Live Brief – Week 4 & 5

After the review with our tutors, we met to discuss the feedback and reach a decision on the concept of our campaign.  We reached agreement around creating a video which would illustrate the hidden aspects of brain injury by using the concept of not always being able to see everything that is actually there.  As a group, we took on board the feedback received from our tutor, Jesse, about making short video clips rather than one longer video.  There were a number of ideas put forward and Oliver, who came up with the initial concept and has experience with creating video/film, will be working on creating the first video clip.  Bloo also has film/video experience and has agreed to create storyboards to illustrate the other ideas for short clips.

I expanded on the mood board concept that was introduced by Oliver previously and looked for images that represented the editorial look and feel that had interested our tutors and which also inspired us prior to the group meeting.  We discussed this and came up with an artistic direction to try for the stills that we would use in the campaign – the approach would be to create images that showed our subjects ‘breaking through’ and emerging from paper or fabric to represent the experience of brain injury impacting on personal identity. In the group discussion one of the team members suggested doing a workshop with the members of Headway in order to create the photographic stills and possibly we could incorporate some of their artwork.   

We each then created sample images for photographic stills which returned mixed results for various reasons.  I was not happy with my image quality as I had to rush it to deliver on time while juggling work demands.  I took quick ‘snapshots’ to illustrate my concept which was a person emerging through paper – I used newspaper because it was a resource I had, however, my vision was for our subjects, the members of Headway East London, to ‘emerge’ through paper covered in artwork they had created specifically for our project, in line with the workshop idea that we had discussed.  I chose to repeat the concept with a second series of images which were actually self-portraits, something I have not done before as I am rather camera shy. 

The other members produced images in their own unique styles, with Bloo cleverly emerging through white paper with reading glasses incorporated into the image, Oliver doing self-portraits with Stik-it notes on his face and our project leader, Raeann creating beautiful images working with a model.  There was some stunning work produced but I felt we lost focus by working individually in this way as we have such varied styles and genres of photography.  The ideas we have come up with as a result of this process are very creative and I still feel that we are working well together as a group, especially considering the challenges of working remotely from each other and juggling the demands of life, jobs and our coursework over and above this.

The one concern I have and which I raised with the group, is that I cannot see the link between our video concept and the photographic stills we are creating.  This leaves me feeling there is a lack of coherence in the design of this pitch and it actually feels like we are almost creating two entirely different campaigns.  We will continue this week to create more content for the presentation to put forward to the tutors next week and will start compiling a folder of the work that will be put into a presentation.  I will not be able to attend the next group meeting due to work demands so this is rather disappointing but I will contribute as much as I can prior to the meeting and will rely on the group to update me on the feedback.