The Brief: Produce a story with a social theme. Your project should combine portraits, objects and spaces to describe your subject matter. You should produce between 8 – 12 images to demonstrate an ethical practice.
At the time of producing this project, I found myself in the middle of a world pandemic as a result of COVID 19, therefore my brief was a challenge. Due to a national lockdown my choices were limited, but, I at least had an obvious theme to pull from, and as like many others, I had been furloughed, therefore I made my topic being furloughed and thought that it could make a good photo-essay.
In motion pictures we are usually introduced to a new scene with an establishing shot, ideally my photo-essay might have benefited with a view of an almost empty high-street with perhaps one or two people wearing masks, taken from a slight elevation. This could have established the idea of the lockdown and the fear and paranoia associated with these times we are now living in. However, the ideal time for this shot would have been in the first week or so of the lockdown, but I was not thinking about this project at that time and in fact I have only thought about this since completing my assignment. I feel that I should kick myself as I have done a film making course with OCA (Setting the Scene) in which I learned about this technique, but I had forgotten it for this project. However, I used the clock to help create a rhythm to my pictorial essay, which I think worked, and I liked my last picture which I made to create a sense of isolation.
Shaun Mullins 512659, Self & the Other (PH5SAO) Learning Log 