Group Evaluation

Coming to the end of our project we have learnt so much about working in a group and taking ourselves completely out of our comfort zone. We have really enjoyed the experience and process and have all  applied ourselves to the project. We now realise how challenging it is to include everyones thoughts and identify everyones strengths and weaknesses. Although at first we had so many ideas as the weeks went on we managed to narrow down our concept and make it more clear. Unit X was a new way of working, we worked professionally together and well as a team. We were lucky to really bond as a group and used our group time to bounce ideas and concepts off each other. The concepts then developed throughout the process and we started to get some very strong ideas coming through that we started to explore and develop in order to create our final film.

When it became clear that we had to have some sort of digital outcome we were slightly unsettled. We had very little digital knowledge or Photoshop skills at the start of the project which was something we had to confront. Sometimes being forced into a situation your not entirely comfortable with can create some really interesting results and we think that considering this we actually extended our skill set.

Working in a group allowed us to be able to work off each others personal strengths, each taking something different to the table, for example some members of the group specialised in hand embroidery, machine embroidery, print and dye. This enabled us to combine all our knowledge of textiles together and use different processes to develop a final outcome. Our samples being projected onto the human body worked well. Although it was challenging and difficult at times, we worked together and completed this task successfully. We feel as though our initial projected images were in fact stronger as individual images rather than put together in to the film.

We spent quite a lot of group time at the beginning going to galleries and doing relevant research around the city collecting photographs and videos. This was useful in the final week of editing as we had so much to work with. The concept of embroidery on the inside started to develop well through the middle of the project. From our samples we really tried to continue this idea.

It could be argued we almost had too much to work with which soon became a detrimental flaw to trying to put our film together. We had worked so hard throughout the sampling process and had so much work that trying to narrow it down and fit everyones pieces in became very tricky especially with our lack of imovie knowledge.