used to I wanted to use relatively new methods. This included after effects, digital drawing, typography, foley and video editing. In fact, this was the first project that involved zero photography. The outcome was something I felt proud of, it is clear I took inspiration from my work throughout and I made good use of what I had learned. However, there are multiple aspects where I feel that the work isn't a high quality though that was a risk I knew would happen when stepping away from photography. Most of it is down to my experience, I hope in future to be able to refine and improve these skills as I enjoyed using them in my work. However, I felt that it was a success.

For my final project, I plan on making almost a continuation of my work from this project. I want to focus on the issues I looked at and the idea of propaganda. Though I am aiming to make this bigger than before and continue to step out of my comfort zone with how I go about making my work. One of my main goals for this project was to be different but I don't feel fully satisfied with that so far. I want to go further with mine and I want to use it as an excuse to get better at different skills or learn new ones.