Going into 2020, I began work on my Final Major Project by focusing on my home town of Great Torrington, Devon. This place is such an important place to me and I have always wanted to somehow make a project on it, and I felt that my final project at university was the best time to do this. During the process of beginning this project, the United Kingdom was struck with COVID-19, which made my project take a complete turn.
My lifestyle changed to completing university at home, working in a confined space and through Zoom tutorials with lectures. It was a very different to come to terms with, as well as a passing of a very important family member during this time, it made me want to focus on this project even more and who I truly am.
I have changed in many ways through the past few months and I wanted my project to reflect that. As I could not travel home to Devon during these times, I found that creating this project helped me get through everything and I was finally able to create a piece of work that fully shows off who I am as a person.
The focus for my banner design was to include one of the initial geometric designs that I had created initially, and add in photographs on the collage montage that I created on my wall for the final video. These pieces of paper included words that people related to me, as well as photographs and other pieces of information that relate to me. When the official lockdown hit the UK and we were all shut away inside, I had to adjust to finishing my degree in my small flat with no one around me but my partner. It was a very hard time as I also lost a family member who I adored, so having to navigate through that as well as a pandemic was extremely hard time. This is where I felt my project needed to take a turn. I could no longer visit my home town of Great Torrington in Devon, so that made my project about how it made me feel and who I am. To help with my project, I posted on Facebook and Instagram to ask people what words or sentences they would relate to me. This was extremely helpful, and I was shocked at the amount of responses. I was then able to write down all of these words and memories from people onto pieces of paper, and add them to my wall.
These are pages designed within my development book that I digitally created for this project. I looked into a variety of features to help me in creating my final outcome. Something that was extremely important was the typeface, as I wanted to create an animation inspired by the film intros of some of my favourite films: "Catch Me If You Can" and "Monsters Inc.". Looking into these films and other ones, enabled me to envision how I wanted my animation to work as well as the style I wanted to go for.
Something else that was very important to me in this project was the use of music and sounds. Music is a massive part of my life and there are songs that everyone relates to different experiences and places that are important to them. A lot of music stems from memories I have in Devon so it felt right to include music as well as small sound effects that I would hear at special places, such as waves crashing and seagulls at the local beach, Westward Ho!
