Project Summary So Far

Within my initial research I have looked at groups like Droog Design, Bata Ville, Boyle Family and Lucy orta. These all gave me a strong idea of what collaboration is about, I preferred the method of Lucy Orta and Bata Ville as they are small groups of friends which I feel will help to create better work as you will both be pulling into the same direction. Due to this I choose to work with Roy Wood a fellow student on the course. This collaboration will be used similar to the strategy of Nina pope and Karen Guthrie within Bata Ville. I feel that Roy would be good to collaborate with, as we have always discussed each other’s ideas in previous projects to get our creative juices flowing. Although we haven’t had a chance to work on the same project together, so when this project materialised it created a great chance to work together.

My initial idea was to carry on a previous project to looking at Leeds night life and how it is promoted to the students, nothing mentioning the causes of excessive drinking. From which I intended to create clothing as a medium to promote the down side of Leeds night life. Whereas Roy wanted to look into creating a performance, so we decided to combine the ideas. As a result of this we decided to split the project into three parts that would all look at the Leeds night life, these included clothing, photography and performance. Which photography is being used as the main research strategy for devolving the clothing and performance.

Once we had both gathered images from Leeds night life, we both experimented with them looking at the movement. Photoshop was used in each of our experiments which I used to create flyers to match those already used by the night clubs as I felt it would be a good way promoting the clothing. Whereas Roy looked more at making the movement in the images standout more, he did this by using various filters. Also from the images we sketched out some clothing designs, which i later scanned into Photoshop and added colour.

This gave us a good amount of work to show within the presentation, although we felt our main down fall was that we did not know what direction we were going to take our project in. So we decided to focus of creating clothing that reflects Leeds night life, then using both photography and a performance as ways of promoting clothing. This has led to research into clothing designers such as Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood as well as fashion photographers such as herb Ritts and Richard Averdon. This has led to each of us designing more clothing and making a select few of them.

We intend to split the remaining four weeks of the project by focusing on making the clothing for the first, then photographing the clothing in the second week which will then give us an idea of what scene the performance will best look. Then the third week will be used to film the performance, leaving the last week as a week for over running as well as editing and assembling the final pieces.

Chris Wren & Roy Wood