Overall Comments
Great progress is being made, and your extensive work behind the scenes is paying dividends, this can be seen through the nearly complete work on your first two subjects3
Assessment potential
Assignment 2 and 4 Assessment potential
I understand your aim is to go for the Photography/Creative Arts* Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to pass at assessment. In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my feedback.
Feedback on assignment
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
Notes from, and in addition to, our Skype tutorial –
Some great work in here, very detailed, warm and close. I felt I learnt a lot about the lives of the first two subjects.
We discussed you feeling that you hadn’t the [sound] interview to back up the images in this series of Adilzhan. We discussed how images, text and sound could show different facets of his story, and a suitable evocation of time having passed and his circumstances having changed could be through the effective use of a caption slide. This should be used to narrative effect, influence should be taken from fictional as well as documentary work. We want to explore how editing changes, or confirms, our views of the subjects.
Your project has the potential to test out approaches to documentary. You have mixed a thorough ‘overview style’, with in depth research and past familial, social and medical histories, with day-in-the-life shoots. These compliment each other providing two documentary strands, over and above your subject matter your work could be about documentary itself showing differences and commonalities of approaches, allowing the viewer space to acknowledge or question evidence.
It could be about testing audiences, testing the viability of techniques.
You have a satisfactory sound interview with Yernar, so perhaps the style of this presentation could differ from Adilzhan’s.
Their storylines contrast educational attainment and success after schooling but this is just one facet of their stories.
Visual, sound and text elements can all be utilised to tell your impression of their lives.
The order of stories will be important – lifting audiences, we agreed that each work could stand alone, but it would also be useful to think of the overarching narrative.
More work is needed with Amanat, compared to the other three I would like you to tease out a bit more of his life, ambition, drive, and spirit. I’m sure this will come naturally through repeat visits as it has with the others.
You noted that you are working with 4 stories so that 3 will hopefully succeed.
You believe that by the end of July you will have gathered all primary data, images etc.
We agreed that ‘presentation is so important’, therefore the editing and production of the packages will take almost as much time as the research and image capture.
We discussed editing at first based upon the aesthetic, referencing other work or research perhaps, we want to capture people’s attention first, then reward their further viewing through attention to detail, breadth of research etc.
I suggested you might want to capture some background visuals, along the lines of the similarities/differences between Kazakhstan and the West. However you may already have enough, I noted Adilzhan’s buggy in the street with the minaret in the background as a great example.
Coursework
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity
The images shown here are of good quality with a lovely storytelling arc. The first two series in particular show an affinity and warmth between you and subjects.
Research
Context,
reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
Evidence of deep research here, plenty of discussion of audience expectations.
Learning Log
Context,
reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
I will look at your log in preparation for the ‘research’ tutorial.
Suggested reading/viewing
Context
We discussed how much research you have already done and scheduled our next but one tutorial to discuss written texts and ideas. In terms of visuals I think you’ve already seen enough, we can look at editing influences later. We will assess your written research in two tutorials time.
Pointers for the next assignment / assessment
We’ll try speak to Eddie to clear up timetabling as you are on the old scheme.
Next tutorial we’ll look at your final visual material, with a view to narratives and edits.
The one after we’ll be discussing your research material, it may be that we schedule these relatively close together.
Carl Whetham photography 