Week 1 | Jwhiteual132024

Week 1: 6th-9th Feb

Tuesday

Today is the beginning of Final Major Project 2. My initial reaction to it is that there is a lot to take in as there are a lot of, although covered in previous units, learning objectives. On top of this, the overall quantity of work compared to before is a lot higher, so something I am making clear to myself is that planning is going to be important. My aim in this project is to get a distinction, so to do this, I will have to achieve a distinction in every section of the project; this requires dedication, skill and most importantly, determination to push myself.
Besides from the workload, my reaction to the project is also that I am going to need to react and take all of this in quickly and begin work ASAP. Though the project’s deadline seems far away, in reality, it will creep up very quickly; the sooner I start, the more time I have. Despite saying this, as previously stated, it is also important that the quality of the work is kept to a high standard.

Regarding how I feel about the project at hand, I actually feel pretty good. I am in a good position where I do not have any formative units overrun, my Unit 12 study gave me a good opportunity to hone in on the skill I would like to showcase and use within this production, and overall I feel ready.

The first learning objective of the project is to begin and develop the ideas development stage. I already have a few ideas in mind that I want to take forward. This stage has many opportunities for the progression of my ideas as I anticipate evolving the ideas into something much better than I have thought of so far.

However, before moving on to this, I have a few more jobs to prepare myself. Here is my journal for day 1:

After going through the entire unit with our lecturer, we got the opportunity to ask some questions. I made sure I used this is a chance to clarify any issues or areas of concern I had for the unit. A particular area of confusion to me was the problem-solving stage. Although this is something that we have been doing without even realising in previous formative units, this unit instructed that we had to create an entire page dedicated to discussing our problems and how to overcome them. From the discussion I had with my lecturer I was able to learn that as you will encounter problems throughout the entire journey of the production, this page is on going and that it is likely I will cross reference from other pages. Clarifying this was definitely worth it as I was now able to confidently move on, knowing what to do in every learning objective that faces me.

To begin the production, I decided that the best thing for me to do was to play it slow and not rush straight into it. Using Trello, a to-do list app, I created boards for each learning objective, with the deadlines attached to them too. For those sections that I knew what I needed to do, I also decided to add checklists. Checklists will help me to micromanage my tasks and make it easier for me to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. Doing this is important on a unit of this size, as it is nearly double the timescale of last FMP’s. The image below shows my Trello board and an example of a checklist.

Now that I had a rough plan, and an idea on the sorts of timescales each learning objective is going to have, I began upon working on the creation of the website (the website you are using now). For the purpose of the situation I was in, I wasn’t too worried about the aesthetics of it, I just needed a place to start storing my work. I decided upon using Wix instead of Google sites due to the Wix having 400mb more storage space for me to insert files, and Wix having more creative freedom so that I can design it better for my needs. During this process, I made sure to read the project brief very carefully to ensure I had all of the pages I needed to include. A timelapse of my work that afternoon can be seen below.

That evening, having had read the brief earlier that day and understanding more about the end of year show, and how it has an impact upon our grade, I decided to take my initiative and create a Whatsapp group, solely for the purpose of preparing and discussing the end of year show. I added everyone I could, and asked others to add anyone who I did not have their numbers for. This chat led to a few discussions, mainly about the venue however. I am glad I did this as I was able to get most people actively talking about work: it’s best we start thinking now rather than leaving it till the last minute.

To end the day, I then wrote myself a to-do list in my notepad, leaving it open on my desk for the next day ahead of me. Planning my day and setting myself achievements is how I aim to complete this large of a project one day at a time.

Wednesday

Today was the second day of FMP. Using my to-do list that I had planned yesterday, I began work on my first objective. The first task was to finalise the journal for yesterday, this was a fairly easy job as I had documented everything I had done. I just had to ensure that everything I said had reason behind it, as this shows my thought process.

The rest of the day consisted of beginning the ideas development stage and beginning to think about what I could make. I do have a few ideas already that I have thought about since FMP1, but it’s important that I don’t restrict myself to these and keep an open mindset. This is because I don’t want to be so narrow-minded that I look past a potential much better idea. After some admin work such as updating my calendar on my laptop and removing the phone number out of a screenshot for day 1’s journal, I began a mind map. This mind map is aimed at being a tool for me to use the blue sky thinking technique. It’s going to be very general and im doing to force myself to not think about any logistical issues that could prevent any of my ideas. I struggle with thinking of ideas a lot, so by getting some words down on the screen, it helped to get me into the flow of it all. I decided upon using XMind for my mindmap as it’s a very versatile tool that I have used before, meaning my workflow is fast and effective. It has an endless boundary, which is perfect for my blue sky thinking technique.

However, after moments of using this mind map and looking into a potential idea I had for a documentary, I decided that I was instead going to spend my time today producing a specific mind map for this one. This was a difficult decision to make because I wasn’t sure whether I should have just stick with the broad mind map and get it done, or create this new specific one. I made the conscious decision to create the new specific one because it was in my mind and I continued to get ideas thinking about it. If I hadn’t have done this, personally I would have felt as if I might have missed upon some good ideas that I had at the time. The idea I looked into further was a documentary about misophonia. I have great passion for producing this because it is very personal to me and I would love to share and spread my awareness on the subject topic.

My work day can be seen below through a timelapse:

Thursday/Friday

Due to personal reasons, I was not able to work on Thursday. This was unfortunate as it meant I had lost a days worth of work. Despite the set back, on Friday I pushed forwards to get the job done.

Having had nearly finished the misophonia documentary mindmap on Wednesay, it was important that I firstly focused todays time on finalising this. I deeply thought about the contents of the doc and how I would be able to structure it into an engaging story. My initial thoughts about logistics were that it would be possible for me to create, so it was just about the creative thinking side of things for now. After finalising this mindmap, I went back to exploring more ideas through the blue-sky thinking. It was important I returned back to this after completing the misophonia mindmap as I needed to get back on track with doing tasks in order. I can find it hard to stay on track as my brain constantly wants to jump around and complete different tasks throughout the day meaning that it can be hard to keep track of what I have and haven’t already completed.

I’m quite proud of the ideas I was able to generate through this blue-sky thinking and I am very glad that I stuck with producing one. I was able to expand off of the little idea that I had and start to envision engaging pieces of media in my head. Though not all of them are logistically possible, there are a range of nodes that I can pick off and take as a starting piece for new idea mindmaps. One of these ideas was to base a film around schizophrenia. The reason for this is that in Unit 12 I based my study around VFX and how I can use it to create engagement within a film, and by using this idea I could create hallucinations with my VFX skills. One of the key points that I was able to take away from my unit 12 study was that in order for VFX to be engaging, there needs to be an already engaging storyline and characters – VFX cannot make a film engaging if it is not already. With schizophrenia, the VFX helps to enhance the engagement of the film because there is a reason for me to use VFX in the first place.

Throughout today I was able to finish the entirety of the schizophrenia mindmap and actually move onto producing the mood board for the misophonia idea too.

A technical problem that I had to overcome today was the availability of space on my website that you are reading on now. Images, particularly PNGs, can take up a lot of space, so to get around this issue, I compressed my files down to reduce the size of them but keep a very similar quality. If I do this for all my images, I shouldn’t have any issues with including as many images as I need to support my work.