Weekly Lecture Notes
Week 11
This week we discussed the AOP student awards and also an opportunity for a residency in a London hotel. I am quite drawn to submitting my work into the AOP student awards, especially some of my portraits from the farm shoots I have done for this project. I will look further into this when it comes round to submitting. After this discussion we then went into our group tutorials and spoke about our layouts, if we have made any drastic changes. Such as, editing down our images and then also changing images. We also discussed how the hand in is now only a digital submission and will not need to print our book. At this point I will still experimenting with images in my layout so I just got some feedback on images they preferred.
Week 12
This week we were halfway through the publish stage of this project so for this lecture we were just in group tutorials to go over our work. At this point I had made a big improvement on my edit and sequence, I had placed my chosen images into InDesign and had put them in the final sequence that I felt worked best. I received feedback on this, with my tutor liking the layout as it all makes sense just need to play around with cover and text. We were also told that our layouts should be complete by the next lecture.
Week 13
On Wednesday we were supposed to have a group tutorial with Chris but due to the other group having a much smaller group we joined together and had Geraint and Chris. I was the last person to go through my work and we ran overtime so I ended up talking to Chris which really helped as he gave me some really useful feedback such as:
-Not sure if the Phoenix produce fits in there or if it is even needed
-Maybe have some more captions to explain some of the images
-When having captions place it so it is on the same line as the bottom of the image
-Play around with the cover, quite likes the green but could do a photo cover instead just do some experimenting
-Could also have a strip of images along the front cover in the middle of the page
-Definitely put the word 'important' into the first text about why I have chosen to do this.
I took out the Phoenix produce image, as like Chris said it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the chain as the image before it the volunteer is delivering and then the image after is also a delivery image. Meaning the chain was saying delivery, back inside with produce and then delivery again, it just didn't make sense so I am glad Chris picked up on this. The new layout makes a lot more sense as it shows the volunteers delivering, I also have lots of other produce shots in the sequence so it wasn't really needed anyway.
The image below is the front cover that I had quickly put together to see if have the green front cover worked, Chris liked this but told me to make some others to see if a photo cover would work, I made quite a few covers and then showed these to Geraint and Joe in the afternoon for their opinion on them. Can find these further below.
The images below are some of the front covers that I made to get to my final cover which is the very last one. I feel that having a full frame cover just didn't suit my book and I didn't really have any images that worked for it, which is why I chose just one image in the middle of the book. I also kept the green on the front cover and back to link the whole project together.
After talking to Chris in the group tutorial in the morning I then stayed around on Zoom for the rest of the day and joined a call with Joe and Geraint. I had changed some of things in the book such as the cover and captions which I wanted Geraints opinion on. Both Joe and Geraint liked the covers I had made and also chose the green cover with the bag image as it best described my project. I then went through some of the captions I had made, Geraint did say that they need to be short and snappy. We also discussed if I was going to be naming all of the people in the book, at first I was hesitant to do this and was thinking of just captioning the people as volunteer, for example, 'Brightstore Volunteer'. But after captioning some of the images like this I then decided that it would be better to name them and to give them recognition for the hard work that they do, such as, 'Rachel, Brightstore volunteer' I feel this just makes the book more personal which I really like. Geraint then asked me if I am going to name the food donation recipients and I decided not to as I feel that this would be quite intrusive to some people and they may not want to be named. It can also be seen as quite a vulnerable position to be in, so I felt that it was better to keep their names anonymous. I think that captioning their images as 'food donation recipient' is also quite respectful.
Some of Geraints feedback:
-Keep captions short and snappy
-Could anonymise names and just caption them as recipients and volunteers
-Or could name the volunteers also
-Have name on back cover
I have included some of the captioned images below, Geraint helped me reword some of them but we didn't have time to go through all of them so I booked a one to one on Friday to go over all of the captions and see if I had put the captions in the right places. The only thing that we really changed was my wording of some of the captions to make them shorter as a couple of them were a bit too much text. I really like having captions in the book as it adds a little something extra to explain what is happening within the image and also the distribution chain.
Week 14
This week we had group tutorials and discussed where we were at in terms of our workbook and our photo book. I had a one to one with Geraint the Friday before and nothing in my book had changed since then so we discussed how I needed to get on with my workbook and also make sure to really reflect on our work when we evaluate. I did not show my photo book at this point as nothing had changed and everyone had already seen the stage of the book that I was in.
Checklist:
- Make sure that your Digital Workbook is as up to date as possible - remember to consider the unit broken up into three distinct phases of five weeks. Make sure that you have added enough detail in terms of Research, Practice and Publish and that you have a final reflection on the process of making this unit submission.
- Your final work should now be pretty much complete. If there are any final checks or reviews that you want to make tomorrow then that will be a good opportunity to run things past tutors and your peers.
Week 15 - SUBMISSION
