Blog Post 3: Project Outcomes and Personal Development Reflection
As the fashion activism lectures revealed, it is closely associated with creative direction. As a result, we were briefed to create a moving image for a brand that we were given. Our team got Traid, which is a second hand charity store.What I particularly enjoyed about this brand is that they put big emphasis on helping charities, lower carbon footprint and a big part of their profit goes towards helping to improve working conditions in clothing factories. Furthermore Traid picks up 3000 tones of clothes from landfill every year. However, we noticed that Traid doesn’t have the best visual communication and marketing. This is expected of charity stores as they heavily rely on volunteers. In order to improve Traid’s visual communication, we adopted a more contemporary approach that should bring wider and younger audience.
After studying Traid’s ethos, positioning and aesthetics, we decided to make a short fashion film combining sustainable and non-sustainable runway with the four earth elements to further highlight how essential it is to be eco-friendly especially in times like these. By using the DIY aesthetics, we created a 90s inspired video with a contemporary mix and overlaying screens which should attract a younger audience and prove that second hand clothes are fashionable too. Combining the video with a fast paced music creates a powerful atmosphere which allows the message about sustainability to be put forward to the audience. Overall, I am very happy with how the video turned out and how the team came together online to put this together. This project gave me an opportunity to work with students across different subjects, which further highlighted what creative direction is all about.
By learning about creative direction for the last few months, I started to unveil what makes a brand recognisable and how to pick up on what aesthetics, ethos and positioning each brand has. It was crucial for me to understand how brand stays relevant, how brand’s identity is created and then preserved and how to correctly engage and communicate with the costumers. As a result, my work as a makeup artist from now on will be more researched with a deep understanding of what the brand is trying to say. Fundamentally, the ideas that I would present to the brand will be catering to the brand’s needs with emphasis on sustainability, diversity and social responsibility as Better Lives have taught me. Furthermore, we learned how to work with different typography, sound and different editing platforms. Thanks to Adobe’s support in this uncertain times, I have the chance to learn new skills at home which I can later use in my practice. At times like these, makeup artists and hair stylists need to work remotely from home, so perhaps for the next few months we will need to edit our work alone, and thus I am very thankful for the skills that I learned during this unit.
In conclusion, creative direction was a great choice as it perfectly links to my artistry and gave me essential skills to become a well educated and relevant practitioner.
Here is a link to our Traid video https://artslondon.sharepoint.com/teams/TRAID/Shared%20Documents/General/Traid.mp4