Production Week: Organising our Digital Artefacts






This week we have been tasked to engage with our groups and continue to produce our final digital artefacts. After a group meeting, myself, Nneka, Ruwail and Rohit decided our project should have a direct focus on SDG number 3, 'Good-health and Well-being'. We thought this would work better than focusing our time on trying to link two together. Instead, we all found a common desire to use this project as a tool for opening up a conversation about the global mental health stigma through art. As I've mentioned before, I feel strongly about the damaging connotations of SDG 3, as having 'Good-health' in the same category as 'Well-being' only contributes to the stigma surrounding mental health, suggesting its merely an extension of good physical health. 


In our meeting we decided what our 3 artefacts were going to be and how they would each interlink. After some debate we decided on hosting an event at the university showcasing our take on projection mapping and a photography exhibition. We thought this would suit our project the best because we want our community to be the international students of Coventry University. Hosting this event would give us the best access to this particular community and hopefully allow us to create a safe space to open up mental health conversations. For our 3rd artefact, we decided we'd produce a documentary alongside our event and photos, showcasing how we would produce everything. 

During the meeting we also planned to meet this week and undertake our photoshoot. After sorting a model and booking the studio, we had a conversation about we wanted to say with our images. I created a mood board of photographs speaking on mental health. A lot of the inspiration I found used double exposure and motion blur, so we knew we wanted to experiment with both. However when undertaking the shoot we also focused upon communicating with our model about emotion and how we wanted to convey pain through portraits. We spoke about channeling anger and pain beforehand, and I think our images benefited a lot with constant communication with our model. As experimenting with motion blur, I found some chains used to hold up the studio backdrop. I decided we should use them as a visual metaphor for being emotionally all-consumed. They worked well at conveying the difficulties of the mental health stigma, relating to the shame that entangles and restrains our desire to talk and act. 









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