FMP Evaluation

When I began my FMP I had no clue what my project theme was, all I knew was that my specialism was Graphic Design. My journey to my final piece began by going on a trip to London to visit ‘The V&A, The National Gallery and The British Gallery’. Visiting these fascinating placing gave me the push I needed to pick the concepts I wanted to base my project one. I gathered lots of primary research and observational drawings. I found this visit to be truly inspirational and gave me the guides I needed to start the project. I then decided to look back at previous projects and units on this course, I mainly focused on looking at Unit 5 because, I felt like I could do a lot more exploring with the list of concepts we were given. This led me to basing my project around the concepts of identity, ecology, earth and time.

After my primary research I moved on to experimenting with different materials including lino printing, watercolour, drawing, photography and a lot more. As I continued to go through my journey in experimenting and developing, I started to have more interest in identity compared to the other concepts. At this point I decided to leave the other concepts behind and focus the project on identity. Once I had focused the project I started to look at articles and began looking into different forms of identity including astrology and social groups. After this point, I came to a standstill of ideas so, I decided to have a verbal peer review. I was told I should make an online survey, I went ahead and did this. When I got the results back, I started to look at personality and emotions. After more exploring I decided I wanted to make my finale piece based on society and media.

The next stage of my journey was using Photoshop for editing and manipulating photographs I took in a photoshoot. I produced various designs and posters that where then developed further. I got to a point where I printed everything out and I was unsure where to go next for my final piece. So I made the decision to talk to my tutor Roger. He suggested I made an animation with all my designs in. When he first suggested this I was very usurer because, I had never made an animation and didn’t even know where to start. Luckily, my tutor Andrew taught me how to make a GIF in Photoshop and also taught me how to use Premier Pro to create my short animation made up of images and GIFs. As I was making the animation, I started to think about health and safety. My animation has flashing images and I feel this could be an issue to people with Photo Sensitive Epilepsy. For health and safety reasons, I decided that make work should be covered with a curtain in the exhibition.

The animation I created is one aspect of my final piece, the other aspect is a wallpaper feature that is made up of twelve A2 poster designs. The posters are created using Photoshop and have photographs from my photoshoot within them. The posters all have a slightly different message on but are all linking to body image, emotions, society and media.

Throughout this project I did come across some problems. One of the biggest ones was that my memory stick broke and started to decode my work as I was using it. It started to glitch my images which I then used to my advantage. I took the glitches as a form of experimenting and have included it in my third sketchbook. The memory stick had also deleted various designs and documents I did not yet get the chance to print, I did however manage to recreate them. This project has taught me the importance of backing up everything you do. Another problem I came across was the planning and measuring of my wallpaper feature for the exhibition. I struggled to get the right measurements of the board and the A3 paper. After doing some calculations, I decided A2 paper would be the better option.

If I was to do this project again, I would focus more on time management. I personally feel that I struggled a lot with keeping up with the weekly plan created with my proposal.