Monday, 28 February 2011
Saturday, 26 February 2011
DAY 6
6 days into my final major project, one would've assumed that I'd have been super productive and done mounds and mounds of work and experiments...but unfortunately, I haven't.
I'll show you what I've done up till now anyway.
So, we had an open brief for this project which comes with its benefits. Well it certainly benefits me as ever since I got a place to go to art school, I promised myself that if the final project were an open brief, I would use it in order to say thank you to my language teachers.
At A Levels I certainly wasn't bad at languages and I felt that I was encouraged by my teachers to do foreign languages at uni. But after much hustle and bustle I actually realised that I wouldn't be happy continuing to learn a language, and art and design was more suited to me.
Because of this choice, I've always felt a slight guilt for not studying languages at uni, so I wanted to show my teachers that I haven't locked languages out of my life now that I art and things like that.
In addition to this I have become infatuated with fashion film and at how visually powerful and dynamic it can be. So, in a nutshell, my brief is to combine both of these interests into a video in the style of a fashion film to portray my gratitude towards my teachers for teaching me French and German during Years 12 and 13 (You can find the full proposal document here).
So as a starting point I watched quite a few fashion films on Show Studio, sloganned "Home of Fashion Film". And rightly so. Nick Knight, the creator of the website, is fashion photographer extraordinaire. His work (along with his assistant Ruth Hogben and many other collaborators) is so dramatic, tangible and extremely innovative.
I knew he had a self-titled book about his work and so I got it and lugged it on the train home hoping to find maybe some inspiration for the video end result, yet the more and more pages I looked at, the more I got thinking of whether in fact I could simply try to make foreign languages fashionable or glamorous.
I personally feel that, thanks to globalisation and Americanisation, people who have grown up with English as a first language assume that they can get away with not having to learn a language as the whole world will bend over backwards to communicate in your mother tongue not theirs. Firstly I find this a very impolite attitude. It's as impolite as not taking your shoes off in someone's house when you are asked. Secondly, the whole world doesn't speak English! As a half Austrian I know that you can't get away with just English as my mother's parents who lived near Vienna couldn't speak English. So learning languages for me wasn't just for fun; I had to know one in order to communicate with me family! This is why I feel strongly about this subject.
So I was playing with the concept of making languages literally fashionable (or wearable) by taking a couple of photos from the Nick Knight book of Shalom Harlow, cutting away the dress and then writing lines from the novels I studied at school over where the dress would've been.
And in reverse...
These two images in particular are my favourites as they are very clearly communicate my message: Foreign Languages = Fashion.
I like this idea a lot. The odd combination of fashion and foreign languages going hand-in-hand seems like it in actual fact makes a great deal of sense. Fashion is very much international and I think that English (as opposed to French or Italian) is certainly not the language when it comes to fashion. Additionally I think that it'd be a great concept if I could create a clothing collection just with words in different languages scrawled all over them. Or prints on a T-shirt:
So it looks like my project won't necessarily just be a fashion-oriented video standalone after all! But just by using languages as the subject, I know that my teachers will understand that I'll be thanking them.
This project is already looking really exciting!
I'll show you what I've done up till now anyway.
So, we had an open brief for this project which comes with its benefits. Well it certainly benefits me as ever since I got a place to go to art school, I promised myself that if the final project were an open brief, I would use it in order to say thank you to my language teachers.
At A Levels I certainly wasn't bad at languages and I felt that I was encouraged by my teachers to do foreign languages at uni. But after much hustle and bustle I actually realised that I wouldn't be happy continuing to learn a language, and art and design was more suited to me.
Because of this choice, I've always felt a slight guilt for not studying languages at uni, so I wanted to show my teachers that I haven't locked languages out of my life now that I art and things like that.
In addition to this I have become infatuated with fashion film and at how visually powerful and dynamic it can be. So, in a nutshell, my brief is to combine both of these interests into a video in the style of a fashion film to portray my gratitude towards my teachers for teaching me French and German during Years 12 and 13 (You can find the full proposal document here).
So as a starting point I watched quite a few fashion films on Show Studio, sloganned "Home of Fashion Film". And rightly so. Nick Knight, the creator of the website, is fashion photographer extraordinaire. His work (along with his assistant Ruth Hogben and many other collaborators) is so dramatic, tangible and extremely innovative.
I knew he had a self-titled book about his work and so I got it and lugged it on the train home hoping to find maybe some inspiration for the video end result, yet the more and more pages I looked at, the more I got thinking of whether in fact I could simply try to make foreign languages fashionable or glamorous.
 | |
| Title Cover |
 | |
| Couple of pages from the book |
I personally feel that, thanks to globalisation and Americanisation, people who have grown up with English as a first language assume that they can get away with not having to learn a language as the whole world will bend over backwards to communicate in your mother tongue not theirs. Firstly I find this a very impolite attitude. It's as impolite as not taking your shoes off in someone's house when you are asked. Secondly, the whole world doesn't speak English! As a half Austrian I know that you can't get away with just English as my mother's parents who lived near Vienna couldn't speak English. So learning languages for me wasn't just for fun; I had to know one in order to communicate with me family! This is why I feel strongly about this subject.
So I was playing with the concept of making languages literally fashionable (or wearable) by taking a couple of photos from the Nick Knight book of Shalom Harlow, cutting away the dress and then writing lines from the novels I studied at school over where the dress would've been.
And in reverse...
These two images in particular are my favourites as they are very clearly communicate my message: Foreign Languages = Fashion.
I like this idea a lot. The odd combination of fashion and foreign languages going hand-in-hand seems like it in actual fact makes a great deal of sense. Fashion is very much international and I think that English (as opposed to French or Italian) is certainly not the language when it comes to fashion. Additionally I think that it'd be a great concept if I could create a clothing collection just with words in different languages scrawled all over them. Or prints on a T-shirt:
So it looks like my project won't necessarily just be a fashion-oriented video standalone after all! But just by using languages as the subject, I know that my teachers will understand that I'll be thanking them.
This project is already looking really exciting!
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