Some thoughts on the summer term of Y1 of MAGCD as well as a peek into my process behind this brief. Admittedly not well documented because the turnaround time was so short.

For this brief, I was not sure where to begin, even though by this point we have essentially been working on iterations of the same project for the last few months… I felt like after the last tutorial session I had for Contextualising I was more lost than ever. I felt like my position didn’t make sense. I felt like I wasn’t communicating anything. I was still struggling to find references on the exact topic I was interested in (the uncanny within the field of graphic communication design), and I felt like I had produced work that didn’t answer this question.

I was happy with what I made initially, but after showing it to multiple people I felt like I had gone down a path that I shouldn’t have. I really felt as if I needed to do Damage Control (haha) with my work.

In my personal life, I had previously had a tendency to over-explain every action I took, I constantly apologised for the smallest mistakes, even my presence. I’ve been trying to practise more self-confidence in my day-to-day life and sometimes I think this spills over into my graphic design practice—I mention this because I feel like I struggle with explaining my work now and adding context to it.

In my 1:1 in December, I was recommended to situate myself within the field of graphic communication design, do more research, and find more references that pertain to what I want to do. I find it difficult to define what it is that I do within my own practice, and this makes it challenging to research other graphic designers and researchers who have worked in a similar way. I’m not from a very cultured background, my parents and grandparents have straddled the line of middle and working class; my family has always been more interested in sport, nature, and pop culture than the art world which is seen as frivolous, decadent and elitist.

I am attempting to become better at developing references and becoming a citizen of the graphic communication design world as I develop throughout this course, but I want to make it clear that I am not ashamed of the sort of “low-brow” upbringing I had; in fact, I think it can be an asset and offer a different, critical perspective on design and academia.

Anyways, I felt like at the end of this project, I was feeling really discouraged again by the fact that I seemed to have not grown at all in the past 6 months. I was at the end of a term again, seemingly unconnected from the world of graphic communication design.

My video was initially not focused that much on references that I had collected but more or less on my process and what that entailed. I went back to the drawing board after my feedback session and re-analysed my own work and its relationship between my references and the field of graphic communication design.

Initially, I filmed lots of b-roll of weird adverts, signage, etc. because I thought it was related to The Uncanny, but when presented in my video it didn’t connect with the viewers I had shown.

I removed the b-roll and added more context via subtitles and an emphasis on the meat of the essay which was the script and its references to my work. Essentially, when I had something to show, I showed it, and I stopped worrying about visual filler.

Initially, I experimented with writing in a poetry-esque way, not really worrying about the form or structure of how an essay should be written, but instead just writing my stream-of-consciousness as it related to my project and the ideas behind it.

I added more structure later, which is what ended up in my final video.

I was really happy to be able to show my animations I made in Blender, and I was glad that I had saved videos from my process in that program so that I could show the behind the scenes which is often gate kept.