Blog 3 Project outcomes and personal development reflection- Fashion Activism Film
I and my five teammates worked on a collaboration between Lazy Oaf x Time to Change ( a mental health awareness organisation)
Sustainability
In regards to social sustainability, our aim was to eliminate the stigma of mental health, remind people that those with mental health conditions are socially equal to those without and ‘its OK not to be OK’.
Before the lockdown, our group had brainstormed some amazing ideas to communicate our message. During the lockdown, I questioned how we were going to manage to complete the task without being able to meet with each other. I realised we were going to have to forget our original plan to shoot in the underground and oxford street with the massive crowds of people! Not really something we could achieve with the UK on lockdown.
Being in isolation as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak we had to find a way to create a film using only what we had at hand. Individually we all vlogged ourselves and our homes instead, which in a way was a little more realistic and relatable. This process of quick changes and struggles has taught me to think outside the box and to problem-solve creatively.
Diversity
It was very important to get the message across that mental illness can affect anyone of any age, gender or race. I felt we were going to experience some difficulties in regards to casting; however, during a Zoom video call looking at each other, we realised we as a group are very diverse! We would model for our own film. We agreed to grab family members to be part of the video for more age diversity. But understandably not everyone feels comfortable being on camera so we weren’t able to delve much into age diversity, I did, however, include my 1-year-old brother, I think it may have given the film more of a cute factor rather than a clear message of age diversity.
What we did do successfully, however, was demonstrating everyone’s different coping mechanism, from spending time with friends/family to being alone and unwinding. We all react uniquely to everyday events, what affects one person may not affect another. ‘Time to change’ aims is to de-stigmatise different mental health conditions. I do believe we could have made the different mental health conditions clearer, it was challenging to get everyone’s ‘struggle’ clips in time to give our team member enough time to edit the final video thoroughly. Not everyone was managing to attend our zoom meetings, keeping up with the group chat or the deadlines set. The time difference between our team members made discussing our opinions on the final outcome and changing it difficult too. Furthermore, I have now learnt that the person who finalises a project must be a person who has been committed to the project from the beginning in order to ensure that the final outcome is what was discussed. Although we did all think it was a beautifully touching film and the process was enjoyable.
30th April 2020 @ 4:22 pm
Blog Post 4: Peer Review:
After going through many equally well written and thought out blog posts I decided to review Katherine Zuleta Gil’s 3rd Post. This blog post is a project reflection by her based on a film she created with her group in her Better Lives class. This film was created on the topic of Mental Health in the style of a Lazy Oaf x Time to Change – which focuses on destroying the stigma around different types of mental health.
What I really liked about Katherine’s blog post is how she structured it so that she can pay attention to all the aspects of Better Lives individually. This created a lovely flow and made it easy to focus as a reader. She explains the group’s intentions in terms of social sustainability – wanting to communicate successfully the issues with stigmatising mental health. She then goes on to explain how she and her group worked around the intervention of the Coronavirus and reworked their plan to be suitable to work from remote locations. This was personally something I related to in considering all our (LCF students) current projects that were initially supposed to be collaborative and have now been reworked to be remotely manageable, causing a lot of us difficulty in reworking our initial plans.
Katherine then moves onto discussing the topic of diversity in her project. She recognises not only the need for ethnic diversity but age and ability as well. This was very successful in my opinion, in terms of including all groups of people when talking about something like mental health that some groups may typically be excluded from. She then discusses how although they may not have been able to act in a group, they were collectively able to show coping mechanisms and carry a continuous style throughout. This is incredibly important in a group project and I was really impressed at their ability to keep that standard from remote working.
I also appreciated the section at the end describing the difficulties of remote group work during a time where lives change and focuses have to prioritise certain areas – I found her notice of this empathetic and definitely supported her project aim. Overall I found this blog post incredibly easy to read, informative and something I could truly relate to.