Category Archives: Reflection on A5

Assignment, Assignment 5 - My Mother's Life, Reflection on A5

Response to Tutor Feedback for Assignment 5

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I had a helpful hangout with my tutor about the work for assignment 5.

He was happy with my research and input into the exercises.

We spent most of the time discussing assignment 5. His main comment / criticism was that I had not explained why I had made the video, what precipitated making it and how I felt about it.  He, like me, thought it was a little long but agreed that this was probably unavoidable. He suggested that I alter the beginning and the end of the video to to give a more personal connection to it, possibly including images of the piles of photos that I was faced with! I am working on this at present. I also need to think of a title.

My tutor also suggested that I should look at references to use of archives within the work up of the video. He gave me 3 helpful references which I have looked at; Michael Abrams – Welcome to Springfield,  Daniel Meadows – Digital Stories and Jim Goldberg – Gene. I have managed to find 2 other photographers that have used family archives in their work; Alexia Webster – Tracing Lives and  Catherine Panebianco .

We then discussed the assessment process and he gave advice about keeping everything concise and making a clear reflection/ artists statement.

With thanks to Chris for his helpful input over the extended time of IAP.

Assignment 5 - My Mother's Life, Reflection on A5

Initial Reflection on Assignment 5

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Assessment Criteria

Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills:

  • The technical skills here were the practical ones of making the video.
    • I still struggle with this; I find getting the volume of the tape even very difficult
    • I have, however, learnt how to clean up unwanted background noise
  • Visually – this assignment was about picking images and memorabilia from an extensive and unsorted archive and making sense of them
  • I had to work out the best way to show the images, considering the use of black versus white backgrounds, text font, placement of text
    • I also considered framing each image within the slide to give more consistency but decided against it as an unnecessary complication that did not improve clarity

Quality of outcome:

  • I am generally content with the final video but –
    • It is probably too long; it does go over the recommended number of images for the brief. The only way to deal with this would to be to cut chunks out of the story

Demonstration of creativity:

  • The idea was creative – but the work ended up being very factual, really a documentary piece
  • There was a large emotional load when listening to the recording repeatedly
  • This video links directly with the earlier one from exercise 4.5

Context:

  • The assignment was based on the work done in part 4 and 5
  • The project was based on a personal event, described in the information.
  • The work sits within the framework of memory and families and I have done reading around this (referenced in the research).