Making the ‘Forest Floor’ Blog/Website.

22/04/2012

One of the important plans we had for this unit was to create a website or blog that would showcase the project which we could then show to prospective clients/festivals. We couldn’t begin on this site until we’d done our ‘Howl’ show, as we needed photographic documentation of the piece in use by a real audience. Now that we had that content we could begin on the site.

Tom decided to take a primary role in writing up the descriptions, information and proposals, and I handled the design of the page. I spoke to a friend of mine from Brighton (a professional website designer) about whether he could help us with the site or give us any direction of good, free ways to do it. He said that it would be difficult take create a site for free, as site hosting costs money per-year and that, due to his full time work it would be difficult for him to help us design a site. But he felt that at this stage in our project (seeing as we’d only done one show and have no income) our best bet would be to create a blog/or WordPress site, as this is simple, free and could demonstrate the project successfully. So I decided that for now, that is what we would do.

I tried to create the domain name ‘forestfloor.wordpress’ (as we’d decided on the name ‘Forest Floor’ for definite after our ‘Howl’ show), but it had been taken, so we settled for ‘forestfloorproject.wordpress’ instead.

We planned to include visual examples of the piece on each page of the site along with a general forest theme throughout as this seemed fitting wit the themes of the piece.

We also decided that we should do a home page, a proposal page – describing what the piece is and the messages it portrays, a page about shows the piece has been in – demonstrating use of the piece (‘Howl’ show being our first example), a page about the materials we have used in the piece and how most was sourced and created for free and from fallen wood in the forest and finally, a page about who Tom and I are and what we do. We felt we should only have 4 proper pages on the site, so as to keep it fairly simple and easy to navigate.

These are some screengrabs of each page of the site; we decided to try and stick to a colour scheme and style similar to that of the project throughout:

And this is a link to the page http://forestfloorproject.wordpress.com/

We’re happy with the site as it stands at the moment, as hopefully it fulfils its purpose and doesn’t look too amateur. Hopefully in the coming months as the project develops we can develop the site accordingly, but seeing as we are on a minimal budget, we don’t plan to spend money on this stage yet.

We plan to send this to prospective clients/organisers and include it in any ongoing correspondence with festivals. It will be a great way to sum up the piece to people and showcase any future shows we do.

Introduction to the Professional Project and our Direction for it.

1/2/12

We are now moving onto our Professional Project unit, our final unit of this year. This is the unit outline:

‘Professional Project draws together your practical and professional knowledge of digital media and provides the opportunity to plan and develop the solution to a live or simulated professional brief. The brief will reflect industry standards and the area(s) of practice in which you would like to concentrate professionally after completion of the course. The unit requires you to consider all logistical and organisational aspects of the brief and to define your proposed solution in a Learning Agreement.

Your Professional Project is the culmination of your creative and practical work on the course. You have an opportunity to develop and produce the practical work required to the highest professional standard. This will be evidenced in the form of professional quality work, displayed in an appropriate way for employment or progression to further study. The work will also be displayed in the end-of course exhibition. The Project thus not only draws together your creative and practical knowledge and skills, but also presents your best possible work to a public and professional audience.

Through consolidation of the learning achieved through the unit and critical reflection, students will have the opportunity to analyse and evaluate all aspects of their work and achievements from the final professional project unit.’

Fortunately, as we have a general idea of the direction we intend to take with this unit, we feel we’re currently in fairly good standing to begin moving it forward. As referenced in many posts from the previous unit, our plan is to continue with the current project; developing, refining, preparing, and promoting it for shows in an art show, event or festival environment, etc. This will also mean documenting the project and finding a space online to showcase it in action, as a visual example of the piece for potential clients, etc.

I am likely to learn a lot in the next few weeks about the promotion/plugging of art installations, as it is something I’m fairly new to. Fortunately however, Tom has worked on a few similar projects in the past so has had some experience with this side of things, so I feel we should be fairly competent at moving the project forward and getting it involved with festivals and shows.

 The unit will involve rectifying any flaws highlighted a the end of the previous unit, redesigning the piece to a suitable stage where it can be brought into a professional context, and researching potential clientele (Art show, event, festival, etc) and beginning correspondence with them in the hope of getting the piece involved. I will elaborate on this in my learning agreement.

DSLRs are Gooooooooooooood.

Unfortunately, i was only able to use a DSLR once this year for any of my units due to my friend (on Film Production year 1) having a Canon 5D MK II full setup. I would have liked to have used one through uni but it seems only the years above are able to this… I guess I’ll just have to wait for then…

This is an edit I made of footage he shot of me using the aforementioned DSLR, enjoy: