Creative Week Developing Ideas

For 'Creative Week', the Media Production and Lens Based pathways paired up with the Graphics pathway and worked together in groups to create something solid and more physical than the usual .jpeg or .mp4 file we were all quite used to producing for our projects. 

Me, Qandeel, Siobhan and Nura decided that the best way to make the creation of this week fit in to all our FMPs was to take all our main focuses and apply them to what we were doing. We had a box of different materials to share and create the solid product from. The two empty plastic bottles made us think that we could probably make little figures of some sort of animal from them. Due to my theme of my FMP revolving a lot around the idea of beauty, what came to mind was a peacock. A very beautiful bird that was quite possible to turn these bottles in to. 

From this starting point, it made me think of how the female peacocks were more pigeon like and grey, than the wonderful coat of feathers that cover the beautiful male peacock. Nura's theme for her FMP revolved around the idea of transformation. Qandeel's looked in to mental illnesses and we thought of an interesting and quite worrying way that a female peacock transforms herself due to the influence of the male peacock. From this we did a storyboard about a female peacock coming across a male peacock. At first it seems as if she is falling in love with him and his beauty but then we later see that she is only after his glorious coat of feathers. She beats him up, rips them off him and walks off, wearing them as her own. 

From this story idea, we went to work on designing our two characters. The female peacock we kept quite plain and simple. Her being the main character, we wanted to make sure she could be the most expressive so we stuck two paper-clips over her button eyes so to resemble eyebrows that could frown in anger and raise in surprise. Her tale, we folded like a fan out of a Wasabi napkin whereas the male tale, I folded out of a piece of paper that I decorated with a peacock feather pattern. We made their beaks out of blue tack and a crown like featherey head for the male, out of blue tack and paper clips. We also decided to just stick a pretty silver broach on the side of the male's head just to add a bit more pizazz. 

With our peacock figures, we were ready to make a stop motion and from some of the stills we were excited to also put together a comic strip which would fit in to Siobhan's theme for her FMP.

I feel like we put together a great idea with the amount of time we had that day. Next time, however, I would like to try and find a way that we could get to work sooner and maybe all put together some more finished storyboards, just so that we knew exactly what we were doing.