Over the last few weeks we have been looking at visual communication and the various practises that come underneath the title. These have included design, problem solving, advertising, propaganda, story telling, narrative and documentary. This initially shows how vast a subject visual communication is. When I look back at all the subjects covered it seems like an immense amount to reflect on and makes the task of answering where I fit in a difficult but interesting one.
To get this process rolling I need to review the workshops that we took part in and think about what processes I took the most from. This could simply come down to the ones I enjoyed the most or the processes that I would like to pursue and try and develop my skills in.
The First workshop was the design and problem solving where we were given a brief that involved making someone’s life better. However the audience varied from group to group. My group had to make a strangers life better in some way and it was totally up to us how we went about this. My initial reactions to this task were very positive, as I liked the thought of bouncing ideas off people in a group situation and then using the feedback to come up with a practical idea. This was a slow process in my group but once we all settled on an idea things started to move along quickly. The next stage was coming up a way of portraying our idea visually. This was also another part of the process that I enjoyed because in my group we each came up with a different option. Then when back in a group we discussed what we had come up with and in a rather informal way were able to get some feedback on our ideas, which I found a very useful part of the whole process. Overall I think that in this workshop the fact that we were in a group situation I really found useful especially when it came down to getting feedback straight away on ideas and also having the option to discuss ideas so that you run with the best one. I think this is a common theme throughout all of the workshops that had a group element such as the advertising and propaganda as well as the documentary workshops. I think that working in a group is something that can be a very crucial part of visual communication, whether it is in college or in a professional environment.
Advertising was something that I thought I would enjoy before the workshop, as it is something that applies to a lot of areas in visual communication. Throughout the day we looked at various subjects such as propaganda and also the idea of persuasion. It prompted me to think about the fact that whatever I do in the area of visual communication I will have to promote and advertise myself to get work, and ultimately noticed in the creative field. I don’t think that advertising would be something that I would be interested in but I think I definitely took away a sense that advertising goes beyond the boundaries of just selling a product. Advertising can be more than that and it’s a useful subject of which to have an awareness and understanding.
The next workshop was on the subject of documentary. We had to make a documentary on a truth within the boundaries of the college. My group approached people and asked them to tell us a truth about the college and we just filmed a close up of their mouth. I think the first thing that I got from the quick process of making a short documentary is that its hard to get people to help you and co-operate with your idea. I think that it was quite an ambitious brief for the amount of time we had and I would have liked longer to tackle the idea. If we had longer we could have asked more people and then we would have had more material to work with. It’s something that I would like to tackle again, as the whole field of moving image interests me, but maybe not necessarily just documentary. This leads onto the final workshop, which was storytelling and narrative.
The storytelling and narrative workshop got us looking at how a story is structured and how we can use narrative. This was the workshop I enjoyed the least and that was mainly down to the fact that the process of coming up with a story and illustrating it all myself isn’t something I am particularly interested in. However telling a story through moving image would be something I’d like to turn my hand to. Through the workshop I found out that I am not really interested in making up the story and narrative myself but I do find the thought of taking someone else’s story and creating it visually, very appealing. In the workshop we went about this using hand drawn illustration, which is another area I am not especially drawn to, however there is something around the area of recreating someone’s story visually that appeals to me and it’s an area I would like to develop in the future.
The second section of this brief after reflecting on the workshop sessions was to take a subject we were interested in and apply some of the process we had experienced in the workshops. I immediately had problems with this, as there were a few of the processes that I would have liked to try out. I also confused myself by initially choosing stencilling as my subject and then thinking that I would try and tie this into advertising. I thought I could use stencilling for some sort of guerrilla advertising campaign. I then overcomplicated matters by trying to include elements from the design and problem-solving workshop. It wasn’t until the tutorial that I got a full understanding of what the brief was expecting. My main problem was that I hadn’t established a clear subject because with my original idea I was going to use stencilling as a process so it wasn’t really a subject of interest. So I made stencilling the clear subject area that I was interested in and then changed the process from advertising to reportage, which fits into documenting.
This idea leads on from the first project we did, involving reportage for our books. I wanted to start documenting stencilling in the Leeds area. I started to look at the various areas I could look into; in terms of what roles I could take from the idea. Firstly there was the idea that I would be walking around Leeds and finding the stencils myself, so there was the feeling of a journey and discovery. There was the process of actually documenting what I found and this would predominately be done using photography. If I look at this idea with a view as to what it would eventually become, I see it becoming a website and this in itself opens up the potential for more roles. There would be the editorial role, where by I would be choosing what images to include. There would be the design of the website and how the website looked aesthetically. Finally with a website there could be the potential to create an online community where people could contribute to the site with their own work or stencils they’ve found in Leeds.
Getting to this stage took me a long time and I think this brief was very much a case of thinking through the idea and letting it develop. This meant I didn’t produce any physical work or examples, but this leads onto the main obstacle with my idea. For my idea to get off the ground I need to find out if there is any sort of stencilling going on in Leeds in the first place, because if there isn’t the idea can’t work. Another problem is that there are so many processes involved in the idea that it could be too grand an idea to physically happen. To overcome this I am going to focus on the first process that initially drew me into the idea in the first place, which is getting out into the city and exploring with my camera to see if there are any decent examples of stencilling. This means that if I don’t find anything worthy of documenting, I will have still explored the city with my camera and broadened my knowledge of my new surroundings.
At the end of this process I haven’t arrived with a concrete answer as to where I fit into visual communication. Nevertheless I have formulated questions that have started a thought process around the subject, visual communication. It has also helped to identify some of the directions I want to go in as the course progresses.
