Feedback from Crit/Week 7

Crits are the one thing i dislike about this course, i get very nervous and shaky when presenting however i knew that this interim crit was vital for developing my project and getting second-hand opinions on my project in its current form. Taking part in this crit acted as personal development as well as project development which was truly beneficial and has enabled me to be more confident about my own work and prepared me for what BA will bring.

Overall the main feedback from most individuals that conformed my worries about my work was that my project was starting to become too general and that it might be a good idea to take a few steps back and review my project. My project struggles with being the bigger picture of England and generalising about what it means to be British and a smaller with an element of possibly helping describing the bigger picture. At the beginning of the final major project, i think i was aware that this could become an issue however i subconsciously decided to let it run its course hoping that it would carve its own clear pathway however i am still having trouble defining my project. This issue was visible in my work to others and needs addressing. I plan to address the issue by tailoring my project to the latter description and creating a niche work purely about Hamworthy and my personal connection to it in a similar way to John Spinks. I think i need to embrace the importance of my project and that it is about nothingness and mundaneness but this is very thing that gives it importance thereby creating a subtle piece of work which is what i think i originally tried to aim for at the beginning of the project but got a bit lost. I think as recent weeks have gone by, i have found that this a idea of generalising hadn't really worked and that the crit has solidified this for me. To quote Spinks taking about his own project, "The New Village is not a political project. It is an attempt to capture ‘Englishness’ – a concept much more elusive and timeless. “It is getting increasingly difficult to follow the threads of quite recent history,”

Some strengths of my work so far is that visually there is a clear mood set and most thought that it worked well which i was pleased with as i have tended to shot on cloudier days during this project to make the images definably 'English'. My work was also described as having 'a sense of stillness' which i thought was a lovely way to describe it.

There was also praise for working on film as my medium rather than digital. For me, there were techniqal reasons as to why i chose to work on film but also aesthetic. I think using film gives a sense of time pasting and memory and although i want this project to be descriptive of the area and also I think this project will be a subtle reflection of myself. There is a possibility that the final image in my phonebook might be myself, I aim to see how this works in an edit.

#fmp