Lens based media

For lens based media, we started off by spreading out a collection of photographs that we previously had taken of scenes, people, landscapes and things that relate to us and are sentimental. I chose a range of photos from travels, my family and friends, all photographs I had taken and were of good quality and meant something to me. We were asked to chose one of these photos to draw on an A1 piece of paper. I chose to draw with pencil a scene from a trip I went on to Amsterdam one February when it was so cold the canals had frozen over. This was a memorable trip and I got some good shots out of it. 

Although the piece was unfinished, the next task was to pick a section of the drawing and isolate it. At first I separated part of the building from the drawing, surrounding it with trees and ground. To me, this simply looked like a cropped drawing, which it was, and did not stand out. The aim of the cropping was to create a whole new image, I did not feel like this worked so I picked a different part of the drawing to crop. My image was full of people ice skating on the frozen canal, the people were spread out and some attached. An isolated image caught my eye on the bottom right of three people standing on the ice. Seen as this was a quick drawing, they were not done accurately yet they are recognisable as human figures. After taking three of them in a group I decided to go further and isolate just one of the figures. This created a whole different drawing completely non related to my original scene. 

The next task was to go around the area of Ravensbourne and photograph a list of things in a creative way. The list was: Fall, Crush, Echo, Happy, Sad

I attempted to interpreted this task in a unique way, using less obvious things and trying to find a clever way to relate to these words. I came up with a few ideas including the surroundings and people I was with. 

CRUSH

ECHO

FALL

HAPPY

SAD

The next day we sat in tables of four and on a large piece of paper, and were told to draw six people/animals that were memorable in our past. I used the first things that came into my head, suggesting they were most memorable. Some were my friends, some people I've met once, some people I do not know but had memorable faces, and some had memorable personalities. I also sketched a strange looking dog that my friend fostered for a while, no one knew what bread it was as it was so interesting looking. 

Next we were asked to draw a happy place, a sad place, somewhere idilic, a worse nightmare, and some other surroundings/things or people of a theme. My happy place was on a warm beach at sunset, and my nightmare was in a swamp of crocodiles. 

In our groups we then created three stories out of the drawings we had all created in six different frames, using no words, only pictures. It was fun to make up these stories and alter them to include everyone's characters. It was difficult to produce a story that made sense seen as we could not use words to explain and only had six frames! This brought our creative imaginative drawing side out. 

After this story we were told to go home and take photographs to create our own story about anything we like. We were given advise to make the story original and unique and the photographs to look supernatural and abnormal. For the story board we were to have six final photographs taken that clearly depict a beginning, a middle and an end. This included: a subject matter, a problem and a solution. 

 Inspired by the given suggestion of 'flying pigs' I made my story about a magnetic fairy that I have in my house from when I was younger. 

The story was about the ice cream fairy going on a journey to find ice cream. This is the ice cream fairy. 

The fairy went to the shop to get ice cream to give to all the children but it was run out! The fairy then had to travel on the tube to find more shops to get the ice cream. On the way she got stuck under a leaf!

Finally, she found another shop that was full of ice cream!

THE END. 

To complete the story board in class, we were to run it by our class mates and comment on each others stories, saying what to improve and what was good. To improve it we were to take out a printed photograph and replace it with a drawing of something better. To complete the story board we mounted the photographs and drawings on an A1 piece of paper. 

To improve my story I replaced the frame where the fairy gets lost under a leaf with a different story line, slightly more gripping... The fairy misses the tube to where she has to get to and its the last one! Th solution is she flies. 

To finish off the day we got into groups and chose the most interesting story out everyone's and announced it to the class. We were then given fead back on the story, how to improve and what was gripping about the simple stories. It was also important that the photographs were self explanatory, so it was easy to understand visually.