Exhibition:

As the final part of my project, I must exhibit my work. For this exhibition, I will use an Apple Mac and two boards. On these boards there will be pictures of the people I have confessions from. On the Apple Mac I will have my piece on a loop. People will listen to the piece through a pair of headphones, to emphasise the idea that the subject is confessing something they have kept secret, possibly for a long time. As well as this, the images of the subjects will have no link to the piece so the viewer will be forced to guess as to which confession belongs to which person.

Audio:

Since my last post, I have decided to tweak my idea slightly, and now, instead of using video for my piece, I am going to use audio. This is because I have found that people are a lot more likely to get involved if it is just their voices being exhibited. As well as this, I am going to use photography to catalogue the confessions.

Second Test Shoot

Yesterday, I was planning to film more footage for my piece, however, due to weather problems I could not film at the same location. Therefore, I started to think about other locations that would not be affected by the weather, and I decided on the train station as it gets a steady flow of people walking through and even though people may be in a rush to catch their trains, it is a dry environment, so people are more likely to take the time to talk.
When I arrived at the train station, I found that there was work taking place on the building next door and therefore there was a lot of background noise.
After this, I decided to take a trip to the nearby town of Bolton as I have been before numerous times with family, and there is some nice architecture which I thought would work well as a backdrop for my piece.
When I got there, the weather had cleared up slightly and there was a lot less wind in the area. There were three main places that I looked at but only one looked suitable. This was outside the town hall and therefore right in the center of the town where there were many people walking etc.
All in all, considering the 2 hour return journey time to get to Bolton, even though The audio aspect of Bolton was better due to superior weather conditions, I found that people were more cooperative in Blackburn and therefore I think I will keep to my original plan to film my piece in Blackburn.

Test Shoot

Yesterday I went to shoot some test footage in Blackburn town centre. After finding a suitable place to film, I set up my equipment, and started asking people to be in my piece. The footage I gained on this day reflected how many people were reluctant to be filmed. After removing the answers that could not be used, I had a total of five answers for each question. This was enough for me to get a general idea of what my piece would look like depending on how I edited it, but not enough to show me everything I needed to know.
The questions that i asked got a variety of answers, ranging from unusable answers such as the worst thing ever done being 'this video' to personal accounts of leaving home and admiting sexuality in high school. I like the way the questions came across and how well the answers come together in the editing process.
I found the location of my piece to be very good, as it looked very well placed, and the positioning of the camera was clearly very central. However, I did not factor in the building work taking place up the road and therefore, during some of the answers, there was the sound of a pneumatic drill in the background.
Some of the answers I got, while very informal, were very enlightening and at times very personal. I found that, although many people weren't willing to confess anything on camera, the people who were willing to get involved had no problem talking about their lives and their feelings in a great amount if detail.

Experimentation

I now have sufficient planning and ideas to start experimenting. I think that so far, my ideas have developed really well and will make a great piece. I now know how I am going to get the confessions, and after much deliberation, I have decided that I want to try and take aspects of confessions in religion and confessions in law and bring them together in my piece. I have decided to do this because I have found both types of confessions really interesting and would like to use my final major project as a way of expanding my knowledge alongside making the piece. I now plan on taking the information I have found and expanding on it with new research, as well as experimenting with my ideas for the final piece.
Tomorrow, I will book some equipment so that I can start generating the material for my final major project and by the end of the week I hope to know which methods I will use in my piece. Let the experimentation begin!