My Skulls Mentors
As mentioned in my previous blog post I’m working on a submission for a competition as part of my assessment, although I hindsight I was a little coy about specifics of it partly because I didn’t necessarily want to direct anything towards them but I wasn’t sure on if I was going to proceed with it. To clarify I still need to produce the work for the assessment I am under no obligation to actually put in for the competition… except now I kinda am.
After talking to my lecturer this week and showing him the work I’d produced so far, he encouraged me to go forward with it and to show it to the judges via a Mentor night held last night. I was still in two minds about it but decided to forge ahead fully expecting to come around with my ego battered and bruised for being so arrogant and bombastic with my approach, and in many ways I still did but not those reasons.
I got a chance to meet most of the judges in small groups throughout the night where we all discussed our work, concepts, or ideas if you hadn’t anything to show… being the only one with (almost) completed work, I was often ahead of the queue in my group. I explained my thoughts and feelings towards the brief, how it made me feel and my thoughts on the industry (still bitter and cynical after all these years) and showed my work… and got overwhelmingly positive responses, which honestly threw me.
When directly asked what response I was expecting I jokingly (admittedly half jokingly) said, “Torches and pitchforks?” because honestly I didn’t expect a harsh criticism to go over so well, almost to the point of feeling bad about being such an angry dick about it… almost… almost. The kindness and respect was a little overwhelming to be honest and was expecting a bit more criticism, even heading it off by pointing out a technical flaw I’m going to reshoot (and even had that told I didn’t need to).
That being said I’m not sorry for my anger and bitterness for this project as it pushed me in a way I wouldn’t have considered and producing a work that is quite possibly the most deeply personal, almost soul baring, and in many ways made me wrestle quite aggressively with some personal demons in a way public way. I’m just not sure if it was worth it or not regardless of the outcome of this competition. Frankly I don’t think I’ll win. and I’m not sure I’m okay with that.
The glory of my tiny contact sheet cards because I was to self-conscious to have big pieces… blurred for now.
We’ll see where we go from here, I still don’t know if I’ll ever publicly show this work (I still hate showing these to people) but I guess I’ll have to at some point.
S
