Reflective Blog

The better lives unit allowed us to learn and expand our knowledge on topics such as diversity, sustainability, culture appropriation, social responsibility, my chosen topic was creative direction I am glad that I chose creative direction as my focus because it allowed me to learn new creative skills that I can utilise in my future careers with creating content for brands. We learnt a variety of things that came under the creative direction umbrella, creative direction is the intersection where art and design meet. Creative direction equals visual communication, it was interesting to learn how to understand a brands aesthetic through products, collections, logos, fonts, graphic design and website design. Also understanding a brands positioning such as their customers and target consumers, competitors, engagement and communication with customers, pen portrait and positioning map. Working on the project with my group was eye opening because I got to see first hand how people interpret things differently, an example of this was when we all were played the same sound in the sound and image lecture but yet came up with completely different things, exploring this creative practise allowed me to be more empathetic because when it comes to other people’s perspectives they may not see things the way I do so I now will think about how somebody else will interpret the things I create. 
When it came to creating our project we decided to give a chance to everyone to contribute their ideas because our goal was to produce as many ideas as possible. We not only listened to all the ideas carefully but we also built and expanded each other’s ideas and then we mentioned it on all the ideas sheet so we don’t forget them or they don’t get lost. After we gathered a large number of ideas we categorized and examined them. Then we chose some ideas among all of them. Then we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. We also asked group members to vote for ideas that helped us to eliminate some of them. Moreover based on this voting we rank the ideas in priority order and then finalized them but due to the pandemic creating our project was difficult as the majority of our ideas involved parks and nature and as none of us are familiar with shooting videos we had hoped to get advice from the media team but unfortunately due to the pandemic we were unable to meet up to make this happen. This made me realise the importance of starting things as soon as possible and having more of a variety of content ideas because you never know what could happen, although we brainstormed our ideas and had a plan of what we wanted to do we could of shot content before the pandemic but we thought we would of had time. However the situation we are in forced us to think on our feet and really think outside the box and so I am happy with the outcome. We chose to make a simple video focusing on the creation of the brand, we did this by using found footage.