Week 3 - Session Two

In today's class, we only had Matt as our teacher as Caroline was unfortunately unwell. At the beginning of class, we met in the presentation suite on E floor and began covering off what we would be doing during the class, and were introduced to De Bono's thinking hats.

We were divided into groups of 6, some groups having 7, and did close analysis' of various book covers for George Orwell's Animal Farm. We were looking to analyse the Ihi and Wehi aspects, along with the use of FADPS to create a certain mood, or feel to the cover. We each picked a 'coloured hat to be', and for example I was the black hat, so I had to give my input on all of the problematic aspects, such as weaknesses and difficulties. I found this exercise very intriguing, as it allowed us to break down each and every cover into a lot of depth, and look far beyond just the face value of each design. It was extremely interesting to see just how many different ways people had designed the cover for one book, to represent one issue or plot, which made me realize just how many ideas I will be able to come with when narrowing down to one 'issue' or 'standpoint' in regards to being pro changing the flag. Each cover baried greatly in how they used line, text, colour, contrast, and even the stylistic approaches to the imagery, some opting for a more silhouette based style, while others were illustrated in the style of a renaissance painting etc. It was particularly interesting in how the various ways each book was approached, evoked a different reaction for the audience (wehi), and how they focused on different rhetoric approaches.

Once we had been through a whole load of these covers, I returned to working independently and continued coming up with more ideas on how to portray my standpoint on the flag topic. Towards the end of the class I had my one on one session with Matt so he was able to see where I was at. We went over each of my recent ideas that I had produced in time for yesterday's interim, and spoke about what worked about each one and what didn't. Although he liked the "Hope" poster, and the "Ausralia?" parody of the Disney poster, he mentioned that it would be far more ideal to reproduce a parodic version of a well known Australian poster, as that would have more direct relevance, as the other ones seem a bit random portraying the Obama poster and the Disney poster, neither of which is directly relevant to New Zealand's identity issues. We discussed how I was mainly interested in focusing on that we should change the flag as it doesn't represent us as a nation, or our cultures, so I was going to narrow in on the identity aspect of things. Over the next week, I will continue to sketch up some ideas revolving around the identity issue with New Zealand's flag. If I come up with certain ideas that I think may work quite well, I'll have a go at quickly whipping them up on Photoshop to see if they'll work or not. It's important that I make sure the process of producing them digitally is relatively quick however, to avoid wasting a whole bunch of time if it doesn't turn out quite as successful or effective as I had planned.