First of all, I’m sorry, but I know my project isn’t completely finished… For this last week, I tried to take the best things that marked each of my projects. First of all, I focused on one scale and time and only dealt with things I had at home and used regularly. This helped me to make them my own and work on them more. The geographical coordinates correspond to my address and I will find a way to perhaps understand this better… Then, I tried to combine the fact that I like to write with some photos. The text/image relationship is what takes me the most time knowing that I’m not very confident . I don’t know if I want my final outcome to be a publication or just double-sided cards. Indeed, since last week, I have noticed that the way I categorise objects most often depends on something else: another object, a memory, a description? What I wanted to do is to have on each double page / card the object in itself plus the other thing related to it.
For this final task, I decided to continue working on my idea from last week and develop it further, as I was interested in the concept of rediscovering ‘lost’ memories associated to the different objects I selected.
Whilst my project for week 3 was the creation of a ‘photo album’ including postcards on which I hand wrote my memories associated to the 26 items photographed, for this week’s project I decided to transform that album into a ‘family edition’ version. Since some objects represented moments in which my family members were present too, I thought it would be interesting to see what feelings, emotions and thoughts they remembered based on these objects; gaining a new, fresh perspective.
To do this, though, I decided to select only 7 objects, which to me were the most significant ones.
This project not only allowed me to give a new meaning to all of the individual objects, to an extent, but it also made me become aware of multiple memories and emotions my family members associated with these, which before I was unaware of, either because I had forgotten about parts of those moments or because we had never talked about these events in such detail after so much time since they took place.
Instead of only using postcard designs for each memory, I used different formats that best expressed the method in which each individual family member portrayed them.
100 WORDS RATIONALE
Memories
are a curious set of information that automatically get ‘stored’ within us.
They can depict a moment in time, an experience, a feeling.
This final exhibition explores this idea of memories and how these can be translated in different ways from individual to individual. The ‘album’ shown includes a collection of memories from six individuals, who all responded to the same stimuli (images of objects) that reminded them of moments lived together. Although each recollection is personal and unique, when looking at them together links can be made, bringing these different perspectives together to make the audience gain a clearer picture of that moment being explored as a whole.
WEEK 4 – CONVERGE – FINAL EXHIBITION: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uRS6y-YLowu1f138aqBZ-vQRpWRRSuy6/view?usp=sharing
The following PDF shows the map of my journey during this platform.
The following PDF includes some of the pages from my sketchbook to show the overall process I went through to get to the final outcome for this week’s task.
With how my week 3 project went I decided to take a step back and simplify things, so I removed everything I found to be unnecessary. Removing the coloured lighting was my first thought as it could take too long to find what colour worked with what objects. The second thing to go was the voiceovers, I felt that if it is going to exhibit the object it should do most of the speaking, ‘show, don’t tell’. Last was the whole concept of making a separate short video for every object, it was not needed and the effect I was trying to create with it needed a camera with a little more power to be recorded to the quality I wanted it to be, also the editing and rendering time would be too much with the time I had.
What I am keeping is the lighting and studio setup. Without colour the black backdrop would not look as well as a white backdrop with lighting, I want the light to bounce all over the objects, illuminating them. I used sheets of A4 and A2 paper to build the white backdrop and also made two white podiums to assist in holding up objects, the idea behind making them white was an effort to not remove as little focus from the objects.
I thought about using Photoshops ‘Merge to HDR Pro’ feature but I found it to be limiting without a way of suspending the lighting as I was using both hands in operating the lights and after doing some experimental photos I found that I could not to make it work with the method I was using, I had no time to research and revise my method so I dropped the concept.
My thought when taking the photos was to treat the objects as if I were selling them online, I tried to show their merits and make them as appealing as possible. My second thought was to make the photo look reasonably interesting, this meant using shadows and highlights to create an interesting contrast and playing with the positioning of the objects. I looked at a lot of apparel sights and even pop opened the old Argos catalogue to get an idea of how they show off the features of an item, I found that most take multiple photos which were not attractive to me, I wanted to fit everything I can in one single photo like I did with the first week but on a per-object basis.
I used a digital contact sheet with the help of photoshop.
Editing was kept to a minimal, I wanted to see what could achieve with a phone, camera, tripod, 2 desk lamps and paper. Cropping was the only editing I used, I had the photos cropped into squares to control the space and to hide any unwanted things in the frame.
Pre-Crop
Cropped
The theme of these set of 26 objects are the same as week 3,
objects that are personal to me, small enough to fit in my mini studio and I will
be taking with me to London. I did make a few changes with some of the items
because of size or accessibility to the object like my phone which I was using
to take the pictures or my wallet I simply can not find.
The revised list:
Alarm Clock
Bookbinding Kit
Cocoa Butter
Durag
Earphones
Family Photo
Flask
Glasses
Headphones
Iron
Keys
Lucky Watch
Mini Canvas
Mini Tripod
Mouse
Clipping Kit
OFFBLACK Tea
Pencil Case
Piggybank
Sketchbook
Skipping Rope
Slippers
Student ID
Toiletries
Tv Remote
Xbox Controller
Outcome
I was not sure on how to present photos on an online open exhibition so I settled for a digital photo book, with objects sorted into categories, I will come up with the how I will categorise everything as I edit the photobook. Below is only the cover, I am really not a fan of the title font, other than that the rest I’m happy with. I will add a full PDF after I have slept. I noticed that 17. Clipping Kit is out of place.
Caption
Ismail TNI Sansui
26 ITEMS
Traveling to London for university was my first long-term venture
outside my own city Birmingham, I was not sure on what to carry at the start of
the academic year which ended up in me spending unnecessary spending money on
moving stuff I did not use once in my time attending Central Saint Martins, so I
put together a list of twenty-six items I am not leaving without the next time I
settle in the city of London and organizing them in various ways using some of
the aspects from the LATCH organization system (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Hierarchy)
using a digital photobook.
I just organise my whole work from last three week. This is not fully complete due to lack of time to do. I am going to do more experiment with my third week outcome and upload rest of my work on arena 🙂
for this week’s final task, I decided to expand my work from last brief (curate), that was an exhibition leaflet, into a website. you can access it here(and should do so on a computer, with not too small of a window.)
the content remains the same but allows a digital interactiveness with the viewer/user that suits our current off-life situation.
i also added some recordings of the testimonies read by artificial voices. in the future, i’d like to be able to tape actual people, from different countries and ages, to match the fictional characters and stories i’ve written.
Here is the final draft for my final video. I re-filmed it following the really useful feedback. I need to add some sound and alter some colours I was wondering if you had any suggestions?
Process Map: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V7UTtSbJT4jzjCQOAZWUvS98HlJ4xogg/view?usp=sharing
