Blog 3
During my time in Fashion Activism I have approached my project in an enlightened way based on what I have learnt from the lectures in the Better Lives unit. Being in Fashion Activism has taught me a lot about branding and communication, considering fonts, graphic design, aesthetics and creating a strong brand ethos for a campaign. The focus themes of sustainability, diversity and social responsibility have tied in perfectly with the themes of the Better Lives lectures, and I was able to use what I learnt from the lectures within my new practice.
Creating our group project by working as a team has helped me to develop new communication skills. We all tried to bring something new to the work to make it rich and diverse, combining our different areas of interest. Our brief was to create a moving image campaign for a brand of our choice. We chose to create a campaign for Lazy Oaf’s “Time to Change” campaign, which is based around mental health awareness. The main slogan was ‘It’s ok to not be ok’ which really resonated with me and I wanted to include that as part of the moving image. These themes tie in well with the social responsibility and wellbeing lectures that I watched as part of the Better Lives unit, and I found it refreshing to see a brand create a campaign like this to raise awareness.
Lazy Oaf has a very strong brand aesthetic, which we knew we must consider and include in our moving image campaign. We created a project statement to outline our ideas and goals for the moving image. This helped to focus on what to work towards and get the project moving straight away. Creating mood boards also helped us to visualise a strong aesthetic to convey for Lazy Oaf in the moving image, and narrow down our broad range of ideas to a specific few to focus on. I am already interested in moving image and I am confident in video editing and effects, so I was excited to work on this project and didn’t feel too overwhelmed with the task. I also wanted to bring some illustrative elements to the moving image as my degree is Fashion Imaging and Illustration. As a group, we delegated different tasks to each member to share out the workload, based on what we are interested and confident in. Obviously, it was more difficult for everyone to do a bit of the project separately rather than work together due to the pandemic, but I think we were successful in overcoming the challenge.
In reflection, I think that given the lockdown we are currently living in, and during the stress of the pandemic, my group did a great job working together to innovate and push the boundaries to create a moving image campaign for Lazy Oaf that we are proud of. I like the message we could convey within our work, promoting the Better Lives theme by spreading awareness of mental health issues, as well as creating some nice moving imagery.