Moving on with my Work in Progress Portfolio (Week 8)

I am making steady progress on my Work in Progress Portfolio The Reeds of Loch Cill Chriosd. I have started to think about the presentation and submission of my work and discussed the options with the Course Leader. To date I have submitted my work through a link to a gallery layout on my website but my tutor suggested that my website layout was too complex and detracted from the images. In order to address these issues I upgraded my website to the latest version and also changed the styling within the template I have in place. This did improve how the images can be viewed and I also found a way to add the words to the images using captions:

I have also put together a draft version of a pdf document using Keynote. I wanted to try out how flexible the styling is and also to check that my images and words would comply with the 20mb limit which they did.

I have worked to reduce the number of images this week and started to process my final choices. However, at this stage I feel like I am going round in circles as the whole presentation needs to come together. I need to finalise the words before I process the images. The reason for this is that my processing may vary depending upon the story I am telling. This leads to a dilemma – should I order the images from an aesthetic point of view, or one that takes the viewer on the most appropriate story-telling journey, or allow the words to dictate the ordering of the photographs? If my words are equally important as my images then how do I resolve this?

Next week I plan to print out all the images and write the words onto them. I can then refine the words and determine the best order overall by constantly viewing and moving the images around. I am hoping that I might be able bring everything together with the words attached to each image forming a poem when read through continuously. Once I have done this I will then process my images accordingly.

I have decided to submit my portfolio using a pdf document this time. The styling seems easier and it provides me with more flexibility. My challenge is to make the styling as simple and effortless as possible to enable the viewer to focus on the images and words. I need to remove the album effect and the handwriting effect and move the words further away from the images.  I also need to consider whether I can crop all the images to the same aspect ratio and if not provide my rationale for this choice.

I plan to draft my Oral Presentation this week and add the final resources to my Library in i-Movies. At the same time I need to bring my thoughts together in a coherent set of entries in this Critical Research Journal.