Throughout this process of creating work for my Final Major Project I have had to overcome many difficulties from creating designs for each characters to finding models to finally sending off the book to be published. The best way for me to talk through the problems that I faced is to discuss each element individually.
Although I already had an element of my final project secured - working as a head make-up artist for a student film, running alongside this I had also chosen to create a book based on the darker side of fairy tales as another element of my final major project hand in. One of the first difficulties that I faced was trying to come up with a new and interesting concept for my book while also choosing a theme that I have a passion for and that will aid me when looking for future employment. I was happy with my final choice of using the Brother's Grimm fairy tales to show the darker, more violent side to fairy tales and I felt that with this I would give me the opportunity to include my keen interest in prosthetics and special effects.
After analysing each of my choosen fairy tales I then had to design and create a look for each based on what I had learned about their characters through the narrative of their stories. This for me was challenging as I didn't know har far to push my designs for each character and whether to make the looks more fashion based, or theatrical looking or something that you might find on a TV programme or film. As I have always wanted to work in either film, TV or theatre so I eventually choose this route and I have tried to keep my character designs more theatrical rather than fashion based.
After designing each character and setting everything in place before shooting one of my main challenges was finding and securing both models and photographers, the people I have collaborated with on this project have been either students or other young people all of which are very busy at this term time with hand in's themselves so trying to get both model and photographer available on the same days proved to be more difficult than I first anticipated. I found a photographer that agreed to work with my on all of my shoots but through illness and lesson clashes she ended up only doing one of my eight shoots. I was unable to find another photographer at such short notice so I was left to shoot alone. Although I have had photography lessons this was a challenging task for me as I had to set up my own lighting, as well as using a light meter to read the correct lighting, a lot of what I had been taught before came into play and with some help from one of the photography technicians I was able to shoot successfully. I was happy with how the shoot came out so I choose to do my photography for the remaining 6 shoots also.
I have always thought of myself as being a very organised person and having good time management skills, however with this project these skills have been put to the test. I have found it very difficult to arrange shooting dates in a time frame that would work best for the deadline and as I had troubles booking studios at the university I have had to complete seven of my eight shoots in just three weeks. This isn't what I had planned in my original timeline and through this difficulty I had to make the decision to remove one of the stories from my book so instead of having five fairy tales, I now have just four, I choose to remove the story of Snow White & Rose Red as I felt this one went the least with my overall concept for the book.
The shooting of my eight looks was a stressful and hard process and I have found it difficult to maintain a high reoccurring standard through each. I decided to shoot most of my looks myself as I had now learnt how to create a correct lighting set up, however for two of my shoots I choose to use another photographer to give me more time to concentrate on creating the looks on the day. This however slightly backfired as the lighting set up created by this photographer came out differently on her nikon camera than previously on my canon camera. I felt that the images were quite dark and I became concerned about how dark they would be when printed in CMYK colour. I spoke to my photography teacher who suggested I lighten the exposure slightly brighter than normal on all of my images as when images are printed they automatically become darker anyway. This has taught me that it is best to use the same photographer or the exact same light set up for each shoot so that you have continuity through your images.
After all of my shoots were complete and all the final images had been chosen and edited I now had to begin designing and laying out the template of my book. As my book includes four fairy tales, I wanted important quotes or sentences from the stories to run with the images as a way of telling the stories to a reader, however one of my first difficulties was choosing which quotes best suited which images and whether those images expressed what the story was saying. Although I am happy with all of my model choices, when shooting each it was hard to get them to express the emotions that they were meant to be expressing in the narrative so some of my chosen images don't quite read the same as the book, in future I feel that I need to go into a shoot more focused with what I actually want to achieve from the shoot and therefore I shouldn't leave until I'm happy with the outcome.
When creating the layout of my book another difficulty that I came across was choosing the positioning and placement of the images on the page and how I could use tools such as the crop tool to create more interest with my images and to help focus on the most important parts of an image, the parts that actually tell the story. Originally I wanted my text to run through the images, in a swirled or arched way however when it came to this stage in InDesign I felt that it didn't look as effective as I had hoped, I then choose to use straight lines of text as this to me looked more clean cut and less messy. I also spent a long period of time choosing a suitable font for the book as I felt the narrative and my concept needed a stronger text font, I was happy with my final choice of a swirled font but upon reflection it is slightly harder to read, I then had to use the spacing tool to create a more spaced and readable text. However with the amount of text in my introduction this wasn't possible so I choose to use a completely different, plainer font for this.
Once I had fully completed my book design and gathered advice and feedback from two of my tutors, I thought that uploading it onto the book publishing website was going to be the easiest stage of the whole process. However once I had uploaded it and viewed it as a PDF document on their website I noticed that my page colours that were meant to be black were grey and this completely changed the whole mood and design of the book. I began to panic and went to visit a printing company as a second option for printing, I told the shop assistant of my complications and she advised me to change the colour of my blacks in InDesign to another shade of black that's called registered black as apparently this is a darker shade of black, her advice thankfully worked and I could then upload my book again with ease.
Although I have faced many difficulties and had to overcome a lot of problems throughout this process, it has been a massive learning curve for me. At times it has been very stressful and wearing but I feel that the outcome of my book shows my hard work and dedication to the project. I now feel more confident in tackling future projects and overcoming any obstacles I might face through them.
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