Visit 2 - The BBC

We went for a second trip to the BBC before Christmas for another try with camera techniques and interviews.

I was supposed to be the camera person but because half of my group didn't turn up, I joined a group with Cheyenne, Emine and Corey as the sound person.

It was an alright job but it got a bit boring because all I did was stand there holding the microphone which wasn't very fun but I dealt with it. I would like to be the camera person i the future though.

We interviewed two people and me and Cheyenne also filmed some clips to use as cutaways in our final piece.

After we had finished interviewing people, we went back to the editing suite and started editing our videos. Me and Cheyenne worked on ours and it started off really good. We learnt a lot about the new movie editor, Final Cut Pro and it was a change from using Ulead. It had a wider range of tools to use such as the splitter screen video and the voice recorder. We didn't finish editing the video but we got quite far to be reasonable and our first interviewee said a lot of "Ums and "Ahs" so we spent a lot of time cutting those out.

Tate Britain Francis Bacon Exhibition

On the 18th of November, our Creative and Media class went on a trip to see the Frances Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain!

We left school at the normal time and took two trains to get there. The first thing we did when we were there was sign in and put our bags into the lockers. After that, we went to have a look at some work from the four artists who were running for the Turner Prize 08. The four artists were Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes.

The first artist's work we saw was Goshka Macuga's. She was a sculptor and also made pieces of collage-like pictures where she would take a photograph and stick pictures over it. I thought she was alright but lacked creativity in her work. Most of it was just pictures with random images stuck over them which I didn't find very interesting. Her first sculptor was quite good though because it looked very interesting and was made out of glass so you could see through it.

The second artist we saw was Cathy Wilkes. She was a sculptor too and made a scene with mannequins with items over their heads and empty food containers on shopping conveyor belts. Cathy Wilkes was my least favourite artist because I didn't like how she had set out her work. The sight of all the empty food containers with excess food left in the bottom was quite revolting. I drew a picture of a heart sculptor she had on the floor.

The third artist we saw was Runa Islam. She was a visual artist and made videos as her form of art. We saw two of her videos. The first one I didn't like much because it was a bit loud and was just zooming and panning on what looked like a garage. The second video of her's we saw was much better. It was some Indian men sitting in carts in a local park. She had close ups on the men and lots of slow pans of the scene. I thought this was a very interesting video.

The last artist we saw was Mark Leckey. He had done a variety of sculptors, paintings and videos. I sketched out one of his pictures of the Tate Modern he had done. He was my favourite out of the four artists and my favourite piece from him was a video of a rabbit sculpture which looked like it was a room when it was zoomed into the eyes. The good part about this was that you couldn't see the camera even though it was a reflection on the rabbit's metallic coat.

After we had viewed the Turner Prize 08, we went to look at Francis Bacon's exhibition. There were a number of different rooms, each with a theme. The themes were:
1: Animal
2: Zone
3: Apprehension
4: Crucifixion
5: Crisis
6: Achieve
7: Portrait
8: Memorial
9: Epic
10: Late
I sketched out his picture of Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) which was in the Portrait section and also two pictures from the Crisis section. My favourite one I drew was the Figures in a Landscape 1956 picture from the Crisis section.

I think that his work was scary and quite depressing since he used a lot of dark colours, pain and scary expressions. I don't think his work really appealed to me that much because of this.

After we had seen his work, we had lunch and then looked around at some of the other work various artists which was probably my favourite part of the gallery because I saw a lot of really pretty paintings here with lots of detail and colours.

We headed back to school after we were all back by the entrance. I think that this was a good day and a nice experience but I think I would have preferred it if I had seen some less scary art.

I would like to see an Anime gallery or the Dr Seuss one next time!

Mindmap 3

Here's mine and Cheyenne's mindmap again but a bigger version of it...

Disappearing Numbers

On the 23rd of October we went on a trip to see a theatre production called "Dissappearing Numbers" at the Barbican.

We left from school at 5PM and it took about half an hour to get there. Once we were there, Cheyenne, Beth, Farah, Anne-Marie, Aoife and I walked around the Barbican for about half an hour until the play started so we ate some food and then talked.

When we got into the theatre, we were really high up and we got a bit scared but we got used to it after a while. The play started and we found out it was about a mathmatician who was from India. The play was 2 hours long in total which was a bit long for me but it didn't feel that long.

I didn't really like the play that much because it was a bit too long and not very interesting to me but it was ok. We also didn't get brilliant seats because we could see everything that was going on in the backstage which kind og ruined it for us. It was also tiring since it was so late and I almost fell asleep in part of it.

Well, those were my thoughts on the play, okie-takka?

Bye!