Bruntwood Project, Week 3

Following my samples development from the second week of the Bruntwood live brief, I spent this week refining and finalising my samples before the pitch on Thursday.

Having evaluated my samples at the end of week 2, I felt that the shapes I had initially drawn were too blocky and having them hung alternately made them look too rigid. Therefore, I decided to redraw the shapes to be more organic, especially the branches and, make the lines of the building shapes more angular rather than rounded. I did this because I thought they could then be hung in five individual rows – two of branches and three of buildings – and these could then be hung at different depths and heights. This would allow them to move gently and overlay each other, leading to a more free-flowing effect.

Experimenting with layering and hanging in paper.

With this in mind, I had my shapes laser cut out of Perspex and ply wood. For my original samples I had the wooden ones cut out of MDF, which I found to be too flat and without texture. The plywood was a lighter shade with a more layered textural effect which I felt echoed the idea of layers I hoped to achieve with the final installation.

Laser cutting perspex.

After having the shapes laser cut, I then dyed the Perspex. With my smaller samples from the previous week, I used iDye to get the orange shade, but this was far too dense and dark, when what I was aiming for was a tint of colour. Therefore, this time I used just disperse dye and I think the effects were much better, as you can tell the Perspex has colour but hopefully when hung in the window they will still allow light to pass through. As well as dyeing the Perspex, I painted the plywood with acrylic paint to go with the dyed Perspex. This was less successful as I found it hard to mix the correct shades to match the colours achieved with the dye; they were too bright and cheerful, especially the blue which needed to have more of a grey tone. However, with further sampling I would hope to get to the right shade.

Dyeing perspex.

Dyed perspex and wood hangings -branches layered over buildings.

I also spent much of this week preparing my pitch and presentation for the proposal presentations at the end of the week. This meant working out the costings for the completion of the project, how the final piece would be installed and fixed into place and visualisations. Doing the costings and fixings was particularly tricky but beneficial as I haven’t ever had to do that for a project before. The hardest thing I found was making good visualisations to effectively convey my concept, as I wouldn’t be able to make the real thing to scale for the pitch. I chose in the end to do both hand drawn and digital visualisations so that I could include the correct scale and notes on how it would be hung.

Hand drawn visualisation.

Digital visualisation.

The pitch on Thursday was nerve-wracking, and I was worried about saying everything I needed to in just five minutes, as I tend to run over on time in presentations. Despite feeling anxious, I felt confident about how the pitch went. I managed to keep close to the five-minute time limit only going over by about 30 seconds. Although I was nervous I said everything I wanted to and believe I conveyed my idea as well as I could. Ultimately, I wasn’t shortlisted for phase 2 of the project but I am glad that I decided to do phase 1. I have never had the experience of pitching to an outside company before, so this was valuable, because it made me evaluate my concept, making sure that it was clear to people who didn’t know my work what my proposal was. Although I was disappointed not to be successful the fact that I came out of the pitch feeling confident has boosted my presentation skills and inspired me to pitch for more live briefs in the future. One comment from one of the Bruntwood representatives on the panel was that my branch like shapes looked a bit, ‘like coral,’ which I had said the day before, so I was prepared for that!

Overall, it was a very valuable experience and one which I’m glad I went out of my comfort zone to do.