Inspiration of the Week - Marc Isaacs

Marc Isaacs is a documentary film maker whose films usually investigate people and their ordinary lives.

I first heard about his film Lift last year in our video skills class and thought that it was a brilliant documentary on the real people that live in the London flats and showed their real reactions to the camera man. 

The film documents the host of characters that all live in the building and shows how they increasingly more comfortable with the camera and the questions the camera man asks. 

The reason that I am looking at this artist is that I am both looking at how I am going to document my next project and also looking into the idea of interviewing real people or looking into real places, rather than how places are shown to be in the media.

Over the course of the documentary Isaacs doesn't move but just stays in the lift, which is an element of work that I am considering. I might try and go to the one space over a number of days and then move t a different one for another number of days. 

NB - all photographs here have been taken from these sites in which the artist is featured:
http://www.marcisaacsfilms.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNAvyLCTik

I do not own any of the pictures on this post.

So that's all for now 

Byyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeee

Róisín -x

Pencil Brief!!

So over the first couple of weeks back we got our first mini brief which was the essence of the pencil. At first I was stumped, but a few mind maps later I had began to come up with an idea. I looked at what a pencil meant to me, and to me the pencil is an object that opened doors to maths English etc, so I started to look into the idea of unlocking.

 At first I though of trying to make a traditional lock with the pencil acting as the key, however I decided not persuade this given the complication of actually making the lock and the time scale of the brief. I then simplified the idea down and decided I wanted to arrange a line of pencils into the shape of the pins in the lock. 

I then played about with different ideas of the background and thought how I would make the pencils stand out rather than just have a plain background. My first idea was to try and join up the pins as to how the key would look for this lock. However I thought that this distracted too much from the pencils themselves and so abandoned that idea. 

I then thought of using old past papers or textbooks as the background

I felt that these ideas definitely worked better, and then decided to go with past papers as the paper was a little brighter making the pencils stand out. I used a maths past paper as the background as I felt that this contained better imagery and also I had to use a pencil in this exam. 

To display the final piece I found an old decorative box in a second hand shop and it was the perfect size for my piece. I bought it for a couple of punds and then took the old display out, added in my pencils and background. I also tidied up the back of it a bit just to make it looker neater and cleaner.

'Unlocked'

We then had to critique our classmates work and write our questions for them on a piece of papaer. I think that this was a good idea as what came back from mine was that I maybe should have placed my sketchbook there as well to show my progression of ideas, and also explain bits of my concept a bit more. What I might do for next time is next to my artist statement have a QR code that links to a more descriptive blog post that would hopefully answer more questions they might have that I couldn't cover in the artist statement.

Anyway, that's one brief done only three more to go,
bye for now,

Róisín - x