Evaluation

Communication Technology has been a learning journey for me which is what the brief was designed to do. I have realised that I do actually have somewhat of a key focus, although it may not be immediately recognisable from looking at my blog. In this evaluation I hope to explain my understanding of what happened thoroughly and clearly in a way that I can read back in future and refer to.

First I need to talk about my crisis around the interim crit. At that point I thought I didn’t understand what was needed of me and that I was failing the module by not documenting enough. Through the summer I thought I would start the year by learning technical drawing, but what I learnt from doing some life drawing, perspective drawing and figure drawing was that providing I keep doing it, I will learn to draw well over time. This suits my learning style, which is through repetition, whether it’s hand rendering or learning a new computer based design program. While sitting and drawing for a while most days I’d become involved with the Students Union, I had been contributing to Active Arts too and it had also come that a few students were wanting to start a life drawing society. I was trying to be involved in all these things. I sought help from tutors and friends after the crit and two things were said that helped me. One idea was to blog everything I was doing and how I was learning from it, so I began to do that although I kept it to things where I was learning new, practical skills. The second thing I was told was that I was spreading myself too thin and that I needed to gain a sort of focus in order to intensify my learning experience.

By looking back over my blog, I realise collaboration is a key concept for me and in this brief I have been observing and researching how disparate technologies are used to help people in different socio-economic groups reach self-actualization.

I came to this conclusion by analysing my initial approach. While I enjoy sitting and drawing on my own, I could not motivated enough to produce a huge body of work simply for my own individual drawing practice. When it came to working with other people however, I had all the time in the world. After realising that, I began to tell people that I enjoy drawing, painting, making and collaborative projects. I rang several people asking for volunteer work and they got back to me saying that they had projects I could work on with them. Networking then, is a key skill that I must tap into in order to grow.

It might seem like I was approaching projects in a curious and opportunistic way and maybe I was, but I have learnt the value of that approach. By disallowing myself any sort of editorial role until later on in the brief, I made sure my own prejudices and expectations weren’t able to interfere with the collaborative focus of my approach.

A good way to explain my learning process would be to go through my blog explaining the process I went through as I see it.

Perspective drawing was hard but I got to grips with the basics in the end through reading about the theory and having several discussions with tutors and friends. Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Google Sketch Up, colour work, costume drawing and figure drawing as well will all develop gradually through necessity and / or repetition and through applying the theory behind it. This back and forth process of academic and practical study has been useful to me and certainly speeds up my development and helps to prevent my practice becoming stale.

The days I spent at Inkwell Arts and Blaize Community arts were a start in realising what I really value in terms of collaborative arts. I enjoyed learning with a group at Blaize’ animation workshops and came away having taught a group and bettered my own understanding on stop-frame animation. I helped empower a group of Asian kids to use art and communication technology to express their views on bullying, which was their agenda not mine. Inkwell was different in that I was networking with established artists about their own creative practice and possible volunteering oppertunities, but in an environment related to mental health and my old job in a psychiatric ward. Going back to that environment from a creative standpoint and really trying to help was something that drove me to apply to university.

The ideas of networking, collaboration and developing my own personal practice came together when I did a two day job with Clockwork Eye Productions. I learnt camera, lighting and set design skills and had the opportunity to employ and improve my own image composition skills through the direction I was given.

Working with Active Arts has been a good learning experience too. What was particularly good for own practice was using InDesign to create a proposal in PDF format to sell our group to the Leeds Love Arts Festival. It worked too. We completed the two days workshops in the middle of Leeds indoor market and we drew attention from the local community. However, I don’t feel like Active Arts is a group I can devote too much time to anymore as I need to spend my time focusing on my own practice. By that, I mean I need to start taking control and focusing on collaborating with people who have skills I am really interested in.

The only time I have taken an editorial role is during an on-going process setting up a life drawing society with the Students Union. It has been testing my organisational skills in a way that a passive role wouldn’t and it has pushed me into networking with the college Human Resources department. The creative- bureaucratic collaboration has been interesting. Firstly, I approached it from an aggressive angle. I got other students involved and we put together a proposal which explained why this would be beneficial to us all and it didn’t work. They presented me with their own problems with the set-up of the society and I set out to solve them. Now, as a creative group, we are trying to solve the problems they present us with until there aren’t any left.

In conclusion I will repeat that By looking back over my blog, I realise collaboration is a key concept for me and in this brief I have been observing and researching how disparate technologies are used to help people in different socio-economic groups reach self-actualisation.

My plan now is to join onto a project with a set designer for a week, who is building back drops for a Shakespeare production in County Durham. I have also been asked to come with a way of making a room in an old factory look damp and mouldy. These two projects relate to set design and are definitely collaborative projects. In the project in County Durham I will be learning some new skills in set making and in the second project I will be using those skills to aid a film maker. 

I believe that collaborative learning is a strength of mine and that it is a valuable process when done well, not only for myself but for all the individuals involved.

LIfe Drawing Society Meeting 1 - 02/11/2011

Today we had a meeting for The Leeds College of Art Life Drawing Society.
We are trying to meet Human Resources requirements of a demonstration that we can be responsible adults and represent the college to FE students and life drawing models with minimum risk of anything going wrong.

Through the Facebook group weve had a few good ideas for additions to the proposal to HR which have been added to the proposal. To me this means the facebook group is working and a collaboration of ideas managed by a small group is going well.

The meeting minutes were posted to everyone in the groups email accounds to keep them up to date.

 We also discovered that Lester has an interest in politics and diplomacy so he has drafted up a proposal for how the group will elect people for positions and keep running by electing members from FE and those just starting in HE.


As requested by HR I read through the college Health and Safety policy and refined to a form thats more easily readable, excluding parts that arent immediately applicable to the environment of a life drawing society

I am learning a lot of different skills here, I've arranged a meeting, read college policy, spoken to college authorities, responded to their requests and kept a dialogue with them going, I've collaborated with other students and still continue to do so. Although these are mainly social and beurocratic skills, the aim result is to provide an oppertunity for myself and the whole college to improve on their drawing skills.

Leeds Love Arts / Active Arts - Indoor Market Workshops

 

 

So the stall was set up in the indoor market and people came to take part in crafts.  There was limited attention but overall it went well. There was a few people who came back to see us a couple of times and several people who stayed for over an hour. The banner with "What makes you happy?" tags on it went down well as it was something people could do in 30 seconds. We had a good team making felt animals which seemed to draw attention along with several folk who made posters. I'm apprehensive about Active Arts carrying on when Lana goes to Peru but I will do my best to get in contact with people who are already running large scale projects across Leeds and pushing for a space for Active Arts to run similar workshops. This seemed to work well, adapting Active Arts to fit along with the values of Leeds Love Arts.

Leeds Love Arts - Active Arts Proposal

I realise I didnt write about this at the time but its worth noting I learnt a bit about writing a proposal for an arts project and put it together on InDesign. This is the result.

The proposal contains our aims as a group, why we do what we do, how we do what we do and what we plan to do for the already existing Leeds Love Arts mental health festival.

This was taken from an online guide on how to write a creative proposal. I worked quite hard on making the 2 pages look right using layout techniques I learnt at level 4. I think it all lines up and looks neat as a composition. This was sent off to TestSpace and they reacted well to it but ended up asking us how intended to create revenue from it after telling us they were a not for profit organisation so we went else where.

Leeds Love Arts helped us out by putting us in contact with a man at the market place who gave us a free space to run our workshops.

We pick up the keys on monday the 31st and run the workshops on the 1st and 2nd of November.

Lana Johnson has put together the schedule and organised the people who will be supervising the workshops.

Anne Marie Hurst and the Skeletal Family shoot - Clockwork Eye Productions

My freind Danny asked if I could help with 2 days of shooting for a band called the Skeletal Family in a warehouse in Keighley. I figured I would learn some new skills in set design, lightning and camera work so I said yes.

We filmed 13 music videos all in the same room but the aim was to get every music video looking different using a mix of camera technique, lighting, a smoke machine and set design.


We overcame this problem by using quite a lot of close ups for a start. We redesigned the room several times. For one shoot we covered the floor with candles and shot with one camera from the floor up and one from above waist height forward.


For one video we shot from the ceiling down with close ups of the band behind. For one we backlit the band with powerfull floor standing lights called redheads and filled the room with smoke and so forth...

I learnt how to use a hand held HD camera and about white balancing.
White balancing is where you film a white piece of paper in the lighting you are going to be working under and press the white balance button on the camera, this tells the camera that under this light, this is white.

Smokey room, red lighting + candles

Hanging lights from the ceiling, using a crossbar and climbing hooks.

The powerful Redheads backlighting

Danny between the two red heads.

Mental Health day at Inkwell, Chapel Allerton

I went to Inkwell in Chapel Allerton which is a community arts space. I went there to volounteer for Leeds Love Art Mental Health festival. I met a bloke there called Steve Willingham who is a Leeds Based artist who produces these paintings. He works in a similar medium to me in that he uses fine liners, paint markers and inks. Ive posted this as something to aim towards in line work and symmetry which I struggle with.

I also spoke to the folk who run the venue with the idea of volounterring for them, which they said was definitely ok. I would be working in place with some fairly great resources. They have a kiln and produce some great models. They also have a lot of painters who go there. The venue is for people with mental health problems to go and create art in a community.

The only problem was that the days for volounterring fall on thursday and friday when I am busy with college. I'm going to contact them again after christmas.

Blaize Community Arts - Stop frame animation

Did an animation workshop at glusburn institute. I was working but spent most of the time doing my own animation which ill post up soon. I worked with plastecine, a stock background using iStopmotion and final cut pro. It was good fun but the point was to teach people to be creative with stop motion animation... I'm not an expert but with Blaize's kit its dead easy. Look at the pictures!

I learnt to use Istopmotion which is a very basic bit of software. Its very effective though. We were working with HD cameras mounted and point vertically or horizontally at a piece of blue paper. We then used chroma key to put backgrounds behind what we animated.

I also worked with a group of 15/16 year old helping them to make theirs.

This is the one I made

This workshop was a good experience for me as I may be taking this project on in the future as Blaize community arts have been asked by the arts council to start training up young people to manage their projects.

Blaize have become well established and successful by paying attention to what the Arts Council want to see in community arts and playing to those needs. This is an important thing to learn if I want to be a community artists.