Blog 3: Project Outcome and personal development
I am convinced that every new experience leads to more knowledge and personal growth for every individual. I also believe that this was the case for myself during Better Lives. The course I have chosen for Better Lives was Fashion Activism. Starting the course made me feel both nervous and excited. Excited, because I could meet new people from different courses and nervous, because I did not know what the group work would be like. During our course I had the possibility to learn more about the role of a Creative Director. Creative Direction can be described as a process of interaction, where Art and Design meet Strategy. In essence, Creative Direction is visual communication.
The purpose of my course was to create a fashion film for a specific brand. Fashion videos are used to tell a story, which is communicated for instance through sound, effects, typography, style, clothes and more. For creating the fashion film our course was divided into groups and given a brand. As a group, we researched the brand’s aesthetic, ethos and positioning to develop ideas for our video. The brand of my group was Nubian Skin. Nubian Skin is a lingerie brand that was founded, because there was a lack of skin-tone choices for women of colour. The idea behind Nubian Skin is to empower and embrace women of colour. Before the holidays, we pursued the idea of filming the video outside, in nature. However, this idea turned out to be quite difficult to implement due to the current situation of crisis that made it impossible for us to go back to university and meet in person. Therefore, the only way to communicate was digitally. It was a rather difficult and stressful situation since the deadline for the submission of our fashion film was rapidly approaching. Finally, we came up with the idea of making a moving image. For the moving image we used neutral colours and images of models presented on the brand’s Website and Social Media page. Strikingly, for us, even though the brand focuses on diversity, there was a lack of male models in the campaign. This is the reason why we came up with the idea of creating a film showing men and women equally.
Working on the project in a group was definitely a great experience. I enjoyed meeting people from different courses, who not only had different ideas and views on specific aspects, but who also had different skills. For instance, one of our groupmates had great Photoshop and InStyle skills that were useful for creating the film.
As stated before, our task met with the obstacle of us not being able to work together, which is normally essential for group work. Overcoming this obstacle made me realize that every difficulty can be solved. I definitely believe that Better Lives made me grow as an individual and engage more with the Better Lives themes. Furthermore, through creating this fashion film I understood how to communicate these themes and create a story for a specific brand. All in all, it was inspiring getting an insight into the work as a Creative Director.
Here you can find our fashion film:
10th May 2020 @ 9:31 am
I had a chance to look at several different blogs and every single student had a lot to say. For my final blog, I decided to review Nicole’s blog which certainly caught my attention. In her blog, she discusses her impressions and personal experiences as well as knowledge and personal growth. She describes her interaction with fellow students and the way she communicated her ideas as well as mentioning the importance of sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. There, she makes a statement that “Creative Direction is visual communication”.
First of all, she explains in detail the purpose of a fashion film and how it can be communicated. She then analyses her group’s strategy and the way their research was done. I think it is vital to be able to discuss every stage of the process and Nicole does it very well. However, she managed to successfully talk through difficulties she had to challenge within their group and how important it was to keep the communication on the same level as it was before the current crisis. Secondly, by exploring and developing ideas for the project, she contributed with numerous propositions and developed creative attributes by rapidly approaching the fashion film. I like her honest and transparent approach and how openly she discusses her personal development and growth as a contributor to the group’s assigned brand. As a creative individual, she reflected fully on the themes of sustainability and social responsibility, especially diversity by creating the link to the brand and the outcome.
It is undeniably an important part of creative practice – an ability to talk freely about the struggles and mistakes. I think her blog combines both positive and negative sides of working in a group, which is normal for a new experience like this. During the course, she mostly engaged with theme of diversity by explaining how essential it was for the brand “Nubian Skin”. Eventually, the outcome echoes the current situation with COVID-19 and the film provided me with an ability to dive into a range of skills and themes, which were presented.
Finally, I think Nicole managed to give an in-depth and detailed blog, explaining her refection and contribution. She gives a nice explanation about the development of their film, which successfully covers and represents diversity and social responsibility. Perhaps, if more time was given, she could look more into sustainability and how “Nubian Skin” could improve their product. All in all, I think the creation of the film was very much a success.
10th May 2020 @ 5:31 pm
Looking at the range of blogs available to reflect on I realised a lot of students had a range of opinions and approaches to this unit which I found very intriguing when finding a post to comment on. Nicole’s blog was the one to grab my attention when scrolling through, her blog doesn’t only reflect on the project outcomes, but it also reflects on her personal experience with the better lives themes within the unit and within her actual discipline.
I personally like how she has started with how she originally felt about starting the new unit as I can personally relate to her feelings as she said she felt ‘excited’ but also nervous at the same time. She then went on to explain her role in the project which was the creative director and how this gave her lots of opportunity to learn more about this particular role.
Nicole, then went on to explain in depth about the purpose of fashion film and how it has great importance and how it communicates ideas to the audiences. In terms of reading this and not having much of an idea about fashion activism and fashion film she has done a great job of explain each stage of creating a fashion in depth which has given me a wide picture of the process of creating a fashion film.
Furthermore, Nicole has nicely put together an idea of the positive things they faced during the project and also the negative impact of things such as Covid-19 and how they overcame that and still found a way to produce this sort of media for their project. From reading her blog I have gathered that she has mainly focused on the idea of diversity in terms of Better Lives themes, this is because her team have created a film for the brand ‘Nubian Skin’ which would be a major theme that the brand focusses on as well as sustainability.
Overall, I think that Nicole has managed to create a great blog post that goes into lots of depth and is very detailed based around her reflection of the unit and also her personal contribution to the group projects outcome. In terms of the project itself, given the unfortunate circumstances of Covid-19 that we have all have to adapt to in this unit, they have done a really good job. However, in terms of constructive criticism I would agree with other comments that Nicole could’ve gone into more detail and look more deeply into the theme of sustainability as I would imagine this also being a hugely important area for the brand ‘Nubian Skin’ to focus on in such a quickly developing industry, but overall this project, from my point of view, seems to have been a good success for this team.