Group discussion on chosen words.
We have chosen 'political' and 'environment'. So we started off by gathering recent political news from the newspapers and internet. And we finally decided to work on the Hong Kong Democracy protest, because it has been on all over the news and facebook, every single Hong Kong person we knew has changed their profile picture to a yellow ribbon, in order to show their belief, and it is really quite shocking and also touching to see how people now are actually speaking out what they want, not just going with the flow or following the gorverment to do what everyone thinks is unfair. We have done a lot of back-ground reading and researching about the whole situation, what people feel about it and what are they doing right now (see Information file week 2.) Another reason we have chosen this topic is because the people in Hong Kong are currently 'calling for support' from all around the world, so we though doing a project that is keeping up to the time is very interesting.
As a response, we want to create an image to put on the social networks to show us, as foreigners, are supportive towards the Hong Kong residents' actions, pay our respect towards how they speaks up and fight for what they think is right. Even though we are not protesting, we still want to pass our message 'keep strong and stay safe' .
The tutor came around and talked to use, giving us feedback and criticizes, which we found very helpful and inspiring, he has given us suggestions that towards situations like those our responses are not strong enough, we need to think more out side the box to create a more effective image, and this is what we found really hard, to express the idea through a political focused photography.
Plans
After further discussion thinking about our capabilities and time scale, we finally came up with one final plan, which is to hand make create the yellow ribbon, and using it to cover our mouth; representing 'why not speaking out', considering the other word- environment, we will take pictures at different landmarks in London; inspired by the news, how people from around the world gather at their symbolic places to show their support towards the actions. The landmarks we have chosen are Oxford Street, China town and Big Ben,(to save money we are actually walking all the way and we will take pictures on the way).
Our final outcome should work out as a photographic piece, can either be a strip made out of the photos we took, and to be placed like the shape of the ribbon, or can be a GIF image of all the photos.
We looked at the size of the yellow ribbon, as we want it to be able to cover our mouth it has to be quite big, we tried out some experiments using yellow paper.
We felt making the ribbon use paper does not look really nice and it loses its texture, so we went to town shopping for materials that would allow us to make a better ribbon.
The tutor also given us advice saying that we could make the ribbons into a chain, in order to represent the illiberality that the hong kong citizens are experiencing. And we though it is a brilliant idea, which would make our image look more exciting. so we started joining lots of small ribbons that we already made in to a long chain.
Final Outcome and our thoughts
I think by working in a group it really helps to flow ideas around and giving each other advices and things that one might not have considered yet, and as a group we work comfortably together, organizing different jobs allowed as to progress smoothly, and we also got a chance to look at the beautiful sites in London, it was a great project and we really enjoyed it. Also to mention that the Hong Kong friends really like our project that they even took and brought up what we have done in one of there meetings on the 1st October.
Other things I have learnt is that sometimes when difficult things come up, there is always more than one solutions to it; for example when I was editing the photos (leaving the ribbons in colour), I started using photoshop, and it is just too time consuming and there are more than 50 pictures to edit. So I started looking at other ways that would allow me to do the same, and this has given me the opportunity to sleep that night.
One thing that we could have done is that we should have done more reaches basing on images and photography, none of us has done any researches before the project even the brief has already been on Moodle. So we actually spent a long time wondering and confusing in lessons. Also next time I would love to try video making, as when we were looking at other people's work in our class, a lot of them did videos, and with some really nice choice of background music. To make an image can happen in so many ways, here are still a lot to learn.