Author's Perspective

[perfectpullquote align="left" bordertop="false" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""][/perfectpullquote]I feel that throughout this course I found myself re-introducing my love for creativity and turning that passion into concrete visualizations through imagery and cinematography. I’ve always loved to use this skill of experimental thinking to visualize and immerse my imagination through creative expressions and tasks at hand. I found that this course has allowed me to re-ignite that same love and apply it using tools and newfound skills learned throughout the semester. This imaginative thinking helped me to conceptualize the rough idea for my photo story assignment; I wanted to merge the ultimate chaos of an after-party, whilst still tying in the idea of class and luxury. My favourite part of this entire creative process has to be seeing my visions come to life in such an artistic way. It’s truly exciting when your ideas present themselves in such a way that works. And getting to see that with going that extra mile to tweak and focus on the end product just goes to show that sometimes those insane ideas that seem impossible can actually turn into something quite beautiful. My least favourite part of the process had to be the latter end of the assignments including the downloading and editing portion. Personally when it comes to downloading files and making sure they are in the correct export formats, I feel that I become quite lost. Not that I don’t enjoy the end result and seeing the edits flow and look like what I had planned them to look like, but once we started talking exporting they completely lost me. I learned that as a creator I have a lot of ideas, and sometimes having to sort through these ideas and decide when it is the proper time to take risks in terms of creativity becomes a lot more stressful and I often feel the pressure to perform because of that. I also learned that I like to take risks and try new things to add value and novelty to the content that I make, as well as pull inspiration from my everyday experiences to add a sense of personality to my work. Like I previously mentioned before, downloading and editing had to have taken me the longest and stressed me out the most, but in general I feel the technical aspect of creating content was the most challenging for me. For instance, learning to set up a tri-prod still gives me grief no matter how many times I am given instructions on it, and that has definitely lead me to prefer hand held shooting the most. I am most proud of my photo story illustrating The Afterparty: Glamour Unraveled, as I was able to capture most of the ideas that I was inspired to shoot. I especially loved this piece due to the creative freedom we were given, and with that I was able to jump out of my comfort zone as a creator and incorporate different lighting and tilts that helped to convey the story. The reason as to why I am so proud of this project is because I know how much work and effort it took within a time crunch as I only had a couple of hours to shoot with my model. Another reason is because of the amount of failed attempts and frustration that came about during the first couple of shots, that included me doubting myself and my capability of creating what I had imagined in my head. I feel that I definitely want to continue to work with photography a lot more, and truly become comfortable with the DSLR cameras so that I can someday incorporate that into my resume with experience in creative directing and brand management. I want to be able to apply these skills that I have learned in my future career one day and I feel that this course has taught me a lot about what I am capable of if I truly put my mind to it.