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JOB DONE - 26.05.2021

Today we presented to the whole lecture and got feedback from all the lecturers. It was really nice to hear the positive responses to the work that we created, it seems that we made the right decisions and presented it all well. 

I am pleased with the final piece that we have summited and have enjoyed a lot of the elements of the module. I have expanded on all of these ideas in my report that is uploaded on to Moodle. 

I have enjoyed this module a lot and have learnt a lot about working in a team and working with people who I have never met or chosen to work with. These are all skills that we will continue to use into our final year at university and into our careers especially as so much of collaborative work is now and will in the future be done online. 

Thankyou to all the lecturers on this module who have come up with fun and imaginative activities for us to complete and for all their feedback not just today but when we have sent work in progress over to them. 

Hopefully now we can all have a relaxing summer where we can finally enjoy meeting up with other people, something that we all missed over the past year!    

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AND THATS THAT. - 24.05.2021

We are done. The presentation got recorded this morning and we hit exactly 20 minuets so it seems that there was just as enough information in the script that had been written. I think we had the right balance between science of how the system works and the creative elements that we put into the project. It was also hopefully nice and clear as to who did what work within the group. 

I am almost treating this post as a free pass as I have already summited 5 and a look back as the module as a whole. 

We started off with some really fun and interesting tasks, those that you would never really expect in a lecture. I specifically enjoyed the scavenger hunt, giving us all an ability and excuse almost to revisit locations close to our homes and re-think our relationships with them. For me it really made me think of how lucky I am to live where I do, in walking distance to the beach and so close to so many of my friends. 

After that we moved on to the progress challenge, and even though we were not directly working with them it was nice to do some collaborative group work for the first time this year. We chose churches and made a short video with photos, live sound and a spoken word. I really enjoyed the fact that on that task in our group each person had a set task to do and we did it in a methodical order, something we may have missed in our after progress challenge.

Then we moved on to the presentation and artefact that we summited this week. At the start we were all, I doubt just my group, very confused of what the brief was really asking of us but then once we looked at it more broadly it was actually quite simple and the scope for creation was massive. In the end, it was my idea of renewable energy that we chose to pursue. I wrote the poem that can be heard in the video and also with James edited the final artefact. We are all quite pleased with how the whole assessment went but I think we are also pleased that it is now over and we can enjoy our summer break before our final year at Portsmouth.

The church we used for our progress challenge, The bells sound was recorded at my local church over 100 miles away from this one that features in our video. This ability to work away from each other was vital in the After progress challenge too. 

The Editing process. Myself and James had to do it all over Zoom as we could not be in person or use the university's facilities. 

https://youtu.be/X8ABzJTvgw8

Link to our final artefact. 

Our opening slide of our PowerPoint that we have worked on to accompany our script.  

Overall we are all pleased with the work that we have done and the video that we have produced. I think I will be uploading one more blog post after we have presented on Wednesday as a final piece and a nice ending to the module.  

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ALMOST DONE - THE EDIT - 19.05.2021

This week myself and James edited our artefact together over zoom. 

We edited the video with the input of other members of the group, we decided that to follow the storyline of Jakub ‘calling’ the future we would have the shots until he typed the year 2026, the year we hope pavegen would be ready to power a city like ours, to be in black and white to portray the older conventional ways of producing electricity. The video suddenly erupts into colour and sparks fly. These sparks are mirrored throughout the video. The sparks were created by using third party plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro and removing the black background of the clips allowed us to use them throughout the video. We mapped the footsteps Jakub made to show the electricity that his steps were powering with coloured sparks and flashes of light. We also made the creative decision to make these effects small and not too intrusive to show the fact that using pavegen technology to create electricity would not impede everyday life or affect the scenery, an argument many have in opposition to wind and solar farms creating electricity. In the editing of the video we found that the music we had originally used to accompany our video didn't fit with the theme that we had gone for and it made the poem feel disconnected to the visuals, almost as two separate pieces of work. So we then chose the music that can now be heard in the video. This choice of music we felt accompanies the visuals much nicer and allows us to achieve the feeling we were trying to get across with the idea of the video flowing like the electricity our steps would be making to power the city.

Overall we are pretty pleased with how the video has come out. Obviously with the fact that Covid did not allow us to make the most of University equipment and buildings, this meant that we were unable to create a mock up tile that we were going to use as an example of pavegen tiles within our video. We were also unable to use the editing suites, this made editing the video more difficult as we had to edit the video over zoom sharing screens, it wasn't until the end of the edit did we find that we could control each others screens over zoom, this is something that I am sure we will use in future projects.

Well that is almost it. As a group we are meeting up on Monday one final time to record our 20 minute presentation. The script is almost done, I have written the majority of it but I don’t mind as I was unable to be there for the second shooting day. 

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MISSING OUT BUT GETTING STUFF DONE - 11th May 2021

Today the rest of the group went out to film our video, unfortunately I couldn’t go with them as I am not currently living in Portsmouth and it was my grandfather’s funeral yesterday so that sort of took priority. From looking at the clips they did a great job. We have gone for a slightly different theme than originally planned, as last week (before we were rained off) we came up with a cool idea to use a phone box to ‘phone’ the future and then our video will show Jakub walking around and the city lighting up. Our new video idea nicely ties into the slogan that I created in one of the very early weeks ‘helping students step into a brighter future’. I am sure after talking with the group we can integrate that into our presentation somewhere.

So, what next? Today I filled out quite a bit of the presentation script and sorted out parts of the PowerPoint, in the lecture tomorrow we are going to use our breakout room to discuss who and how we are going to edit the video and then the rest of us will really knuckle down on getting our 20 minutes presentation sorted ready for the deadline in two weeks’ time.

Before this week I was feeling a bit tense of if we were going to get this done in time, especially after our set back last week when we could not film. However, now I think we are in a very good position to get the presentation and video done to a good standard ready for the deadline. After todays meeting, we will have a clear route of who is doing what jobs, weather it be editing or getting the presentation ready and I think we will get it all done well as a group.

I have written all these blog posts but have not published any, I suppose I should probably find a way to publish these now, so if you are reading this I obviously found a way!

I have written a presentation script and left spaces for others in the group to add their parts in. 

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RAIN STOPS PLAY - 6th May 2021

I should be writing this blog after having spent the past three days having been in Portsmouth filming our video for our project. One of those points are true, I was in Portsmouth, but the video is not filmed. We went out to film and was really good to finally meet the group in person, but after we shot our first take the skies opened and poured down on us. We were soaked in seconds. Its not the end of the world though as we now have solid ideas on what and how we are going to shoot. Unfortunately, it means I will not be there as I cannot get down to Portsmouth again next week when they want to film but I am pleased we have a solid idea, and it will get done very soon. We have changed our idea slightly to a more story-based film where we ‘call’ the future and show how our sustainable energy supplying footsteps can produce electricity. I think we will also aim to film enough footage to play around with our original ideas as well. We also decided that the video should feature music that is fast paced to emulate the feeling of electric charging up the city. This music should allow the video to ‘flow’ in the same way electric does when powering a circuit. 

As a group we are kind of working in reverse as we have done most of a script for our final 20-minute presentation before even finishing the video. It was good to see the group yesterday and we all thought that being in person allowed ideas to flow much better than when you are all talking to each other on zoom. I suppose that is something we all took for granted when our lives were not being lived through a computer screen, and definitely something we are all looking forward to when we can all get back into Uni together. Me and James were even saying we were looking forward to a two-hour lecture in a big hall even if it is at 9am, we must have been stuck inside our homes to long!

Between now and my last blog post, myself and James felt that the group project had sort of come to a stop. probably because of the Easter holidays and deadlines in other modules. To try and get the ball rolling again we wrote a poem that could accompany the video, originally we started it as a sort of jokey poem but then we really got into it. Gabriel had said that he was going to write a poem but he had said he did not know if he will get it done in time to shoot the video because of other commitments so me and James sent ours to the group via WhatsApp and they all seemed happy to use it and pleased we had turned it around in such quick time.    

This week I also helped by doing a voiceover for another groups video, do I wish we were doing something like that? perhaps. But that may just be because they have a finished artefact while we don’t, I’m sure when we are done I will be just as pleased with ours.  

I am pleased that the video is being sorted and probably better than it would have been if we rushed it in the rain yesterday, disappointed that I can’t be there to do it with them. However, I can get on with the presentation while they are all out doing the video.

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KEEPING MOMENTUM - 19th April 2021

It has been a while since I wrote my first blog post mainly due to us having the Easter break. However, that does not mean I have not been thinking about his challenge. James and I expanded our research on floor tiles that produce electricity and found a company that supplies them around the globe called ‘PAVEGEN’. It seems like something that is so simple it is surprising that a forward thinking and sustainability conscious university like ours have not already thought about installing them. Before Easter I attempted to contact the company to enquire about the cost of the system, I am yet to get a reply, as I think this would be something that would benefit our pitch a lot.

We have had some problems in our group arranging a time when everyone is free, with the pandemic still affecting many parts of all our lives we have all had to pick up work and other commitments that have slowed down our Uni experience. It was good this past week being allowed a little more freedom with the country starting to open with pubs and non-essential shops reopen. Maybe now the end is in sight?

Today I checked in on the group and continued some research of my own as well as seeing who can do what in regard to the presentation and the video can do we plan to create, with us all still dotted around the country and beyond in our case, arranging when we can shoot a video is proving difficult. I do think though that like many assessments once the ball starts rolling it will all snowball and come together nice and quick.

I also this week found information about an app called ‘Earth Miles’ where doing exercise can earn you points that can be redeemed for money off environmentally friendly products, such as water bottles or cosmetics. I will talk to the group to see if this is something they would like to integrate into our idea.    

 The forward thinking Uni - https://www.port.ac.uk/research/research-areas/areas-of-expertise/renewable-energy-and-sustainability-analytics  &  https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/our-ambition/sustainability

Pavegen - https://pavegen.com/

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THE BEGINING - 25th March 2021

Going into this challenge initially I was skeptical of how we would complete it as a group, not because of the members of the group as we have all already proved we can work well together, rather because none of us were really sure what the after-progress challenge was about. However, now after talking with the group and Simone we all feel we can complete the challenge and have fun with it at the same time. As group of creatives, all studying a creative subject, we have decided we should use our skills to create an almost advert/ PSA and adopt the persona of an upcoming company to encourage student to live a more sustainable and environmentally friendly lifestyle.

During our first meeting as a group, I put forward the idea of environmental living as something we can easily create and research, we also decided that we needed an almost ‘group leader’ to make sure everyone is working on schedule, a job that the group floated around giving to me as I had organized elements of the last assessment.  

We did some brief research while in the meeting and James found that electrical plates are used under playgrounds to create electricity something that we believe we could implement around the paths of the university to create power. We also agreed that we could use our skills at visual effects to make the illusion of wind farms and solar panels appearing as we walk through our video.

Overall I am looking forward to working with my group again and creating something creative while also educating ourselves of how we can potentially be better students at looking after our planet.