Evaluation

The ‘Four Corners’ was a fantastic experience for me to learn how community projects function and see how they benefit others.
At the start when we were introduced to the project, we attended various meetings with people of various jobs and skills such as finance, writers, event organisers and so on. We established communication between all of these people obtaining our own network and points of contact. Through these meetings we also settled the time scale for the entire project, the planning of various areas including the completion date of the mural, the planned exhibition dates and the requirements for each individual project. The meetings also allowed us to understand the community we would be working with to a better extent as we were all invited to a get together of ARCH and Youth Point at the big wheel at the Albert Dock. This provided inspiration for my individual piece, a short film on the Cinder Path which was introduced to us at the first meeting as the place the mural will be focused on.
As it was made clear that for the mural, us students would be independent as to how we would go about it, all we were required to do was follow a basic ‘Vision of the Future’ design, fill in a CRB form, and make a price list of all the things we would need i.e. The type of wood, paint, brushes. This aroused most of the learning as we contacted the school, given sheets of health and safety basics when working in a school and school policies. We also went about asking for meetings ourselves in order to understand issues and second opinions of solutions before they went into action or if we were over complicating a simple situation.
For the film, I wanted to achieve a child like ghost (as told in the story) though it was to be a puppet, manipulated by the environment and the people around it therefore making a more sinister connotation of control and ruin. I experimented with materials such as fabric, dough and latex before settling on air drying plaster which I would make clothes for. I green screened a stop animation for it before layering it over the footage of the Cinder Path at night. My greatest problem was the editing. My camera is not compatible with Mac, only PC and Vista. And so editing it on Final Cut would not happen, instead in desperation as I could not find the money to buy software, I downloaded a trial version of Corel Video Studio ProX4 which offered the tools I needed for the editing and publishing which was amazingly simple with the options of downloading more special effects on demand. I published the films on You Tube as backup and as another version of publishing what I am doing throughout the development of it and so when it came to the completion and the assessment, it seemed the addition of the animation was unnecessary for the effects I wanted the film to achieve. Therefore I gave both versions of the film in for the curator along with an artist statement and another statement of which film I preferred though with an understanding it may be a bit too sinister for an exhibition designed for and by the young people of Garston.
To conclude, I don’t think this project could have run any better than it has. If possible it would have been nice to have longer in the planning by a week or so though for the school work it was best to have things run one right after the other to keep the children interested in the development of their mural. It also would have been nice if the fence was strong enough to hold the mural but with its age it was thought better not to take the chance and secure it to a solid structure. For the film, it would have been better if I understood the outcome more and actually read the compatibilities of my camera beforehand. It has inspired me to think more on film and invest in professional standard software for the future.

Exhibition at LJMU

The Four Corners exhibition has begun! As of today LJMU is hosting the exhibition until next tuesday when it will move onto The Urban Village Hall and then finally the World Museum at the Walker Art Gallery. My work is on a computer as well as part of a cycled projection onto a wall, I am very pleased with the reactions of the audience after they read the description of the video then insisting they saw the ghost at various points. I believe it to be a major part of any successful piece for the viewer to see what the artist intended them to see, I am overwhelmed by the fact that listening to the viewers in the exhibition, all the pieces done by my fellow artists are perfect in every sense. I will be writing a conclusion of the project very soon outlining what I have learnt, the positves/negatives of the project and my future intentions. The privte viewing was a major success, here are some snippets.