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.

This week we have been in uni as a group from 10am until 7pm! We have put lots of hours in to make sure we are all happy with our final film.

We had lots of edits of the film(on group blog) and realised the problems with trying to combine files between MACs and laptops!

Monday; We started trying to collaborate all of the filming we had done over the project, we soon realised this was too difficult, we had too much variation in filming and our ideas behind the project were not clear enough.

Tuesday ;we focused alot on making it clearer and using the parts that we thought best represented our project.

We thought the projection work and our drawing film portrayed our project well. 

The whole editing process was very exhausting but we are slowly seeing the end result.

We always had the idea of a 'hidden' element to our project and so at the start of the week we did envisage projecting our film onto a shirt. But after experimenting, we found that the quality of the film would not be as clear, and so we had to abandon this idea.

projection on shirt

Once our film was complete we wanted to project it onto a shirt that was open to show our concept of inside Manchester, however we felt that it just didn't look right, as a group we thought that the projections on the shirt looked better live maybe we could project onto a shirt in MOSI?
We have a short clip of what it did look like.




http://vimeo.com/user11738357/movingshirt

Second Stage of Trousers

After I machine stitched into the trousers I passed them onto Emma, she decided to dye them. The dye worked really well and it's interesting to see that different areas of the trousers were dyed different shades, some threads also got dyed in the process. 

Final Film

We have been working really hard the last few days to edit all our film footage to a 4 minute long film. We wanted to get all the elements of our project into the film, the idea of hidden Manchester (we spent a day filming hidden areas of Manchester), the water dissolvable fabric films, the projections and our samples. We started by mixing all elements together but this came across as quite confusing and not making sense to the audience. We decided to simplify it and just have projected images onto our model flashing to the beat of our chosen tracks, this works well and looks exciting and intriguing. Another idea was to project the film onto an open shirt to show our concept of inside Manchester and hidden gems and film it then use this as the final film, we experimented with this but decided that this was not as successful or as clear as just showing the original film. Here are some images of the film being projected onto the shirt..

Drawing and Filming

As Emma and I missed the first group drawing day we decided to produce our own drawing, film it and fast forward it to create the feel of growth and progression. We experimented with lots of different materials making sure we took inspiration from our original work, taking elements from our samples and using mark making to portray them. The film looks great fast forwarded and we will be using it in our final film. The drawing was also very successful with a lot of texture and different marks to it, having two people draw together gives diversity to a drawing and you can play off each others strengths. 

Group drawing day!

Me,Sophie, Grace and Lara started drawing from our samples and images of bricks. We used a variety of media to create these brick like and mouldy textures. The day went really well, we were moving around and drawing on top of each others work which was effective and created that mouldy look we wanted to achieve. This task also gave us the chance to see how others draw which was good.We also recorded ourselves drawing to show the process of how the bricks and mould are growing. Here are a few pictures I had taken.

Drawing day

Just to follow up from Sophie's initial post about our drawing day this week I thought i'd post a few more images of close up parts of our drawings. I think the day went really well as the four of us drew at the same time and then swapped over to work on other peoples drawings which gave a lot more texture and we've got some really exciting images. We also took a video of the activity to put in our final film. 

Group Work

Today, me Grace, Lara and Lamia did some drawing from our samples, we filmed the whole process, hoping to include it in the final film. Using big pieces of fabiano we drew on top of eachothers marks, which worked really well and gave us some  nice effects.

More Dissolvable

This is one of Josie's dissolvable fabric pieces that I photographed as it was sprayed with warm water. We also took some film footage of this. It really reminded me of the Gunther von Hagens body world work that we have looked at for inspiration earlier on in the project. Once the piece is fully dissolved I think it looks really good and quite a lot like protruding veins which is very interesting. If we were to develop this piece it could be something on the inside of a garment made out of dissolvable fabric and as we spray it with water these threads and machine stitches could become visible.

Dissolvable Samples

To get the idea of 'slow is beautiful' across in our work, we decided to create some samples using water dissolvable fabric and then film the water dissolving the fabric and perhaps edit that film to slow motion to be able to see the slowness of dissolving fabric. Here are some of my samples..

I stitched the word Manchester to show it moving and dissolving slowly, suggesting slowing down the city itself.