Blog 3: Project outcome & Personal development reflections
Within Better Lives Unit, I have attended the session of Fashion Activism in the past several months. As an outcome, my group has successfully created a gif that corresponding to collections of the brand “Nubian Skin”. At the same time of cultivating ability on demonstrating idea, I further have a deep comprehension towards theme “diversity”.
First and foremost, promoting “Nubian Skin” collection helps me in redefining the word “diversity” in a border horizon, especially in both positions of brand founder and viewers.
In order to making advertising film in conformity with its identity, history and ethos, my group did a lots of research at the first stage. Therefore, in primary research, my group successfully gathered all useful information in different aspects like publicity shots, props, model, setting and slogan. In this process, I have gradually seen how “diversity” is defined in originators’ eyes, with different body sizes in photos, with slogans of “freedom” and “different beauties”, with color palette of nude. All those visual languages soon raise my awareness towards popular stereotypes that exists Instead the brand itself, I would rather believe that “ Nubian Skin” teaches a lesson on distinguishing body inclusivity or color.
In part two, my team has converted the perspective into customers and further reflected how advertisement shaped our first impression. Group members have highlighted common concerns of guests and finally put them into outcome based on original positioning. For instance, our gif have collaborated with slogan like “Comfort in any sizes” and “Confidences for all beauties”. To developing the theme in-depth, group choose to represent conceptions of “racial diversity” that declared against stereotypes by creating our own illustrations. It is valuable for me to see how other members view “diversity” with different understandings.
Furthermore, creating gifs also strengthens my skills to transform ideas into essence. Specifically, my challenge is to added illustrated elements toward photos. In this process, I have experimented different shades, colors, lines and each impacts that applies to the page. By introducing nude colors, the illustration can directly reflect different skin tones as a whole, which implies the inclusiveness of the brand. Replicating the outline of underwear with light color helps in emphasizing the focus with a strong visual impact. Even changing the brush sizes can create different female figures with different muscularities in aesthetics. Therefore, I have learned that various combinations of drawing techniques can deliver diverse messages. Especially as a imaging maker, I should concern more about messaging’s accuracy and efficiency.
In this project, one of our strength is that we’ve leaded a good discussion and communication in group. Each members have provided a lot of ideas in order to enrich the content of final outcomes. With samples, other group members would passionately give advice for improvement.Looking back on now, better lives unit is a beneficial journey that provides to me to engage with other friends from media program. It is instructive and inspirational to see how other students have interpreted the theme with their specialized fields.
On the other hand, there are still some weaknesses existing in final outcome. One of the flaw is that my group didn’t introduce any background musics towards gif. A good song in most cases is able to attract audiences to content in the first place. For improvement, I would always remind myself to add music to video or moving image in future to invoke emotional reaction from viewers.
In short, this assignment offers me an opportunity to better take parts in better lives units. As a fashion student, better lives is not a irrelevant topic that goes far from our work since all experiments, research, brainstorming that we did in course are enriching our working style in future.
My group outcome link: “Draw my Nubian Skin”.
https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/9ae54b6e-fb0f-404e-9e59-fd7891cf6741
8th May 2020 @ 11:38 am
Peer review
A post by Xiaoqing Zhou on Fashion Activism project with a strong focus on diversity caught my interest quickly as I skimmed through countless blogposts by my peers.
What attracted me to it is the presentation of “different beauties”, a concept that demolishes the idea of beauty standard and body/racial stereotypes propelled by the globalisation of pop culture with visualisation through colour and image. It gives a sense of privacy to our depiction of what is beautiful without outside influence.
I believe it is our responsibility, as part of the society that instilled the popularised view of beauty, to be the one who disintegrate it and usher in a more open and accepting outlook towards something as subjective and personal as the the topic of beauty and confidence in one’s appearance regardless of what is perceived as conventionally attractive.