Blog Post Three

The better lives themes: diversity, social responsibility and sustainability were the core of the project, with my specific brief being to create a character that developed and showed a story based around the better lives themes. The recommended adaptations were to look at evolution as a form of diversity, ecological balance for sustainability and personal identity for social responsibility, creating characters around those topics as we established makeup and prosthetic techniques, learning professional standard finishes of the makeup. I intended to create a piece exploring diversity, forming a character around evolution. I began researching Rick Baker’s work on the Planet of the Apes, studying the ways in which he used prosthetics in order to transform actors into apes.

I began to like the idea of creating a character that shows the evolution and adaption of diversity through a series of photographs, perhaps to be used in a campaign. As I began developing and exploring my idea more thoroughly, I had to move back to the North East of England because of COVID19, generating issues surrounding my project. Due to my location, I no longer had access to the resources required to develop and finish this project. I have had to adjust my project in order to allow for the better lives brief to be fulfilled: using my creative thinking to allow myself to interact with the project, completing research on techniques and using the online resources provided by my lecturers to complete my briefs. I also have been reflecting on techniques taught in workshops, practising these skills in order to further my personal development in the project. As I have been completing the work around my blog posts, I have been reflecting further on the better lives themes linking them to the lectures I attended, the work I completed in the workshops and my project. For example, the work I completed during the distortion of the face workshop closely relates to the representation lecture delivered by Teleica Kirkalnd that I reflected on in my first blog post. The techniques I learnt and makeup I completed could be used to show the social responsibility we have to represent the whole of the general public as we enter the creative world, by ensuring we incorporate all types of people in our work, these being all ages, all genders, all disabilities and all ethnicities, whilst also guaranteeing we represent them not only fully but correctly and, therefore, allowing for the celebration of diversity. I plan to continue to allow myself to reflect on the better lives themes, taking them forward with me into my general practise and ensuring I always consider them throughout the creative process of developing a project. Furthermore, I recognise my own responsibility as a young person only just entering the creative industry to allow and encourage my learning to shift from it’s current academic context to one of applied practise, always making an effort to carry what I have been taught throughout this specific project with me in all of my future work.