Finding out that Sam and I were paired for the project made me incredibly happy; we had gotten along already prior to the project and I did enjoy his company. The project also gave us a wonderful opportunity to get to know each other – with the interviews and just us spending time together. We didn’t do the interviews during class time like everyone else did and chose to meet when we were back home, for us to feel so much for comfortable. We had already been friendly with each other thereby talking wasn’t really an issue. I didn’t want to spend any unnecessary time brainstorming on questions so we took the easy way out; googling ‘questions to ask to get to know a stranger’. Those questions were incredibly basic –
1. What’s the one thing you would like to change about yourself?
2. Are you religious or spiritual?
3. Do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?
for example.
I didn’t think we would be spending more than an hour together, time ended up flying by and 3 hours had passed! It was one of the best chats I’ve ever had with someone that would/could be considered a stranger. With the amount of information that we had gathered about each other, it was not challenging to begin brainstorming of ideas that we could work on. With Sam’s Avatar design, I wanted to make him seem far more confident, had much more experimental style of dressing and included his love for trinkets and books.
There was a magazine that I had which I absolutely adore – A Magazine. Which is a magazine which really is a mood board and inspirational heaven. I scanned pages from the magazine and began collaging them into an avatar with an images of Sam which we had taken at Union Square Park during class.
We were both doing extremely well on the project and when it came time to brainstorm on how to present out project, the one that stood out the most was to print out our Avatars life-sized and present them in either a video, moving image or GIF.
I chose to have Sam’s life-size print out be made into a scroll by backing it at the back with strips of cardboard so that when it unfolded, there would be a proper visual and sound.
The day of us filming, we rented every equipment that was available to us; lights, backdrops, cameras etc. We chose to use the setting of a classroom as our Avatars were intended to be heightened versions of ourselves, while still existing in the present world. Therefore, the main link between setting when it comes to Sam and I would be the classroom. Filming took an entire day but the results were absolutely phenomenal, not to mention, I had so much fun working with him!
The project was a huge success in my opinion, we got along really well, got to know each other as friends and what we came up with resonated really well with the class as well as Charlotte.
