Blog post 3: Project outcome & personal reflection
Throughout this unit, I have learnt the importance of diversity, sustainability and social responsibility and I have learnt how to apply it within my experiences within the fashion industry. For the project, my group and I were tasked with creating a moving image for the brand ‘Nubian Skin’. Nubian Skin is a brand that provides underwear, or rather ‘shape wear’ for all body and skin types. We decided that we wanted to focus on diversity as an umbrella topic, and since the brand ethos and values targeted body diversity as well as racial diversity we felt we could elaborate on the same through our moving image.
Our group consisted of six people and our idea creation process was relatively simple. We all researched and learnt more about the brand in general before we began writing ideas down on paper. The initial idea consisted of our group members being given different tasks in relation to models, set design, make-up, etc and we were planning to create a video advertisement/promotional campaign for the brand. This plan seemed appealing to us because we collectively wanted to create original content and our main aim was to create content that we could share with others, even beyond our classroom; hence we wanted to create something from scratch. Even though we had never worked with each other before, I found it surprisingly easy to suggest things or provide an opinion on someone else’s thoughts. We came up with multiple ideas and decided that we would all individually work on sample videos to see whether anyone had any interesting concepts of their own, and then go on to share and collaborate for the final video. Our process was very fluid and I was content with the way things were moving, we were not stagnant as a group. However, due to the interruption of our academic year and all of us having to work remotely, we felt the need to come up with something that we could all work on alone, and just have one person put all the pieces together. I definitely considered this to be a setback as living in different timezones made it slightly more difficult for us to coordinate and collaborate on this project. The fact that we were in different countries did play a part in our overall pace, because we were sometimes unable to connect as a whole group for 24 hours and that hindered the development process. During our initial brainstorming in class, one of our team members, a fashion illustration student, created a doodle and sketch on top of one of the photos from the brands’ instagram page. All of us really liked that concept and decided to emphasise on that by creating a series of similar images, and showing the process of the doodle within the GIF. We focused on bringing our strengths to this project, and I opted to create an Instagram layout for the GIFs so that we could have a clearer picture of how it would look on their actual Instagram feed. However, I feel that I would have been able to contribute differently to this project if we were not facing this current predicament, as I know that I would have had more equipment and space to create and experiment freely. Despite these many constraints, I personally feel that our group was able to communicate and emulate the better lives theme of ‘diversity’ within our moving image effectively.
28th April 2020 @ 8:43 pm
Blog 4: Peer review
I am reviewing Natasha’s blog 3-
https://1920betterlivessmc.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2020/04/26/blog-post-3-project-outcome-personal-reflection/
I liked your third blog post on your project outcome as you spoke from a creative direction aspect as opposed to my styling project outcome. However, the two fields are related massively especially regarding the Better Lives themes so I saw some connections between our project outcomes hence why I found your blog really interesting.
Throughout my better lives blogs I found that I focused mainly on sustainability over the other themes, mainly out of interest and I found it related most to what I had been researching, so I really enjoyed and found it interesting how you focused predominantly on diversity in the fashion industry and within your project on the brand ‘Nubian Skin’, as you got a more in depth understanding of the theme. I think if this piece of work was to be larger it would be insightful to delve more into how the brand you were researching involved sustainable and socially responsible practices alongside diversity. Maybe you could mention if Nubian Skin is an ethical brand, are the materials sustainable?
You made a really compelling connection between diversity and Nubian Skin as the brand message is about body and racial diversity which I think would result in a great creative campaign- you mentioned set design, makeup and models, this would be a great opportunity to incorporate the Better Lives themes and creating a message to the brands target audience about its ethos.
You spoke at the end of your blog how your group encountered setbacks around creating and completing your project due to working remotely and in different time zones- I think this could work out positive as teams get to work out how to collaborate digitally considering this could be how some brands work from now on after the pandemic.
Overall I think your blog clearly reflects how you explored your better lives project and I like how you discussed your challenges and how you overcame them.