PDP done and dusted

Liz's tutor group had to wait until Tuesday for our PDP's, which in a way was good because we had more time to keep working and therefore more to show, but we had to wait to the last minute to get any feedback on our personal projects and competition briefs.

I had a specific list of questions to ask and points to discuss (haha) but I think this helped me get the most out of the session. Sometimes I think the PDP's are a waste of time if you are doing ok, there's not much to say and you don't get a lot out of the tutors unless your behind or not doing ok, but this time it was quite useful for me.

The first thing Liz said was that she thought this had been a good term for me, that my confidence in my ability seems to have changed completely since summer and I agreed totally with her. I have to say my work experience in London has totally changed the way I work, the way I think, what I want to do in the future and how I see myself. It's one of those things you don't notice until after it happens. Particularly I feel so much less stressed about leaving uni, I won't say I'm not still terrified but it's a good kind of exciting terrified rather than rigid with fear shit help me terrified. I suddenly realised that actually I can do this and I can get where I want to go if I work hard enough, and if I fail then I'll just try something else. I personally feel this has had a knock on effect on my work. Again, I can't say that I don't freak out from time to time, but I freak out at the right time when I know I haven't done enough, and then I deal with it pretty quickly. I have stopped giving myself such a hard time, I know I am my own harshest critic, but I also know that I have worked as hard as I possibly could this term and so whatever I get in the January assesments will be the best that I could have done. And now everyone will probably hate me, but accepting that in my mind has been a massive shift for me and is allowing me to be totally relaxed and enjoy my work and enjoy the pressure of getting everything done, which in turn is making me work better! Like dominoes in a good way =)

As far as critique on the projects goes, there wasn't much to say as Liz had seen most of the stuff in tutorials. Silence is in the making as we speak after many hours filming and editing it is finally coming together. There's still a high probability it will completely go to pot and I will be left with nothing but I guess I will have to deal with that if and when it comes. She advised me to get a second visual opinion form Mack about how to display my Alcohol awareness project (which I did and we concluded that I should work on the colours and then take it into flash) but it was a thumbs up for the concept and ideas. Then we agreed that working on the stonewall brief as my personal project would be a great brief for me if I can apply a strong concept to it, a chance to enter some work into a live brief and the room to develop it further than what's asked for my portfolio.

So I think all in all it went as well as it could and mainly reassured me that I everything is going A ok at this stage!