Introductory Field Guide Project

So, I've just been through the first two weeks of my course. Induction week was pretty normal. Building tours, basic workshop inductions, enrolment and a gallery tour around Birmingham.The week after that was our 'Field Guide' Introduction Project. Here we had around a week to all work from a very vague project brief and use Bournville village as our inspiration. The brief was:

'A small print on a mailbox becomes something really precious when you remove all the noise around it and isolate it from it's settings.' (Merel Karhof, Project 2) Explore familiar or alien surroundings by isolating, documenting and displaying anything you think will create a new awareness of the landscape.

I had written down about 12 basic ideas from things that had caught my eye in Bournville, and had taken a few photographs on my camera phone. The idea I deemed good enough to present to the group and carry on with for the week was based around malfunctioning objects around Bournville. Near the entrance to Cadbury World there is a car park, with normal everyday car park barriers that go up and down when a car approaches to let them in and out. However, one of the barriers seemed broken as it was continuously going up and down without there being a car there to activate it. So I filmed it a little and took some photos. This got me thinking about other broken or malfunctioning things in the village, and how this in a way contrasted with the perfect, prim and proper atmosphere of the village. I found a clock that was showing the wrong time, and a metal barrier that had been crushed, probably by a car collision.

So I had a starting point but didnt really know how I wanted to present it. The tutor said a video would be most suitable, and that if I could find more malfunctioning 'things' I could put them into a montage of sorts. So I ran with this idea and planned a video called '6 minutes of malfunctions'. It would feature footage of the original barrier, traffic lights, bathroom taps, indoor lights, a clock and possible a computer printer all edited to appear as if they were not working properly, because I couldn't make them break in real life or wait for them to break on their own. I felt that this removed them from their original context because you are being forced to watch them, whereas usually you might only glance at them or not notice them at all because they are trivial in comparision to what ever important things you might have going on in your life.

I then had to present this idea to the head tutor 2 days later, he liked the idea but said footage of the original barrier looped on it's own would be better. I then realised I had probably been a little ambitious with my plans for '6 minutes of malfunctions' given the time restraints of under a week. So I did as I was told and headed out to get better footage of the barrier 'doing it's thing', and unfortunatly the barrier wasn't doing it anymore! So I decided to try again the next morning before I had to display my video at 10am, but had my original camera phone footage as a back-up. Luckily, by Friday morning it was doing it again, so I got 50 seconds of better quality footage to display in class. I decided to simply display it on one of the Mac screens.

So it didn't go as well as I wanted, but nevermind. It was only really a practise run. I think if I were to persue this idea again it I would definately go with my original idea of  '6 minutes of malfunction' and I would also want to display it on a projector or a much plainer TV screen.

EDIT: Upon further consultation with a tutor, I plan to carry on with this idea for the 'Context' section of my field guide projects.