What I did to assess the draft submission
I assessed your submissions against a checklist of the requirements of the assessment brief. This checklist is enclosed in the envelope with your returned submission. It should help you identify and address those areas where your submission does not meet the requirements of the assessment brief.
Note: I did not check the written sections for clarity of communication nor the images for quality. I am assuming you are submitting the best possible versions of both. Your clarity of communication in the documents and the quality of the images will be graded in the final version and contribute substantially to your mark.
Some general observations
Having gone through all of your submissions, I noticed there were some issues that came up again and again. Here they are in no particular order:
- Your submission should look like you value your own work. As would be the case in most real-world situations, I had no previous familiarity with your work, so this promotional package is all I have to go on. Before the images and the documents get to speak for themselves, every aspect of the physical artefact you have presented is telling me something about your own attitude to your work. Make everything work for you, from the CD case in. It doesn't have to be fancy - no-one expects you to turn into a graphic designer overnight - but it should communicate your passion for your work and your sense of your profession as an art practitioner. At the very least it should be clean, informative and consistent.
- You should put your details (name, class, title of work, course, date of submission, copyright notice) on the CD/DVD itself as well as on the case. This is really important. Imagine a situation (such as my desk last weekend) where someone is going through a large number of applications from different people. It is all too easy for a bunch of unlabelled CDs to get mixed up, which wastes time for the assessor. SImilarly, when they finish looking at the CD, a labelled case makes it easy for them to find the right case to put it back into. If you're applying for funding, or a residency, you don't want to irritate the people assessing your application by making extra work for them, so "idiot-proof" the process by labelling stuff properly. Writing the details on to the CD/DVD with permanent marker is perfectly acceptable, if you don't want to make a printed label. If you do make a printed label, only use specifically-designed CD/DVD labels, as other labels run the risk of curling up and sticking in the computer (which might just prejudice an interested third party against you ... )
- Your name and your contact details should appear on every document. Again, this is just common sense, as well as being part of the brief. When you provide documents in digital format as part of an application, you should assume they may be printed out. If one document gets separated from the others and you don't have this information on the page, it's effectively lost.
- Make the format of your CV easy to read. In the real world, CVs are assessed at a glance. Make sure that glance catches as much information as possible. List things in reverse chronological order. Format the information using Indents/Tabs or a borderless table so that the dates and the achievements that correspond to them can be scanned easily.
- The insert in the cover of your CD/DVD case should fit properly. An A4 sheet of paper folded to fit is a real nuisance - it falls out when you open the case, or gets in the way when you are shutting it. Assume that this is the first contact the viewer has had with you, your work and your practice. Don't start off by irritating them needlessly.
- Be careful about spelling and grammar - simply because mistakes make documents more difficult to read, and distract the reader from the content.
- List your images in your image list. Lots of you submitted numbered image lists, similar to a list you would provide to accompany numbered slides. However, in this situation, the numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) are meaningless, because they don't correspond to anything. Instead, you should "number" your list with the names of the image files, including the file extension .jpg, to avoid confusion. That way, it is clear to the reader what the details given correspond to.
These were the most common pitfalls, and they are all very easy to avoid.
:
A quick word about images
Although the quality of your images strictly falls outside the remit of the draft assessment, I noticed that many of you submitted relatively poor quality images as part of the submission. Some specific problems included:
- Lighting. Many of the photographs were taken in inadequate lighting, resulting in dull, low-contrast images. Ideally, you should re-photograph the work, paying attention to the lighting. As a last resort, see if you can improve the brightness/contrast in your existing images a bit in Photoshop, but it can't work miracles if the original image is not good.
:
- Framing. When photographing 2d works, the work should be centred in the photograph, and parallel to the bottom of the photograph. When taking an installation view photograph, make sure that floors are horizontal and walls are vertical, as things like this can really distract a viewer from the work, which is the bit of the photograph you want them to be looking at. You can do a lot in Photoshop to remedy skewed and non-centred images. Just make sure you do it before submitting them.
:
- Distortion. Make sure your photographic settings have not distorted your work. Wide-angle settings can cause "fishbowl" effects, and photographing an object that is tilting towards you or away from you will cause perspective distortion. For preference, address this at the time of taking the photograph. Otherwise, fix it in Photoshop.
:
- Distraction. Your work should be photographed against an undistracting background, traditionally a white background. If that white background is a board in the studio, make sure you are not including random bits of masking tape, post-its, or last year's graffiti in the photograph along with your work. Unexpected things in the background (coats, stepladders, whatever) lead the eye away from your work, and you lose your viewer's attention.
:
Deadline for final submission is Friday 15 February.
|
