In one of my last posts I expressed my nervousness at deciding to make some big changes to my project at this late stage in its development. I was also worried that I had probably wasted an assignment review when I submitted a relatively minor update between assignments 3 & 4 just to show progress, and thus only had one final review left before final submission. Because of this I decided to take advantage of another Scotland study day to show my work to others to get their reaction before then sending it to my tutor.
The good news is that, even though I only had a short time to present my work this time around, the general feedback was positive and seen as a major step forward in the project. I explained to the group how I now planned the work to be presented across two books but which are joined at one end so that they could / should be reviewed across a four page spread.
While it is difficult to show the full effect on this blog, the following are a set of four images which are expected to be viewed across four pages:
The layout is going to look a bit more like this (if you can imagine it being a four page spread):
I have also tried to create a balance between the work being read across all four pages and also for each book to work on its own rights, which has needed a careful selection of images to try to get this to work.
I also wondered whether I needed to be clear that the four pages should be read together but then decided that it would be more interesting for the viewer to make that decision, potentially pairing images in a more random order than I intended.
Going back to the study group showing, it was interesting for me to pick up where things didn’t quite work when I was trying to quickly explain things to the group, and there were also a couple of minor points I picked up from their feedback, both of which I will consider when pulling this into a final set.
The next step will be to prepare a final mock-up of the two books, probably using Blurb or some other photobook company. At this stage, I want to have books that open flat, so if Blurb don’t do that then I will need to look at the other options – for now this feature is more important than the actual print quality. I do not intend to create anything other than a ‘mock-up’ version of the final product at the end of this module, and thus intend to leave final decisions on print quality and book binding options until the final module.
And so, overall I am quite pleased with the progress I have made with this work and will now progress towards producing something for the final assignment submission. I have also just moved house (and City) yet again, which has taken me away from my studies, but I now hope to spend the next 4-6 weeks finishing things off just before my two year deadline for this module.
Major Project 