Open Share Project

Part One – Refinement

The role of this self-driven project is to provide you with a period of reflection and development for your studio portfolio before Summative Assessment. You will be given the opportunity to refine a previous project for exhibition, and produce a 3minute showreel of what you consider to be your best work this academic year.

Throughout your time at the GSA we aim to help you develop your self-initiated troubleshooting, planning and refinement skills. This project offers you the learning time and space to implement practical methods that will become second nature and support your creative process by Y4.

When developing one of your previous pieces of work you should aim to spend this time not solely concentrating on whether it technically succeeded but prioritise the importance of staging and communicating the context of the work. Alongside this you are expected to compile three of, what you consider to be your strongest pieces of work, in to a video showreel for submission. Take on board all you have learnt in the documentation skills workshop to stage your works, tell the story behind your ideas and articulate your process.

Part Two – Exhibition

The second part of this project involves a cross-year Exhibition of your selected piece. This will involve you working in designated teams to make this happen. You should consider location, scale of work, power requirements, lighting, titling when curating the exhibition.

Exhibition

After spring break, this is last project of the year. There was a briefing on 17th Monday morning. It was an overview of the project. In the same day afternoon, there was a workshop on how to make a showreel.

The project is divided into two parts. The first task is to select three of the projects in the first or second semesters and then make a 3min showreel. It is a task of finalizing the year. At the same time, we have a group work that preparing final year exhibition (Y1 – Y3). This is the second task. In the case of group works, roughly eight people will be grouped as curating team, promotion team, documentation team, technical support team, etc… In my case, I was assigned to ‘Documentation team’. Our group task is documenting whole process about preparing the exhibition. It could be a photo, video or etc…

In the afternoon workshop, tutors explained what showreel is, the theoretical meaning, and the form of assessment. Rough outline templates have been created already, we only have to edit our work to fit it.

On Tuesday, I had time to meet a same group member. Today meeting was to organize the plans for what we need to do. However, our group have a more time to organize everything than another groups. All of our task scheduled on the installation week.

In this meeting, we discuss about what kinds of equipment we have and which way are we going to use of documenting. We planned to take a video using handheld, time-lapse, close-up photo, general video.

On Friday 19th there was a group leader meeting. In the meantime, I prepared my own showreel. On Friday the 26th, there was a group tutorial. we talked to the tutors about the documentation plan and what to do next week. However, when they asked about the distribution of the task, we was not able to answer because it was still undecided.

After the tutorial, we took a look at the location where we would shoot next week with Fabio’s Go Pro. In conclusion, we decided to shoot TimeLabs near sofa, in the middle of the studio, and the space where used by the 3rd year student.

In the exhibition week Monday. Before I went to the studio, I have been Reid building Media Lab to find two Gopro. Then, I took the position and started filming with 30’s TimeLabs. Everyday when we finished recording, we backuped the images and video in the hard drive that tutors gave to us.

On Thursday, there was an exhibition opening, and I borrow a camcorder for additional video footage. Before the opening, I recorded the work of the people who worked on the video work. After opening at 5 o’clock, I recorded the exhibition’s going . After Friday 5pm, I had to clear out the files that we took. But, I thought it would not be easy to organize later, cause files are roughly 100GB.

Refinement

I chose ‘Graphic Narratives’, ‘Rich Sensors’, and ‘Data Visualisation’ for Showreel. Originally, I tried to put ‘sound visualization’ in the showreel, but I do not have a idea to how can I make it better. Instead of that, I decided to use ‘Rich Sensor’ for my showreel.

Graphic Narratives

I cannot notice something is insufficient in my work when it was creating a graphic narrative, but after work, I can find there were too many insufficient things. I invested a lot of time to change a whole form of the project, then I submitted that to end of year exhibition.

I added an illustration of structural explanation for Dancheong. And changed the overall format and annotation. And changed a lot of illustration key frames in the work. I changed the song to “Lee Sun Hee – 인연 / Fate”.

Data Visualisation

In the case of a data visualization project, the final evaluation was not good. I felt I needed additional modifications. So, I chose it as a project to use for showreel. In the original project, circles move on the map, then people can clicks on my location data. Original work is felt so visually static. Instead of that, I try to create a more visually interesting animation using After Effects. This time, I made extensive use of the camera functions, and I used a lot of visual effects.

In the data visualisation refinement, the basic framework coming form original work. But, I tried to make it give completely different feeling.

Finally, I ended up making it at prototype level. Because, I spent a lot fo time to Graphic Narrtive project, and I need to do so many work at the same time… showreel + blog + documentation.

However, I personally think that the new version of data visualsation project is more visually interesting than the original work. At least, I believe I made a work when people look at my work they can make a question about my work “what is this?”.