Surrealism becomes hard reality

For the first time, since I started my photography course I actually failed to pass a brief... solely for the fact that I never handed it in because I had not completed it... I simply ran in to too many problems and out of time and I was not able to quickly get over each problem.

Unfortunately, most of the blame is my own... I was unable to move on from the challenges of this brief quickly or at all, I let each problem drag me down until in the final week, I just gave up through disappointment. Which now, was the complete wrong thing to do... instead of getting dragged down by the problems, I should have learnt from them and quickly moved on rather than kicking my feet for a couple of days, but coming from a not so good project, I was determined to make this one work and act like my come back, however this was not to happen as at the first signs trouble, I jumped ship.

In this brief I ran into quite a few problems... firstly was my own mind, as the project was set on surrealism, therefore we could basically to anything, and I took to long to settle on a idea as the spectrum was just too wide for my narrow vision. Then I went through a few ideas before choosing my final one, only discarding each idea because it was too cliche. Instead of taking so long, I should have focused a lot more early on to nail down the idea that I would use.

Next, was the artist research and I just did not know how to present it or how many to research... in the end this took me three to four weeks to complete (the project was six weeks long) although, through this I managed to understand what I should do in future briefs for research as I quite enjoyed presenting the research in this project. 

After the research, came to mind maps and development of my initial ideas... this actually went well, this was during the week where my mind was at ease and thinking straight. I was easily able to develop my ideas into effective images, which I thought would be great and as a result got very excited about the end results... unfortunately possibly a little too excited as this is where I made the mistake of setting "my heart" on the way that the project would continue.

There after, it came down to the test shots, I only had three and five ideas wrote up in my proposal and generally in my mind, as I did not know what my last two images should be, however I continued with the three ideas I had... All of my images would be location shoots as the location was extremely important to the image and the location would give the image the atmosphere and stage for the viewers to interpret the image in the way that I wanted. Therefore, I researched local location, and I found the perfect locations, in my mind, and all within walking distance give or take an hour or two. Everything seemed to be going well, I had the idea, the location and my friends had agreed to help and be my subjects... perfect, I was back with a vengeance with this project... or so I thought. 

Roll on the night of the test shots, I am all there at the meeting place and who should be there but... only me... no one turns up, I contact them... no answer. We re-arrange... again, no one turns up. This continued three times, until I gave in and settled for a different location, again no one shows.

So test shots already a week late with two weeks left, I had to completely change the location and subjects, to my girlfriend locate around the corner from her house.

However, the shots did not even turn out the way I wanted, the basic digital camera that I had at the time was not good enough, it was not able to cope with night time photography and therefore the images turned out terrible... over the next week I continued to try to get my test shots, whilst continuing the rest of the project, however, due date... still only half of my test shots, not much that I could have done.

Although, I have learnt that I must not rely on people as much as I did in that project, also when things go wrong, I should get over them as quickly as possible without kick and screaming... as I know I am capable of creating effective solutions. Furthermore, as in the last week I effectively gave up, this was wrong and I really shouldn't of done that and I now know that, that was the wrong thing to do and I can ensure you that it will not happen again.
Luckily, I am able to go back to this project and not only finish it but make sure that it is as good as possible, only this time I will do things differently... firstly, I am going to refine my theme and influence through a selective mood board, then I will just experiment through images an try to be as fluent as possible... thus is all I have planned so far, the next step after this is yet to be seen as I react accordingly to how it goes and the results I get... all i know for sure, is that this time I will not fail again.