group work – Journey Through the Lens

Due to work demands, I was unable to attend the second group meeting for our Live Brief presentation which is disappointing. However, I did receive feedback from the rest of the group who felt it was a very positive session with some good points made. The webinar was recorded so I was able to watch it later and catch up.

Both tutors, Anna and Jesse, seemed to agree that they liked the concept of having both a video and photographic stills. They also both agree that Instagram is a good channel for our campaign but Jesse cautioned that we do need to be aware of its limitations. For example, he raised concerns about sound saying that many people will flick through Instagram stories without turning on the sound which means that the punchline of the video clip we had created would be completely lost.

To address this, he suggested that we would need to either go with an entirely visual clip or we would need to find a way to encourage viewers to use sound. Anna agreed but felt we should keep the sound and therefore rather encourage them to turn the sound on. Both tutors liked the choice of the video clip and appreciated our take on bringing awareness to the hidden aspects of brain injury.

Both tutors particularly liked the way that we were keeping our campaign ethical and novel at the same time through the combination of workshop (documentary style) and film/stills (editorial/advertising style). However, they felt that we were trying to do far too much in a single campaign, and needed to focus it by doing less. I agree very much with this feedback as I had felt we were going in too many different directions.

Overall, the group is very pleased with the feedback and we are in discussion about our next steps.

Live brief – Week 3

As part of our work on the live briefs, we had a scheduled meeting with our tutors, Jesse and Anna, and were tasked to be ready with a short presentation to put forward our initial ideas for the campaign. We met earlier in the week to prepare for this and one of the members of our group, Oliver, created a mood board as a visual stimulus to help focus how we would like our campaign to look and to help us agree on a coherent style across the group. We all have very different styles of photography and work in different genres, so it is going to be a challenge to bring this together into a consistent visual narrative.

The mood board was a great idea and triggered a lot of discussion on the main visual themes we wanted to incorporate into the campaign. This was incorporated into our presentation to the tutors, as well as main points from the research we had done so far. Our research had led us to identifying Instagram as the focus for our campaign pitch as it is the online channel that we felt would most fit with our concepts and could incorporate clever use of video within the Instagram Stories function, as well as IGTV. The tutors seemed to agree with us and liked the concept of video, but suggested that instead of long videos we look at creating short clips. They both seemed to like the editorial look and feel to our mood board and felt that this was a different approach to apply to this type of campaign.

The tutor feedback was very positive and definitely helped us to arrive at a focus and direction for the way we want to design the campaign. We also took the opportunity this week to establish a list of each group member’s key skills so that we could look at allocating roles for the duration of our work on the live brief. We selected one of our team to be the Project Manager and take responsibility for planning our timeline as there are only 6 more weeks left before we need to be ready to pitch. It will be essential to plan effectively so we can deliver on time.