Laura Allwood

For my last post I refer to  Nicole Banke’s blog 3 entitled ‘Project Outcome and personal development’

Looking at the range of blogs available to reflect on I realised a lot of students had a range of opinions and approaches to this unit which I found very intriguing when finding a post to comment on. Nicole’s blog was the one to grab my attention when scrolling through, her blog doesn’t only reflect on the project outcomes, but it also reflects on her personal experience with the better lives themes within the unit and within her actual discipline.

I personally like how she has started with how she originally felt about starting the new unit as I can personally relate to her feelings as she said she felt ‘excited’ but also nervous at the same time. She then went on to explain her role in the project which was the creative director and how this gave her lots of opportunity to learn more about this particular role.

Nicole, then went on to explain in depth about the purpose of fashion film and how it has great importance and how it communicates ideas to the audiences. In terms of reading this and not having much of an idea about fashion activism and fashion film she has done a great job of explain each stage of creating a fashion in depth which has given me a wide picture of the process of creating a fashion film.

Furthermore, Nicole has nicely put together an idea of the positive things they faced during the project and also the negative impact of things such as Covid-19 and how they overcame that and still found a way to produce this sort of media for their project. From reading her blog I have gathered that she has mainly focused on the idea of diversity in terms of Better Lives themes, this is because her team have created a film for the brand ‘Nubian Skin’ which would be a major theme that the brand focusses on as well as sustainability.

Overall, I think that Nicole has managed to create a great blog post that goes into lots of depth and is very detailed based around her reflection of the unit and also her personal contribution to the group projects outcome. In terms of the project itself, given the unfortunate circumstances of Covid-19 that we have all have to adapt to in this unit, they have done a really good job. However, in terms of constructive criticism I would agree with other comments that Nicole could’ve gone into more detail and look more deeply into the theme of sustainability as I would imagine this also being a hugely important area for the brand ‘Nubian Skin’ to focus on in such a quickly developing industry, but overall this project, from my point of view, seems to have been a good success for this team.

For my project I have developed a character that is based around the Better Lives theme of diversity in terms of the gender divide and how the rights of women have improved, my character I developed a character that essentially represents the struggle of women and how they fought to get to the position they are in today. There is one parallel between my degree subject of fashion journalism and the makeup and prosthetics industry I have been studying within, and that is that when given the opportunity to do a piece that is based around any controversial area I tend to always do something around feminism and women’s rights as that seems to be an area I like to focus

on. 

In terms of a Better Lives theme that caught my intention and essentially sparked my imagination for this project, the one that seemed to do this for me was diversity, as it provides such a wide scope to work with and provides lots of paths for me to go down in terms of the chosen discipline I went with for the Better Lives project, for example I could’ve gone with subjects such as ethnicity and class equality as well as gender. I chose to go down the gender route. With my project I decided to gain inspiration from the ideas presented by the walking dead, for example I made my character almost zombie like, I done this to show how hard women have fought for their equality and rights over the decades, for example how the suffragettes were the first to spark any ideas of improving the standard for women for women at the time and how they sparked the whole concept of gender inequality. Due to the unforeseen circumstances that arose during Better Lives unit I was unable to produce my character using any real prosthetics as we were not able to access the prosthetics that we would’ve been able to if Covid-19 had not evolved. For my final project I produced a slide for the presentation that took place showing images I would take ideas from to produce my character showing the struggles that women have endured from fighting inequality, I would have used my gelatine prosthetics that we was taught how to apply in our workshops with Steven to essentially create a bloody and gouged out eye on one side of the characters face and also would use the techniques taught such as bruising, ageing and contouring to create idea that women have essentially fought for their lives.

The Better Lives unit has informed my future creative practices because it allowed me to explore another route in an industry that is similar to my own, the area I decided to explore for my project was creating a character. This unit has taught me to focus more on context rather than what is just in front of me, for example to develop a believable character you need to think of what their background is and not just what they look like.

In the future, when back in my degree subject of fashion journalism, I think this unit will change the way I approach the tasks that require collaboration with other people on my course, as prior to this unit I have been a bit more introverted in my work which in the long run would give my work a disadvantage as it would only be from a singular perspective, I would gain some form of benefit from allowing other creative perspectives on my work as they could provide me with some constructive criticisms that can help me reach higher grades and allow my work to show a range of perspectives instead of just one. In terms of changing the way I approach the more collaborative tasks in my degree, in future I will begin to share my pieces with others to allow myself to be able stretch even further and improve my work, I will also allow my course leaders to see my work more often to get their expert opinion.

Another way in which the Better Lives unit will change the way I work in the future is how it will change my approach to the more creative tasks in my degree, for example as I study fashion journalism some of my tasks require me to create my content in term of vox  pops and broadcast pieces and also some require me to use the InDesign software to create my own magazine layouts. The themes have definitely taught me that being original is important in the fashion industry and that its ok to go outside of the box and be ambitious with my ideas instead of essentially playing it safe. In future I will be looking outside of the box for more niche stories and thinking bigger for any magazine mockups I may be required to do.

The lecture series on a whole presented us with a bunch of guest talks that covered different parts of the Better Lives themes such as diversity. The one lecture in particular that stood out to me and influenced me was the lecture that was presented by Claire Swift and it focused on the topic of collaboration. Collaboration refers to the action of working with someone to produce something, this relates to the Better Lives unit because the unit requires people for all different majors within LCF to come together and collaborate on a chosen project. This lecture stood out to me the most because of its links to social responsibility which is a main theme in the unit. Social responsibility refers to an ethical theory which states that individuals are supposedly accountable for fulfilling their ‘civic duty’ and that the actions of the individual person must benefit the whole of society. This point suits the lecture topic the most because it’s essentially saying that we are responsible for fulfilling our duty in group work and that we are therefore responsible for our contribution as it benefits the group, we would be working in.

The main point of the lecture that was presented to us that has influenced the way I began to think about the unit itself, was when Claire suggested that collaboration is about sharing knowledge and expertise and that it is a ‘creative endeavour’ and is not meant to be competitive, and how we should look at it as if it is a shared understanding of each other’s strengths and a chance to recognise the power of working together. This influenced the way I started to look at my project in particular, knowing my project would include working with a range of different people to develop a character over the weeks to come, so this clarified for me the ideal way I should approach my project.

This lecture also presented us with what collaboration is made up of, it is supposedly made up of 6 key points, which hare: participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence and emergence. The main point that stands out for me from this list of what has been suggested as what makes up collaboration, is participation. Claire, when presenting this point used a quote which explains this in what I think is the best way to put it, the quote is ‘Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests’ this was said by Sir Ken Robinson. This quote explains how that essentially participation in collaborative projects are necessary for us to learn, this also leads to the point that if you do not participate then you do not achieve.

This lecture has influenced the way I think about the topics now because it has shown me that in order to succeed and get the full potential out of the better lives project then I need to look at it in a more positive way and participate to the fullest extent in terms of the collaboration side of things.