Personal Evaluation

Unit x has been very different from any other project I have done. I have never really been involved in a project that is so group based and has huge emphasis on collaborating with other people one our course. I was very lucky that I had such a good group who were very keen to do well on this project. There are pros and cons when working in a group. 
The pros I found were that you never run out of ideas because when one person says on thing that triggers some on else to come up with a different idea. We found this in our group,we had too many ideas to go from, so this can also be seen as a con too. when you have too many ideas it makes it hard for a group to decide on just one. One of the biggest pros I have found is that I worked a lot harder in a group. Working on my own I have a tendency of being more lazy and only having myself to blame if I do not it. However in a group if you don't turn up to group meeting, your not only letting your self down but others. This has given me the push I needed all year to get up earlier get more things done during the course of the project instead of doing everything really last minute. I can see this could be really positive for the projects to come. Another Pro is that no one has the same textiles skills and everyone has different strength so we had a wide range of samples through out our project. However one of the disadvantages our group had is that none of us are very experienced digitally and we had to have a digital outcome, which brought us all out of our comfort zone. 

When we found out our digital outcome was going to be shown at Museum of Science and Industry we wanted to really impress our audience so decided to make a short film, which none of us had any previous experience with. We rented out equipment from the AV store got a lighting induction and had a day tutorial session on how to use a camera. It was tough for us to know what to do and now look back at it i realise how we could have improved. When you are filming you really need to have a clear plan of what you are going to film, so a story border is key. We had so many different ideas we did not know which direction to go in and we wanted to include everyone's work in it. This was a something I have learnt from we should have homed in on the best pieces of film we had done and worked with that instead of trying to fit everything in. I have learnt a lot of different skills on imovie which i think i will use in more projects.

I feel our final film is successful and hopefully the audience will get a sense of what we are try to portray however I think we had better footage we could have worked with but it did not include everyones work. This is something i am going to take with me if i use film again. 

Filming

we did not to just experiment with the idea of inner (hidden) manchester being projected on to garments and the body we though it would be interesting as a lot of our samples looked quite organ/ vein like to experiment with looking at parts from inside the body and showing them on the outside. This was demonstrated with our dissolvable samples. Which were very successful and my favourite development we experimented with.

Projections of drawings on to Vincent

After looking at the samples we went on to using some of the photos we had take of our drawing and seeing how that translated on the human figure. Some images were more successful then other. I felt the ones with the bright colour were the most successful like the image just above. 

Projections on Vincent

The second session we had with Vincent was a lot more successful then the first, the colours of our samples were brighter and bolder. We combined all our samples and the big drawing we had done to project on to his bare chest and see what different body textures it would create. These images just look amazing by themselves each one is so interesting and has so much texture to it. 

Hidden in the jacket

I had brought a jacket for all the samples to be projected on at the beginning of project and decided i wanted to create an embrodiary sample hidden inside the jacket that looked like the inside of the body. Connecting all of the different ideas we had been looking at. 

The sample turned out better then i expected except I put the sample a bit tooo far in the jacket so you could not seen it at all when the jacket is being worn, it is hidden to the extreme. 

Drawing

The drawing day was very successful, there was a real sense of team work between Grace, Lamia, Sophie and I. Creating a drawing based on our samples and the brick work of Manchester, Making us form a variety of different marks on the page. Eventhough, everyone had their own individual style the drawings as a whole worked really well. 

Dissolving onto the body

I experimented with small dissolvable samples and see what they would look like dissolving on the chest.

I found these piece not as successful as the group dissolvable session but it was intriguing to see how they changed and the dissolvable material at the end looked like grease on the body

Projections on the inside

Grace and I experimented with trying to project onto the inside of the shirt today going back to our intiual idea of 'hidden gem' projecting everyones new samples on the inside of a shirt giving the illusion to the audience that it is stitched into the inside.

This pieces were very successful and created really intriguing shapes on the garments. I would like to use this idea possibly again in another project. 

Dissolvable sample stop motion

Learning how to use imove I experimented with using stills of a sample I hand done and bringing it into imovie to create a short stop motion film. The sample was a hand embroidered piece slowly growing. The embroidery sample was inspired by the inside of the body using different embroidery techniques.